I get off from the panadería—where, by the way, no one fears Dusty because, as I get it, they are already dead, and where I am accepted because once covered in flour I am indistinguishable from the dead—I get off and go home and make María breakfast against her day abus. I feature the fried egg and the cigarette tortilla, buttered and salted and rolled tightly. They’ve allowed me a bag of sopaipilla from the panadería and these I adulterate with things and put in a plastic bag for her. She goes off brown and fresh and fed and coming home to me. Wow. Legs! Kisses! No crap! Me and the dog and my TV-free day! Silver mining with my dog. I am a puny Tarzan with an apple-dome Cheetah and a robust Jane. Jane is always robust, that is why she is Jane. Jane does not say, “What did you do today, honey—nothing again?” Jane says, “Estoy berry tire” and gets you in a headlock and wrestles you to bed and buries her head in your unmanly chest.
Then the Revolution came by. That is all I know to call it. It was a parade of men in Mercedeses, shouting a formulaic something that contained the three or so Mexican names known to me before this my naturalization. It sounded like ZapatBoliTrotsGuevaraWhathe-fuckwrongwiyou!? I looked timid for a minute and looked to María for support and protection, a very bad move on the game board of machismo. But I noticed there was some kind of gentler current running through things; the apparent leader got out of the T-top through which he had been throwing the crowd epithets and candy and spoke conspiratorially with María, as near as I can tell about me. At any rate, they looked at me during this consultation, he at my head and she at my feet. I had the wit to go get my dog and two sugar scoops of the pills. I could not tell whether they wanted me for a ritual sacrifice or for some nobler symbolic purpose—a red-faced white man visible in the cause.
When I got back outside, things looked better and worse. El Revolucionario looked like he wanted to kiss María rather than execute or conscript me. The gang was impatiently revving the Mercedes Revolution motorcade. The entire scene had elements of a rabid young labor union, a Klan rally, a Hells Angels mobilization, a football weekend, a fraternity rush party, a fistfight on a dance floor, fishing on a big party boat, and on the fringes a drug deal. That’s where I stepped in: without any more ado I poured the pills from the sugar scoops into the cupped palms of all the revolutionaries. This raised my stock visibly and considerably. At the precise zenith of this coup of public relations my forty-seven-pound Chihuahua peed on a Mercedes tire. I felt we had together made a perfect declination to join the cause, either as casualty or as troop. And indeed the wet tire was noted with some chuckling and some pills were thrown back amid headshaking and the Parade of the People was off in half-circle blasts of dust and diesel and death to the oppressors. María and my dog and I stood there arm-in-arm, looking happily into the sunset. Is the cup half empty or full? I aim to get into my grave squarely and neatly and meet my private batch of worms without one more moment of horseshit intervening. Leave me alone—I shall dig my own hole. I do not recall being as centered, as easy on the feet of my being, since as a boy I took solid solace in keying out a snake or tree and playing a little ball. After that, things got pointless fast. And it seemed the job of everyone to accelerate the pointlessness and deepen one’s commitment to it. This is where, if I am not mistaken, “failure” began to accrue: those who for whatever reasons did not or could not vigorously conspire in the proliferation of pointlessness began to “fail.” The specifics of what I mean by “pointlessness”—oh, supply your own. Who cares. I’ve got a unique dog and a room full of no appliances broken or working and a woman not broken and no country that claims me and its revolutionaries will not kill me. Could I have more? I am allowed to muss myself in the bakery of the dead. I am allowed to prospect in old and lost mines. I am allowed to fall down therein in prodigious bat slime. I am allowed.
Many things are not allowed. People can have as many people as they wish, whether they can afford them or not, and consume as many cars as they wish, but they may not drive them as fast as they wish. This would reduce the number of people. And so forth. María and I had tequila sopaipillas following my brush with the Revolution, and got dizzy and bloated but otherwise felt very good. I saw more than the usual number of dead folk glance in our window while my tequila-sopaipilla buzz wore off, and waved at them all. I have not had, and not missed, socks since I’ve been south of the border. María slept nobly, flat on her back and breathing smoothly, which may be what attracted inordinate dead, after our biscuit buzz. It is possible my mother is in the hospital. No Son of Sam or anything, but my dog told me this, if in fact I have been “told” this at all. Told, “told”—it is not so suspicious: when you are told nothing—no phone, no mail, no Western Union, no pigeons—you find that you are nonetheless, necessarily, told something. This neat little fact is what, I suspect, really separates man from animals. Animals can do without, man must be told something. I doubt he can think one whit better, or has an ounce of soul or mind more, but he must be told something some of the time or he goes nuts. But a dog does not care if you keep the deepest secret on earth from him forever. You have never seen a dog longing for the news, and you never will. Yet somehow my world-stopper dog told me my mother, for whom I care not much, was hospitalized. I’m almost certain. He’s forgotten it, of course.
One day the sky was albemarle. One day it struck me that the sky, which looked like pink and blue marble, should be called albemarle, and I left. Without telling anyone. I went back to my house, which was unharmed and did not look particularly vacant, and I wanted to go have a peek at Mrs. M. but she was not home, I could tell, and I wanted to see my mother, but I did not know where she lived. I took these impulses to be bad signs—wanting the unknown. An observer would hazard that I was regressing. I would not presume to know, but I nonetheless did feel—particularly in the matter of wanting to see my mother, whom I had no clue the whereabouts of and had not known and had not cared to know the whereabouts of for twenty years or so, but not so much in the matter of wanting to winder-peek Mrs. M., whose fiery red hair and supine openness constituted the kind of thing any rational sport might want to spy on if he could—I nonetheless did regard myself as displaying bad signs in some of this. Next you know I’d be turning myself in for my observational stay at Taco Charley’s, which stay had probably compounded punitively in my AWOL into a term at the penitentiary, all for looking at a redhead and borrowing a boy’s trike, and a couple of other things—I suppose there must have been something else. But I hardly see that a man in the modern world could be expected to play the role of a daily historian of his own or anybody else’s activities, what with all that is going on and all the people and all the deficit this and riot that, and, well, the whole radio band of nonsense broadcast by everyone on earth of which it might be said there are even in a conservative reckoning about ten times more than we need, and I rue the day the Soviet Union collapsed and therewith the plausible threat, or promise, of annihilation of this 90 percent human excess we are suffering. I found some frozen bologna and bread and made myself a fried bologna sandwich with yellow mustard and ate it with a quaff of reconstituted powdered milk with a goodly stream of Hershey’s in it, sitting on my porch watching for Mrs. M. and wondering why I was not in María’s arms. She would be getting home about then and seeing my dog would know I would be coming back—a man does not abandon a fifty-pound Chihuahua. Or does he? I had suddenly to ask, looking at the facts of the case, where I was, after all, sitting. And the sky up here was merely blue.
I was held on what is called “72-hour mental hold.” I was released on “personal recognizance.” I was to report to the psychiatric hospital for a look-see. I got home and pondered my face in a mirror and decided that I did not recognize myself personally and was therefore not bound to observe the terms of my bail. I had no personal recognizance as I perhaps too narrowly or just too dumbly grasped the term: a bond had been put up for me by the court in good faith that it (my personally recognizing myself) existed, but it did not, and therefore they had no hold
on me and I was free to “jump” bail, of which there was no actual collateral or security. So I did. As you know. And now back, inexplicably, I am very worse. I should not have left my dog, my grotesque dog I do not myself believe, but over whose leaving I feel like weeping, as if I were nine and the thing had been run over, is not merely “waiting” for me in “old Mehico.” “Why” “am” “I” “doing” “these” “quotation” “marks”? In all truth, comrades, I do not feel well. I am tempted to say “not myself,” but it is precisely that amorphous—lovely word I do not know the meaning of—that amorphous not feeling oneself as I looked in the mirror for my personal recognition of my personal self that got me “fleeing” “the” “law” in the first place. I’m all amuddle. I sometimes have occasion, and this is one of them, to think about how extremely difficult it must be for homosexuals to pursue and secure the affection of their kind when it is so truly extremely difficult to pursue and secure the universally approved affection between heteros. Then again, I don’t know of anything harder than your footprints being found under a Lucille Ball look-alike’s window and you and your muddy feet being found on her son’s tricycle, the getaway car. And you are actually charged with attempting to avoid arrest because of your use of a “vehicle.” A Chaplinesque high-speed chase, and you to see real headshrinkers who do not possess the class to kill you before they begin the arduous process of diminishing your head. I once saw an ornithologist preserve a bird by stuffing its body cavity with cornmeal. Shouldn’t that rot, or something, the meal itself, I mean, not the bird? I mean not the meal, the meal I mean not, I do not mean the meal. I become moxied on some pepper vodka and try to find my mother by calling city after city information, and think about giving up and turning myself in, except I am afraid to because I figure I will be charged with whatever unsolved serious crime has gone down here since I last saw my…my what? Who was I to have seen to establish…I am confused and will retire to write another day. I wonder what Roberto Duran could have done as a writer.
A Little Founders and The Iron Rescue—these are titles that have come to me, whether from Mars to a part of my brain or from one part of my Martian brain to another. I’d be disingenuous if I did not tell you that I have just gotten out of a loony bin of considerable more swat than Taco Charley’s. I have been to Chattahoochee without a banjo on my knee. Something happened to put me there which I do not remember, and most of what happened there I do not remember, but I do recall the later innings and the being polite and eating my Thorazine and the entire public-relations campaign you wage to get them to let you go. Convincing hawk-eyed authority whose job it is to find something wrong with you that there is nothing wrong with you is about like convincing people to vote for you for President—harder in the case of the loony campaign, because you are not heroic even when you win. You are at best, in AA parlance, a dry nut. A nut bar with the wrapper (temporarily) back on.
Mrs. M.’s house has a vacant look, and I fear I did something over that way which inspired this late incarceration and her apparent absence now. This is a shame, because not every man on earth, sane or no, has the opportunity to court a woman who is a dead ringer for Lucille Ball when Lucille Ball was looking good, which she was before she no longer looked like Lucille Ball when Lucille Ball was looking good. I trust it is apparent I am a man who knows more than the usual about desire, refined and not. Read my books if you doubt me. The Iron Rescue is light going but startling in its permanent truths. A Little Founders will break your heart, quite honestly. I am not all the way back. I am not coming all the way back. The bigger they are the harder they fall? Well, sir, the saner the deeper and more torturous the cave they chain your butt in, the more drooly your peers, the more of your daily boon companions you will see crabbing with kite string on the lawn or masturbating into the bowling-ball bag behind the nurse. The more likely you are to walk around like a penguin yourself, expressionless. Do not get too sane once they have their teeth in you. In sport, once hurt do not get too healthy. Fiduciarily, once broke do not recover too much, obviously prudent once bankruptcy obtains. Same thing here: a Chapter 11 of the mind. Stay down. I am. But like a turtle with a wormlike tongue, I can say an intriguing thing or two to fish.
This morning I am interested in vanillin. Or vanilla—it occurs to me I don’t know the difference exactly. I am interested in that essence of bean that makes candy candy. That is all I am interested in. I am not interested, today, in Mrs. M. or straitjackets or Mexican lamming or improbable dogs, or in women or food or drink, or in newspapers or civil ways and means, or in jackshit. I am hot for a little brown bottle and a whiff of vanilla. Life as we know it in this late day of sophistication is predicated on the spectrum of ones interests; it is judged, to be more precise, by one’s interests. If these are too narrow or too broad, or too shallow or too intense, we do not have a normal person. A man is supposed to be a kind of balanced diversified portfolio of modest interest in things, none of which is to get out of hand. A small percentage of his interest can be in high-risk matters provided the bulk of his interest is rock-solid conservative. Thus you see a man in a cammo suit on a computer-driven moving-target shooting range, shooting pop-up silhouettes of men with the aid of an infrared scope mounted on his very head, and bragging that he is thirty out of thirty, “About,” he says, “what you’d have to be in a riot situation,” and we have a goner—a white supremacist most likely—until it is revealed this is an assistant prosecutor with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. This is a fully legal hobby, and my God, look at it, it looks like exercise to boot.
The sane have a balanced portfolio of interests, the insane have given themselves to imprudent investments—to high-risk, low-yield ventures. You do not look in windows. You buy lots of dinners for women if they are your interest. Take the newspaper; I sometimes think the newspaper was invented to serve as a benchmark for the sanity of man. You must take the paper and read it; you may even, if commerce is in any way involved, subscribe to and read several papers. But you must discard them promptly. The hoarding of newspaper leads to suspicion quickly. Fire marshals have a nose for them and a scorn for the hoarder nearly equal to that for the arsonist (whom they secretly admire, anyway). On the other hand, you may not not read the paper—this is uncivil.
Every venue in modern life is marked with a propriety of option similar to that attending the newspaper. The investor is expected to diversify, to be liquid, to mix one-tenth risk with nine-tenths conservatism. He deviates…well, he’s deviant. Be interested in nothing you cannot sell—that is, be interested in nothing you cannot not be interested in. Here we get to the wicket. After dinner with her, take her home if she says to. A certain party will then go home himself; another will look in her window. QED.
QED my ass. Nothing has ever been proved. Perhaps in the old days—perhaps Columbus proved the earth round. Beyond a few rare instances of likesuch, what has been proved? What is probative today? As far as I am concerned the jury is still out—and a laughable concept that—on the entire modern world and all its doggerel affairs. My point. I like it when a person is moved to say to another, “Your point is well taken.” This usually actually means “You are full of shit and I ought to kill you to get you out of my face but I do not see a way of doing that and getting away with it so I will say ‘Your point is well taken’ until such time as I can get an unwitnessed fatal blow in.”
And things are heating up in my perception of the modern world: folk are stepping around each other in a more and more ritualized and more and more impatient dance, looking for the moment they can stop saying forever, Your point is well taken. In heaven it will never be uttered. In heaven you can say, Your point should be put where the moon don’t shine. Right now I am smelling smoke and it is possible my house is on fire. It is possible this is my house I am in. Since Chattahoochee there has been uncertainty. I miss my dog, if I had a dog—I can’t tell how far back this episode might go. I miss my dog whether I had one or not—there, a little assertiveness training
to the rescue. But no one on the white-coated side of the fence would encourage you to lament the loss of an imaginary dog. My position on this, best kept to oneself, is that all dogs are imaginary. Is this Platonic? Can you pet an Idea? Can an Idea have fleas? Can an Idea kill the neighbor’s chickens and get run over with feathers still in its mouth?
Stroke
A WOMAN COMES AT me armed with a weapon, her mouth, her clothes. The weapon is indistinct, mouth open, clothes off. Something is coming out of her mouth. It will hurt. The weapon is vague and bright—not nickel-plated, more accurate to say just nickel plating. It is bright essence of weapon, and not the true weapon. The true dark harm is in the mouth, the clothes removed. The oglalasioux jumble of syllables to slur on me, the jungle of hot flesh to be withdrawn once I’m listening, the platter of blind regret waltzing away with her victory. O dogs of solitude, lizards of horniness, we must prepare ourselves for Armageddon. If we only knew what that word meant. Islets of Langerhans is more like it. Prepare for that, boys. Call your mother and tell her flowers are on the way but she’s seen the last of you and your practiced civility, you are going to the island. No man is an island is disputable. No woman is on it is not. I bid you adieu, Mr. Donne.
Then these dudes attack, with their women balled up at their sides. Then some more then. Now what?
This: Duwop Nura Buddy, a dog, was awalkin down the street singin duwah diddie diddie dum diddie day. I ignored him. I do not need a dog, let alone another dog.
I want to write a book sinful tradeout minnow (stroke) (related) (-) (stroke-related). A young man can have one. (Stroke.) Even so, he can still cross his t’s and dot his i’s, and cross his eyes (smile) unless they (antecedent: eyes, so you don’t have to guess) are permanently crossed by the stroke. I cannot read my bank statements. Fortunately there is no money in the accounts or I would be in trouble. All life is trouble, degrees thereof. All flesh is sloughing, degrees thereof. All metal is rusting. All cheese going bad, or hard. All dogs leaving you, or refusing to. All women balling up into fists. All islands being washed by neaps and ebbs of loneliness. Not solitude, that is $100/hour loneliness, and islands do not pay $100/hour. Neap and ebb and spring, low and lower and lowest—who, my pretty, is the lowest tide of all? Out there run aground on the ebb, you can click together your red goody two-shoes until the cows come compounding interest.
Aliens of Affection Page 9