If he had money

he had prostitutes drugs art

better to work friend.

Placing Hamsun’s, Growth of the Soil, onto the bathtub’s lip, submerging my head under the water, the silence blankets me and I don’t want to come up again.

Last night’s Chinese dinner, that with tip, came out to twenty four dollars, left me a twenty in my wallet, and nothing else. It’s better to evacuate the previous night’s dinner, than to just throw the money into the toilet, true, but the day after, hungry again, you could think, what’s the difference.

Yawning, running a bath, the day’s leap through southeastern windows, sunny, I’m tired and I have a check due me – just get motivated, pick it up. After rent and car payments, I would have enough for Chinese the rest of the week, or pizza, a small bag of smoke, beer or wine, and worrying about the future. Fortunately, attention deficiencies make moments everyday seem new and full of endless possibilities.

Otherwise, I day dream the various exit routines: diving out the window of my fourth floor apartment, stopping the car while crossing a bridge and flinging myself over the rail; the unhinged mania route like suddenly sawing at my neck with dull keys, or the two inch fishing blade on my belt as I walk towards my parked vehicle in the late mornings, but soon forgetting about those plans and thinking something good waits for me while rummaging through dust blanketed badlands like the soft tones of a Fender Stratocaster weeping, when played right.

The monitor glowed. I could see it from the open bathroom door, waiting for me, the electricity’s blue desire. But I hated the machine currently and angrily refused to engage her keys or to give her the tender tapping, morse code love of written expression, at this time.

The bathwater cooling, I rose up, dropping the water level, released the drain, and ran the shower to rinse off and finish bathing.

I would be meeting Thomas tonight, the cranky genre writer, who hated any opinion opposite his and only slow tortured those with like opinions, which could not have been worse, since you did not expect to have to defend yourself while agreeing. It also meant tactical agreement had to be well considered before opted as a strategy. Nevus would be joining, too.

Nevus, the nearly authentic, broken splotch of earnest attempting. Cigarettes, fast food, drinking – a tremendous amount of arguing would be going down tonight.

“Only the expectation of satiation provides an offer for romance…” That remark, stated by Nevus, was what stuck in my neighbor’s mind and she repeated it every time I saw her, telling me how funny he was. 

Having no money requires a youthful stamina – no romance, no insulation, swim the meridian. Beaten hearts, broke, the fracturing veneer readily apparent against the thick walls of affluence affording those with wealth the privatization of suffering while bureaucracy humiliates the vulnerable, whether brilliant or dull, the exposure mires them down in communal, statistic-like, antagonism. As Nevus often says, “Who doesn’t have a fear of stats?

I feel somewhere between the boldness of Henry VIII and Radiohead’s ‘Creep.’ Of course the far sweep of the former’s hyperbole dampens the strength of the latter’s presence – I can only hope!

A kind of wandering forbearance, Lord Stanley like, waiting for one or the other to prevail. That may be one of the deeper questions, as to which prevails; why, do I choose it? The line doesn’t seem small at the outset, rather the nearer one is to the edge, the sharper it becomes. For kings and their courts, it reckons the sword’s blade as literal, and for fools, disillusionment and isolation.

Rather than commit, why not fall somewhere in between, where lie possibilities of innumerable outcome? A spectrum of opportunities; the myriad of pathways emerging as river deltas.

Rubbish!

Some just overlook the best fruit, too self centered to hear the words spoken, too obstinate to know their most capable of friends because they’re unsure, they’re afraid and frozen outside of their blankets. They can’t know and so packs are formed to better hide from the necessities of loving and all the efforts these entail.

Later, the daylight ticked away past trailing horizons of sardine grey rooftop lines, we sat in the high, tin ceilinged room, the lighting, hard water yellow. Some of the eyes following a seam of pale amber plane, the wall sloping suddenly into gray shadows, darker against the space. Thomas sat, stiff spined, an Italian master. The room cocked out of symmetry, all of us drinking from watery scotches. This lapping for attention and the loneliness of misheard intent, quiet ripples on the pond’s surface, loves below, unseen, each hungry for affection and assuaged through contention.

The dialectic setting pragmatic hounds against the didactic viewing of cinema as literature, excepting Thomas whose harp, mostly on writing, was staunch in both his rejection and subsequent betrayal of the kind he felt amateur.

I was amateurish, mainly because I did not write for publishers, I mean, I hardly knew how! This would both confound and enrage Thomas, pushing out a kind of pressured speech like rant against not paying artists for their work. It was a desperate segue, true, but the point must be engaged, eventually, of course. I would not disagree, but, lacking an object to pummel, the anger would eventually find a target at the table, especially someone writing and not being paid, then the torrents ran undammed.

The table was round, thankfully, wise others stanching the exuberance. Nevus had a new girlfriend present, her aquiline profile caught in sports bar dim, stated, sweetly, a distinction between artistic writing and commercial writing.

That I understood, and could learn from. Then, in the pause of transition, I’d listen to Thomas berate, usually Nev., and think on the sloppily edited manuscripts stacked and published from his house with all sorts of typos. Not a few, including that epidemic scourge of properly spelled words incorrectly contexted by a lack of human observation. But I am just frustrated, punk rock ethos beguiling, and probably, like the others, loathing the lack of complete control.

The strongest arguments need repressed personalities to obtain that necessary amount of belligerence submission requires. It is just an unfortunate dynamic, doubtfully serendipitous, that, in the taut bondages sometimes catching us, the very same kind of victims are the greatest oppressors.

Nevus was an easy target. Earnest man-child, blindly caught in a perfectionist trap that he considered his own cultivating. Sweet, soulful warrior who lived with his Mom. I loved him dearly, his words strangled weaker talents, he resided as this ghostly prodigy singing the greatest love songs.

Nevus, nor Thomas, made much money. Thomas would jaw me in my friend’s absence. We were always broke, he would yarn, but unencumbered for years. Nevus and I would have conversations of this kind at three in the morning: “A person has to work at failure, same as success.”

“Thomas,” I would say, “you want fame, then artistry. Nevus and I covet your consistency, yes, but I look at Nevus and want to self-destruct like he does. My fear, though, is that it’d be no accident by me. And, after all that, Nevus thinks I’m some chieftain here to bring about a redemption. How absurd is all this!?”

The distraction. Fears of success. Those deep points all the analogies flow forward from, the metaphors, the myths. Archetypal musings, youth’s spring.  What is the world telling me, writing in secret, lost, seeking out the city, desiring the country?

Sometimes the conversations would twist a struggled weave, like a delivery boy, a bicyclist, plotting a wobbled course east up the hill on 187th between Wads. and Broad., blanketed in slush and ice.

“Did you really write, “a deep brooding overcame him…?”” Asks Thomas.

“Yeah, I did.” I say.

Thomas replied, “you weren’t mocked in English Comp 101 over phrases like that?” 

“I don’t know, not really. I don’t know. Probably -” I stammered.

“Purple, pure fucking purple,” says Thomas.

Of course, I should not have been baited, as drunk as I was:

“You are square. Set in all the mundane borders of the box and thick with obviousness.” Is all I could muster, which was saying something.

How did we get home?

I remember Thomas sat on the orange rust bench of the subway car, cheeks suddenly puffing out, then relaxed. He stared straight ahead and did it again, a noodle suddenly emerging from his mouth. Then it happened again, his cheeks puffed. Again.

He was swallowing his vomit, it was clear now. When the train stopped, Harlem at 125th street, he leapt up and holding his head out the doors, vomited a long stream of booze and Chinese food.

I was trying to keep from nodding off, keep from getting jumped. The arrival passed. The elevator arrived and we went from steam to winter. I walked the old sport to his door, he had fallen and cracked his nose the last time and I resolved to see him home. I kicked his cat back into the apartment when it tried to break out and trudged through the cold grey landscape back to my place, finishing the evening.

Before I knew it the door shut, I freed my limbs of winter wear and felt the heat blasting from the radiator. Mid January and my windows were opened. The hours, deconstructed into minutes, those fragmented into seconds, the time lost without any output. I could not be productive all the time, and this void could, G-d forbid, remove me from the world as an empty vessel. There in the dim light of my studio, the raucous cacophony of Charles Ives beating the walls, I rubbed swollen eyes and heard all the musings drowned out by 3/4 time waltzing.

I sat before the keyboard, drunk-typing. The title fell onto the screen amid room spinning derision, “I Don’t Want Cats, I want a Girlfriend.”

I laughed, typing, “He is the Buddha, and because of you, doubting something you cannot limit, this is true,” only stopping to piss into an empty two liter so as not to pause the muse.

In the end did we remain grounded, focused on an agenda? Probably the others, but I was too sick from alcohol to care much.

Rockets need boost to overcome the gravitational pull of earth, generated by a release of force through the form of combustion: fuel, fire, exhaust, thrust, motion, etc.: circuit.

We’d have to repent and make money, to live. There can be no other way.