thee istsfor manity reader

Saul Goldfarb’s Shiva

(The end of a year-long penance for both of us…)

I was cordially invited this morning

To remember Saul Goldfarb.

I don’t know who Saul Goldfarb is; or rather,

who he was, 

and I don’t know if I would have liked Saul Goldfarb 

or if I’d have been his friend.

But I know, this e-mail tells me so,

that the shiva will be in apartment 150 and 155, 

which I’m told is Hal Cantor’s apartment.

It says they’ll be a crowd, and they want food,

and I must coordinate with Sarah Dubus

of the Friendship Committee.

Stan Peres tells me all this 

via BuildingLink notification — 

his office, his employ, a mystery.

I don’t know Stan,

I don’t know Sarah,

I don’t know Hal,

and you already know — 

I didn’t know shiva about Saul Goldfarb.

The invitation to shiva is more news from nowhere.  

I’ve avoided the news — 

it’s been 1105 days!  

I set out for 30 days… and I feel fine…

It’s the end of the world as we know it

and I feel fine.

I like it here.

The news of Saul’s shiva came through the intranet — 

my building’s world —  

and like so many of the world’s nascent islands 

of floating plastics,

it’s more flotsam shot over my virtual transom,

and thudding in to my life unwanted…

You rarely see ten-dollar-a-night hotel transoms left open to strangers in hallways anymore.

The first time I noted a transom — and I would not know the name of this odd architectural detail for many years to come — was when Peter Bogdanovich showed me one in Paper Moon.  I saw that film with my father at Twin Gables Theater when I was nine years-old.  As I remember it, my father and I were often at the movies that year.  We saw Sleeper, Papillon, The Sting, Day of The Jackal — at least one film a week each weekend, sometimes two.  

We bonded over films and baseball in 1973.  And he beat me senseless in 1973.  It was the year of violence and divorce.  This year returns to me now in moments when I least expect it.  Meryl, my therapist, says it’s part of the swirl associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  All I know is, here it is, somehow, uninvited, reading about the shiva for Saul Goldfarb…

But back to apartment 155 and Hal Cantor. I don’t think I know Hal Cantor either. He lives one floor below me, on the 15th floor, and three apartments over, facing east, facing the harbor.  There must be a sweeping view of downtown Boston from Hal’s balcony just off to his left over Mission Hill. 

I may have run into Hal in the five years I’ve lived in the tower. But I’m not certain if he’s the man with the enduring smile. The man who calls me “chief,” and listens to Thelonious Monk songs at top volume while sitting in his Saab — the bass echoing up one level in the garage while I linger by the stairs — as Monk segues from the arpeggiated high notes to silence and then to a boogie woogie roll on “Epistrophy.”

If he’s Hal Cantor, I might have gone to Saul Goldfarb’s shiva, because that Hal seems like an interesting man. We might talk about Horace Silver or Alice Coltrane; or maybe about more challenging music — free jazz and improvisational music —  Sun Ra, Christian Marclay, or Keshavan Maslak. Yeah, I’d invite that Hal up to my place and we could look northwest from my balcony: over Brookline Hills and Arlington Heights, and on a clear day maybe spot Wachusett Mountain.  I’d have a breakfast stout, and he a cold porter in hand. 

He could play the latter day father I never had, like my actual father sometime before 1973, before he disengaged, dissipated, and disappeared completely. That father — this Hal — would be interested in my films and my writing. He’d encourage me.  That father — this Hal — would want to know about how I hosted and produced radio shows for 15 years.  He’d want to know who I interviewed and photographed while I was a journalist in my twenties. 

He’d ask, with interest, why it took me 13 years to graduate college and why I studied in six different fields, before I settled on English Literature and Creative Writing. He’d want to hear me read my published work and what I was developing now.  He’d ask why this piece is a poem and that one’s a short story.  He’d ask about the novel length work taking shape on my laptop.  We’d talk about Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, the contemporary excellence of Ottessa Moshfegh and Leni Zumas.  Experimental literature and films… But no one’s father is that ideal, and I’m certain that Hal isn’t either.

Hal Cantor may be another man altogether in my building.  Hal may be the man that barked at me once in the elevator. The older man with the hedgehog toupee, and hair darker than mine, was when I was 23, and still had hair.  Yes, that Hal — that father — is closer to my real father when he was the Violet Bathroom Dictator — when he held court, as he spray-plastered two foot long strands of hair into a combover atop his head every morning, but that’s another story… 

When that combover 

Wasn’t “just right,”  

A belt buckle rain 

Might fall that night…

Let’s remember Saul Goldfarb instead.

“From the fact that everything is to die someday he draws the best conclusion… A writer has some hope even if he is not appreciated.  He assumes his work will bear witness to what he was.”

— Albet Camus

Photo courtesy: Raymond Pettibon, Sonic Youth, DGC.

My Friend Goo

My friend Goo is fierce, but she’s a troubled sort. The kind of girl whose mother framed “The Serenity Prayer” and hung it up in her bathroom, so every time Goo sits on the toilet she has to read: “God grant me the SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change, COURAGE to change the things I can…”  I hate that prayer — Goo does too, but she’s the one that has to face it everyday. I close my eyes when I use Goo’s bathroom. I have neither the courage or the wisdom, but Goo does.

I’ve seen what Goo does in the bathroom every morning. She started on her 13^th birthday and has done it ever since.  Every morning she scrapes a scab she has on her inner right thigh, next to her lady parts, with a sharpened nail file.  She scrapes enough of the scab off to uncover the raw skin, but never deep enough to draw blood.  Then she makes a new cut in the shape of a cross on the inside of her left thigh, this one deep enough to draw blood, and it trickles down the inside of her leg to that cave on the back of her knee where it branches out like the roots of a red cedar. She’s brave enough to chant “fuck you” to the serenity prayer. Goo calls this her “ritual ablution.” She’s unlike anyone else, full of such ideas and words. I couldn’t do that everyday for 3 years. 

I get this powerful feeling when I’m with Goo. She also has the best taste in music. The other girls at school are listening to Whitney or Madonna, while Goo’s making mix tapes of Dead Kennedys, The Butthole Surfers, and her favorite group Sonic Youth. That’s where Goo got her name, from the song “My Friend Goo” on SY’s new record. Her real name is Virginia — she used to go by “Ginny,” but Goo said the last time she was “virginal” was when she was 12. Her father Pastor Summers changed all that.

No one messes with Goo, not the jocks or the “Junior Superlatives.” All the cliques give Goo a wide berth.  I love riding in her wake. Her spotlight throws off just enough light to snare me in it. Most of the guys are scared of Goo, so they leave me alone too. Goo is my one and only friend now.

Goo tore up Jimmy Poteat’s knee one day in P.E. I’ve never seen anything like it. Jimmy thought he could just help himself and put his hands down the front of Goo’s shorts, like it was a natural thing for him to do, like he was born into it and now taking his prize. I don’t know what I would have done. But Goo, like it was nothing at all, like it was pre-planned or something, she cooed and asked Jimmy to step behind the bleachers so she could take her shorts down properly. When they got back there Goo put her shoulder down and came down on the right side of Jimmy’s knee. Jimmy’s knee buckled in such an unnatural way, and the sickening pop it made turned my stomach. His cries were nothing I’ve heard before — wails so thick and deep from his gut — it froze me for a minute. That’s the time it took Coach Koziol to run across the football field. I thought Coach would keel over from the shock on his face. And Jimmy couldn’t say a thing against Goo, she told him so before Coach arrived.

You see why I think Goo is fierce? 

So I’m not sure what Goo gets out of marking herself up in this “ritual” way. But I know I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the courage. Anyway, my parents check me all the time as if my “ladyhood” was something sacred.  Goo says nothing is so sacred as to have to withstand that. I tell her everything. And even though she talks a lot, it seems like she holds back a lot. But I see what she does. 

Nothing is so sacred for Goo because I think she lost so much so early. She said her father used to check her too, then it went wrong. She didn’t tell me all, but enough for me to know it’s one of the reasons she marks herself up like she was drawing the blood of Jesus through her own stigmata. She marks herself to insure no one else will want to do the same as Pastor Summers. She also goes on about “purifying through scarifying,” which scares me because she’s so poetic that she makes it seem like I should be doing it too. Some things go over my head, but she moves me so. I feel her power course through me, like I’m her disciple.

Goo tells great stories. I think she’s the best writer in English class, and Mr. Dodd likes her writing, but her grades are awful. She skips a lot, especially when we’re diagramming sentences or reading dead white men. I’d like to skip too but I can’t. I’d probably get a whipping like when I was younger. I’ve done a good job steering clear of father’s belt and mother’s pitch. She once threw a glass ash tray that caught me in the eye, and they had to keep me out of school for a  week.

Goo makes me feel like I’m in the middle of a great adventure or mystery. Like yesterday she asked me to bring her my father’s gun. I know where he keeps his revolver. I once overheard him telling Del Quonset that the gun was “his girl, his Saturday night special.” 

Goo heard her father has a new position at the First Memorial Hospital chapel. “He has friends in high places,” Goo said. 

I think she intends to scare him straight.

Photo courtesy: Raymond Pettibon, Sonic Youth, DGC.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

— Anne Lamott

The Shrunken Head 

All night she dreamt of shrunken heads.  She awoke haunted and restive.  In the dream a shrunken head in flames hovered over her and her cat, which was surprisingly undisturbed by the apparition but nonetheless pawed at it.  She gazed at the ceiling a long while, lost in the geography of its valleys and peaks.  She hated popcorn ceilings.  It was in this humor that she turned toward the winter light struggling through the window when her recoil caused her to fall off the side of the bed.  As she knelt over the bed she verified what she thought she had seen in that instant of a second.  There, on her ex-husband’s former pillow, was the shrunken head.

The shrunken head spoke to her.  It told her it knew of dark places she had never seen and of a sadness she had never known.  It said it was her guardian from all things that would harm her.  It said it would be with her now and forever: and, well, he (for the shrunken had once been male, but now neatly removed from its genitalia was at peace with the world)… he loved her.  The cat jumped on the bed, sniffed it, and swiped it off the bed into a linty corner of the room where it came to rest face down on some cat hair dust bunnies.  The cat hissed and ran out the door.

“I love you,” the shrunken head whispered, and with those words she felt a strange melange of sensations: dread, disgust, appreciation and a carnal lust that she had never known was possible. But it was the dread and disgust that drove her to find her dusty college lacrosse stick from the garage where the cat was cowering by its litter box. She scooped the shrunken head in the crosse, and despite the shrunken head’s garbled protestations of love —  you see, a cross piece of netting was strung around his sewn shut mouth — she promptly shot the head into the trash bin in the driveway.  

She had enough of complications.

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.”

— Issac Asimov

Pinwheel Practice at the Proving Ground

Overheard at the artillery field…

Let’s take out that minuscule target with a 240 mm cannonade.

No need to sight anything let’s just shoot willy nilly.

Let’s just load them up and fire and screw the captains and the colonels.

Let’s shoot everything that moves: officers, infantry, birds, planes, squirrels, deer, and deer flies.

Let’s fuck everything up, and then shoot ourselves in the head with our sidearms. 

Whattaya’ say, Bill?  Whattaya’ say?

I wanna kill everybody, too.

Boy they trained us well.

I say, what the hell. Why not?

They’re using us for fodder.

Why don’t we get them before they get us to run hugger-mugger into some fusillade?

Let’s do it, Bob. Let’s do it.

There were pinwheels.

There was fire.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”

— Joseph Heller

Pocket o’ Blues

Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk.  It has something to do with the wiring in her head.  

I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru.  She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco.  An alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves.  I should know, I  saw the vacation photos.  Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.  

She can’t stop chewing the leaves.  I make tea out of them.  She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.  

I’m just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning.  They were spry then.  Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold.  

Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood-borne illness from said beasties.”  

She says this thing between us will never work.  “Let’s forget this all altogether and just get down to the sex,” she says.

“Wha—?”

“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.

“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting— ”

“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”

“You mustn’t assume that aesthetic expression is the prime motive for writing; it is really only a means to the more profound end. So don’t worry about it if you write out of sadness or hate or love—fear—or fascination, the important thing, if you wish to do it, is to write.”

— Ralph Ellison

The Point

Clodomira’s legs are whirring pistons.  She’s up over 100 revolutions per minute on her bike.  The countryside streaks by her and in these few seconds there is no revolutionary struggle, no ultimate leader, no great leap forward.  

The fervor of the People dissipates and all is still.  She is frozen in the moment, and the moment frozen all around her.  The landscape a stilled blur of streaks.  In this instant all of existence becomes the object of her consciousness.  

Life in this infinitesimal moment is bearable — worth the battle toward transcendence.  

A flash and the moment is gone.  

The bicycle, a humble 1956 Rabasa, feeling greatly misused upon resuming at that diabolic speed rebels, and disengages its chain breaking into a dizzy wobble.  They jackknife.  

Clodomira is thrown into the sugar cane detritus — the edge of the field heaped with the sharp husks of post-Marxist labor.  Now in mid-air she pictures herself as the radiant spear point of the vanguard, but as she hits the ground a shard of cane husk pierces her abdomen.  

Clodomira rises to a sitting position.  Our Lady of Charity hovers in the distance in an alcove of roiling cumulonimbus.  All manner of birds and land animals are swept into the funnel and disappear.  

Clodomira seethes.  Oh, to be swept into that vestal vortex.  Then she feels her father’s leaden hand on her shoulder, his grip tightening and constricting the blood flow to her head.  Then his other hand under her shirt and rubbing her belly.  

She is earthbound.

“I need the sound of others practicing to goad me into practicing myself.”

— Philip Glass

Mixed-Up Friends

“If you know aught then you know I am grandiloquent and will smite you in wordplay,” Loquatio said.

“You don’t know nothing, bud,” Tim countered, “and do me a favor, speak English or I’ll kick your ass out of this bar.”

From that inauspisicious beginning they became good friends. They met at noon every Wednesday. They crafted handmade books, discussed the weeks’ events, shot pool, and watched certain movies of men and farm animals.

They had a predilection for sheep movies. Especially Loquatio who developed a proclivity for sheep when he was 6 years-old and saw the beautiful lamb Gene Wilder had in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask. If there was true animal pulchritude, that hoofer had it in abundance. But Loquatio did not experience a lamb until his sophomore year in high school when he was voted the student manager of the 4H Club. It was anticlimactic, yes, but he dedicated the rest of his life to enjoying lamb beauty.

Tim loved gerbils. There was no manner in which he could have as full a relationship with one as he wished, but he enjoyed bringing them pleasure in his own digital manner. Tim burned incense and Ambien shavings, and played Carole King and Roberta Flack records, for his gerbil friends. The gerbils seemed to enjoy these nights as much as Tim did. Tim spent the better part of a dozen years doing this before marrying his twice-widowed high school sweetheart.

Tim and Loquatio. Gerbils and Lambs. Pangloss and Martin. Puck and Caliban. Mother Teresa and Ghandi. Stalin and Hitler. Barrack Obama and Andrew Jackson. Gacy and Dahmer. Sex Pistols and Johnny Mathis. Any Kardashian of your choice and Martin Luther King. You. Me.

This truly is the best of all possible worlds.

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” 

— Jack Kerouac

trash dash: manhattan iv.

overheard in the uzbek restaurant…

wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields, too much hash

the one-upmanship sharp…

peripatetic call and response about the tang and other merits of uzbeki beer and uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead and the future is billie ellish

the timbre maudlin the umka a perfect puff…

wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting, petrodollars ruin everything, and somehow the talk turns to czars

the plov congeals in its oil…

meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts and promises to do it more, something in the voices belies that certainty

the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…

peregrinations of assiduous maths parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit rectangle… yes, let’s, more often

while a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.’”

— Jim Jarmusch

The Allegory of the Falling Sky

The sky was breaking into bite-sized chunks and falling on Panfilo’s front yard.  The pieces fell and accumulated into a forty foot-high pyramid that dwarfed Panfilo’s poor house.  People came from miles around to see the sky in Panfilo’s front yard and a few brave (and doubtless hungry) souls moved forward to try a cerulean chunk or two.

“It’s cool and chewy,” said Monga.

“This speckled white piece is light and fluffy, like a marshmallow,” said a rotund woman in carmine.

“Chucha, you must be chewing on a cloud!”

“Ay dios, it’s so good!” said Chucha.  Chucha kept a pair of magpies at home that constantly shit on her faux Louis XIV settee.  “You know, maybe I should give some to Pepito and Cuca; I have a feeling it might finally constipate them.”

From all around the dying province people came to eat the sky and the clouds in Panfilo’s front yard.  They ate and ate until there was one small stratocumulus nugget left.

Mishu, the feral cat, starving for days, came upon the last curious nugget.  It smelled vaguely familiar, a bit like the tuna, cockroach and catnip farrago Sister Lucrecia put out after Friday vespers.  Mishu pawed the sky chunk about in the yard.

Panfilo turned the corner in his crusty 1971 Trabant as Mishu batted the piece of cloudy sky into the yuca patch that served as the boundary line between Panfilo’s house and Comrade Dr. Sobrenada’s manicured lawn.  As Panfilo pulled into his driveway, from his weekend’s fruitless boar hunt, he caught a glimpse of the cat scurrying out from the yuca patch and over the trash cans with something in its mouth.

“God-damned cat!”

Panfilo was tired and angry – nothing exciting ever happened to him.

“It goes on day and night.  All my life I’ve never stopped thinking.  I think all writing is a disease.  You can’t stop it.”

— William Carlos Williams 

The Dry Descent or: the 2,000 Mile Walk and the Obloquy of a King, a Demigod, and the Author Himself

The Descent:

I hear a cry – the lamentation of a dying man.  I turn, strain to see.  Nothing.  I stagger half-blind on scree, collapse heavy on my backpack, my hiking poles bent useless after two thousand miles.  The cry of a loon, disparate and distant, rises from a pond far below.  I affix on a turkey vulture above, gliding lazy, on a convection of air.  The sky is a moribund blue.  My tongue cramps.  My eyes rack out of focus.  Every dehydrated move I make freezes into a painful paralysis.  I delayed, basking at the summit, and was last to start the descent.  It’s unlikely anyone is heading back up the massif this late.  And who would possibly be hiking down now?  No one will be out on the trail doing the last three miles, and three thousand foot descent, this late.  I wait unblinking.  Strangely unmoved.  It ends like this?

Sisyphus: Bah, overstated. Overdone. So baroque. Please.

Heracles: Well, you can say he made a Herculean effort to become Sisyphean.

Sisyphus: Ha!  He wishes. I’m still rolling this rock, aren’t I?  Look at him — a cramped-up, frozen heap.

Heracles: Is this how it ends?

Sisyphus: Of course not.  He’s writing this tripe, isn’t he?  It’s merely the beginning in what will obviously be more than 250 words.  He’s inserted us!  Just shut up and watch…

And so I collapsed under the weight of absurd expectations —  and the distinctly unpleasant sensation of acute renal failure from severe dehydration.  Every major muscle system in my body locked up during the preceding few hours.  The doctor in emergency told me I was an hour or two away from permanently needing dialysis, and a couple more hours from sloughing it all off… probable death.

That Mount Katahdin became this absurdly Sisyphean goal at last attained, at the tail end of six months of hiking from Georgia to Maine, was now immaterial as I was on the precipice of permanent organ failure.  Gliding on the knife’s edge of death because I wanted to — no, NEEDED to — hike the Appalachian Trail, despite never having spent, in my life, a single overnight in the backcountry before I’d started this hike.  And the absurdity of keeling over fifty feet away from Katahdin stream while trying to fill my water bottle is not lost on me… one must imagine the imbecile happy…

“Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.  He too concludes all is well… The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus / “The Myth of Sisyphus”