“!Clase de bamba, clase de bamba!” is what the bird says every time I move.
It squawks too — if I don’t move — but clase de bamba is on repeat for the last 15 minutes. It’s a hot, dingy little office overstuffed with papers and old phone books — the White Pages. The White Pages! — dating back to 1959.
And hundreds of pictures of Fidel Castro strewn about in every pose imaginable: fulminating spittle in mid-diatribe at a lectern, smoking a cigar with García Marquez, hugging Allende, saluting troops with Pinochet, glad-handing a sugar cane field hand. Then there’s Fidel in a baseball uniform. Fidel and his brother Raul. Fidel and Che. Fidel, Raul and Che. Fidel and Kruschev. And my favorite, Fidel and Nixon smiling camera right.
It’s just endless, hundreds of pictures, and every one of them has a rifle sight painted in lipstick over Fidel’s face.
Seriously, lipstick. The open tube on the desk is Revlon Kiss Me Coral. Says so on the red dot on the tube.
The air conditioning unit is laboring something fierce, rattling in the window frame. And that fucking bird is going on about clase de bamba.
Skip tracing is a special way to meet humanity — its kindnesses, empathy, and its beautiful places. Especially the lovely places where this humanitarian lives and works. This Riggleman.
He’s a souse. It’s clear from the two dozen gin empties in the corner. The ashtray hasn’t been emptied since 1978. God damned clase de bamba must be his favorite thing to listen to. I couldn’t sit here all day with this mangy parrot going on and on.
I’m talking about the pre-millennium neuroses and the pumpkin-psychotropic blues.
It reminds me of Florida this sickly place. It’s hot, full of love bugs — sparing on the brotherly love — and it smells of piss and cigarettes.
Riggleman’s a fast one though. Always seems to be a half-a-step beyond the long arm. Betcha’ he’s shuffled off to Florida — the state shaped like a gun and an impotent penis all at once. The dangler at the bottom end of the good ‘ol U.S. of A.
Now there’s a picture.
This is Fall at 4:40 p.m. on 11/07/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (1/4)
“In a way, it’s an act of authorial control to withhold information, but I also see it as an utter evasion of authorial responsibility. I just sort of hand the system over to the reader and say, I don’t know what this means, but I’m out of here. Sure, I have my own feelings about what I am interested in investigating emotionally. But, in the end, my intention doesn’t matter.”
— Rumaan Alam / ThePaisReview.org, “Something to Hold On To: An Interview with Rumaan Alam”
Nothing in the darkness. First thought best thought was moot. His brain went mute, all circuits switched. Long stretches of imperfect dendrites. Long stretches of boredom and damnation. Then a spark. Detonation. Clean developments. Cold synapses. Withered axons.
Sounds from outside the darkness: the missing foundations and the people who made unholy noise. Every time he developed a word another appeared wanting to take its place. Darkness darker than the extant black seeped in.
She clapped the clap of the heartless, and thought it better to go to sleep. Either / or propositions appeared to light up the darkness and dimmed. It was light and dark again every few seconds. Then it was dark forever.
The dark mocked them. They craved the silence just before words were spoken. They craved silence.
There was a tinkling before the great silence.
“Gtting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
— Joyce Carol Oates / Interview with Robert Compton, Dallas Morning News
I fell asleep last night thinking I need a new muse. I’ll be damned if Chuck Heston didn’t show up for self-appointed rounds through my REM sleep. Yeah, Chuck Heston must be my new muse. But he wasn’t alone, no. Here came Chuck Heston and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Here they came down this dimly lit hypnagogic hall o’ hallucinatory goodness. Chuck “god-damned dirty apes” Heston says, “We’re ready to roll. C’mon, Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)!”
So we’re driving downtown on a typical Saturday overnight. The fares are clicking over regular. Busy night, full moon. We just saw a guy taking a dump at the entrance to Duane Reade.
“What’s the new assistant manager going to do when she opens up the store tomorrow morning?” I say. “She’ll run her heel through the shit and nearly fall — save that she holds on to the door handle. Then that smell hits her and she adds her puke to the mess at her feet. Her new heels ruined, she fears. What kind of way to start the day is that, huh, Chuck?”
He’s busy tightening Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) red neck bandana in the back seat.
“Chuck, her heel arch is clogged with a runny shit meatball,” I say. “The knotted florets on her shoes are now spattered with last night’s calzone bile. Chuck? Chuck?”
He’s wild-eyed. He rolls down the window. He screams into the wind — to the darkened alleyways: “You maniacs. You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell!”
My own command performance in the back of the cab. Wow. He catches my eye in the rear view, spittle-mouthed and bleary-eyed, he says: “You take umbrage at my Rosetta Stone? Who do you think you are? Mr. Goodstuff? There are no more $3 whores in this town.”
“True that, Chuck. So very true,” I say, and offer him some Peppermint Chiclets.
He declines and says, “I’ve been home all the time.”
Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at a group of Argentinians grilling steaks on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. They’re all decked out in cerulean blue and white striped jerseys, and chanting “AR-GEN-TI-NA, AR-GEN-TI-NA.” They invite us over for steaks by a 50-foot high bank of television screens all tuned to the 1978 World Cup.
A flash and we’re standing on the sidewalk with plates full of rice rolled up like strips of sod on gauze — each individual grain is inserted in to the gauze.
“How do we eat this, Chuck?”
“It’s a roulade of rice and gauze,” he says.
Yeah? Ok, I say. “Gauze and all.” So I toss one to Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People). He chomps it down.
The wall of screens go black and the Voice of America, interspersed with static, booms from the speakers.
A smiling woman with a name tag the reads: ANA appears with an acoustic guitar. Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at her, foaming with ill intent and a bad savor in his mouth. Ana produces a steak from the sound hole on the guitar and quiets Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Another lady appears who looks like Patti Smith with blonde frosted bangs and ends. Her face is covered with heavy white pancake, but her name tag reads: SWAGGY. She’s carrying an electric guitar.
An argument ensues between Swaggy and Ana about who is the better multi-instrumentalist. Punches are thrown and the Argentinians get involved. Chuck drags Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) away on a leash.
I attempt to sort this all out. A steak is at stake.
“The question is, how do you want to exist in the world, and how are you going to do the work?”
“Ever since Trump was elected, we have been living through things that we would find overplayed and unbelievable in fiction and film and they keep on coming…”
— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”
“Sure, go north,” the man says. “Proceed past the turnpike interchange and…” He stops pointing west north west, rubs his chin and says, “whatever you were talking about… wait, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about getting up at 6:30 in the morning and driving 16 hours to have an affair in a friend’s apartment, who isn’t really a friend just a big burly kissy-guy that likes to hug and give me cloth-band watches. There’s no sex, just a lot of staring at each other from opposing sofas.
There’s no telling what journaling will do. I wrote a story about semiotics in French, and according to him it’s tantamount to liberalism — or is it illiberalism?
Or it may be Antioch in antifreeze — or was it Antioch and antifreeze? It’s the preponderance of the evidence, which in this case is scant, but also attractive to dogs and super furry stuffed animals placed in reverence at the base of a tzompantli.
Hey, are you listening to me? Are you listening to this that I’m telling you on the Day of the Dead?”
She rolls down window fully, so that he could get an unobstructed view of her face, so that he could see that she is serious.
“Technically, it’s the day after the Day of the Dead, lady,” the man says. He shoves his hands in his pockets. Fingers his keys, a quarter, some lint. “I believe you’re the one that missed it, m’am. Just go ahead and drive off, and have yourself a day while you’re at it.”
“Everyone is drunk today.
Everyone is preparing for sex today. Little
turquoise boxes with white ribbon are hand-
delivered around town today. The smell of
beef is powerful. The cemeteries are still full.”
October is in the rear view. The rear view is in the river. Pelagic creatures are flopping about in the shallows wondering where the encroaching oceans went.
The monks are illuminating by the gallows. The henchmen are getting soused.
Bring me freedom in reused wrapping paper and take your sleep wherever you can get it.
My knees are knocked by hummingbird buzz and candle wax. I’ve turned into a fairy but my wings are made of iron ore.
The Department of Divestiture is out on a declination of compasses decimated by degaussing — and the polarities have fled to Argentina and the Argentinians have decamped to Mauritania.
So I’ll content myself by washing my submarine and whistling a tune from a future era.
Hallowed is thy appendix. Here’s November!
“Reconsider writing by hand. There is a kind of story that comes from hand. Writing which is different from a tapping-on-a-keyboard-kind-of-story. For one thing, there is no delete button, making the experience more life like right away.”
You’re normally truculent and foul-breathed in the morning, but even the ubangi bangi car sputtering down the street can’t spoil a morning like this: a pastel yellow, peach and powder blue sky, and the world is frosted and heavy with snow.
And you finally got eight hours sleep and you feel rested and your schpilkas ain’t up yet.
And you just crunched around on the snow outside getting a picture — and proof positive that there is a smidgen of beauty in this world before the spigot opens and the torrent of shit starts to flow.
You could live in this world with a modicum of hope.
But you know it’s a cheap simulacrum, because later the demons and ghouls will appear — and you ain’t thinking about the kids dressed up for Halloween. No, you’re thinking about the people you depend on — leaders, neighbors, family, and friends — LIFE writ large ain’t this beautiful.
But you enjoy this sliver while you’re able.
This is Fall, at 7:09 a.m., on 10/31/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (31/31)
“I think writers need tolerant people around them. They’re prickly and strange and needy, yet they demand to be left alone.”
— Hilary Mantel / “How Writers Learn to Trust Themselves”
The Romans are meeting at the Forum — more like the Colosseum — deciding the fate of the legions off at war; and somehow, I, a hero, am embroiled in the decision. But I find myself hiding in a clothes closet off to the side of the meeting. I have an oblique view of the stands where people are assembled hashing these issues out. I should be visible to some of the people at this convocation, but they can’t see me — and just in case they can, I move to a deeper hiding place among the many frocks in dry cleaning plastic bags.
And again, there’s this palpable feeling of the presence of Charlton Heston but no sight of him. Then it’s dark, and I’m in the catacombs and holding cells below the Colosseum. There are cells with bars, and some skeletal remains in theses cells propped up in poses. I’m looking out from behind the bars onto a ramp, and out of the gloaming comes Charlton Heston.
Charlie, friggin’, Heston!
Somehow, even though this is an early role for me I tell him he’d be surprised at what my favorite film of his was when I was five years old.
He instantly says, “Planet of the Apes.”
“Absolutely,” I say. “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!”
I challenge him to guess what my second favorite film of his was — to which he says, “Omega Man.”
Man! How does he do it!? How does he know?
He holds an open palm to my face and then up to the sky and says, “from my cold dead hands, Mr President. From my cold dead hands.”
I think, but don’t dare say, Wha’? Huh?! Then I go through the calculations… he said that during Clinton, right? Wasn’t he already dead by Obama? Whatever.
It doesn’t much matter. We’re fast friends now and heading to a combination bar and full service gas station atop the Los Angeles Colosseum, but it really seems to be the press box at the Daytona Race Track. Heston asks me about Soylent Green, and I tell him I didn’t see that until I was an adult 30 years later.
He says, “Ah! It was people you know? The green crackers… people!”
“Sure, whatever,” I say.
We’re getting familiar and there’s a hubbub behind the bar. Everyone around the square bar is clapping and cheering the muscular bleached blonde bartender who’s wearing a classic gas station attendant’s shirt — with the sleeves cut off and ripped jean shorts — he’s getting his trapezius muscles massaged by a waiter, and they’re both wearing Oakland Raiders caps backwards.
Charlton looks over to me and says, “everyone is an actor in LA.” He points at the TV and says, “every time one of the commercials or TV shows they appear play people take a moment to recognize them.” Another cheer and clapping is heard from the adjoining rooms as other staff memebers are seen on the dozens of televisions throughout the bar / gas station.
A couple of guys wearing cageless football helmets, modified to look like motorcycle helmets, are causing a ruckus at the edge of the bar and punches are thrown.
Heston says “let’s get out of here,” and we walk through the window and hover 80 feet in the air over the racetrack. In a flash we’re in the pits, but it’s really an old time gas station and Heston has disappeared — but the guys who were just causing the scene at the bar are in a car backing up, coming at me slowly.
I step out of the way on the passenger side and tap lightly on the trunk. It’s one of the troublemakers, in the cheap plastic helmet made to look intimidating, flexing his fist open and closed. They exit the car with ill intent. The smell of motor oil and cigarettes wafts out of the car.
We’re crunching on small beads of tempered glass as we make our way toward the rear of the car — it now appears as a hatchback made of thin, pliable tin. It’s broken and missing a section.
“Look at what you did,” the driver says in a menacing tone. I tell him I didn’t do that. “I lightly tapped the trunk. This wasn’t like this before. This car wasn’t even a hatchback!”
The one with the helmet says, “you did it, man!” and they pin me to the rear of the car. The glass below our feet is gone and I say, “see here, there’s no glass. This hatchback was already in this condition.”
Then I’m in my darkened apartment. But instead of being on the 16th floor in Boston. It’s on the 60th floor of a condo building at a crossroads in mid-Manhattan — something like a combination of Times Square, FDR drive somewhere near the UN, an open air version of Grand Central Station, and Columbus Circle all at once.
All the lights in the city are out, and it’s my duty to turn them on before my partner gets home with Charlton Heston. I’m feeling my way down the hall in the dark toward the fuse box to trip the switch, but I hear the refrigerator start to hum, and some light streams from the open refrigerator door.
I hear my partner at the door, and she gets to me just as I’m pulling the switch. We hear a earth shaking noise outside.
She says, “was that a car accident?”
“It didn’t sound like cars,” I say. “It sounded like a detonation of something large. I don’t know what it was,” I say.
We run to the balcony windows. Darkness. Then it dawns on me: “hey, where the hell is Charlton Heston?”
This is Fall, at 5:01 p.m., on 10/30/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (30/31)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
thee istsfor manity reader 