probably high on some reefer as usual—
and I was probably tired from my three parttime
jobs and all the classes I took to get through
school quick before I hit one of those smug
professors or graduate student assistants—
I think I already quit teaching at the Free
University, my class on Stalin, not because
I dug him, but because if people were gonna
talk about him I figured they oughta know
what he did and said and wrote or had ghostwritten
for him, but when Russia invaded Chekaslovakia, I
gave up caring about any of those Communist
thugs and their theories—and I had already
lost the election for sheriff of the County,
despite the great letters and support I got—
I did pretty good actually, a lot better
than Hunter Thompson did the following year
when Rolling Stone tried to pretend he was
the first stoned-out writer to run for sheriff
anywhere—but that’s another story too—
what I’m remembering is that old brass bed
you dug so much, and us in some kind of
clutch under all the stuff, we could see
our breath in the dark night air it was
so cold—there was a lot of snow on the ground
as usual, but that was out there through
those tiny windows, the dark Iowa sky and
the stars, and the way they looked through
our stoned hallucinations, your fears about
what all my revolutionary commitments might
mean, where we would go, what scene we would
get enmeshed in next, none of that had come
up yet, this was a pause just before we
got ready to move on to the next and toughest
part of our time together, now, we were still
able to weather all the shit we had been through
and still stay together, and we knew how to
do that so well in bed Lee, goddamn it it
got so confusing later didn’t it? But we knew—
feminists tried to tell me in later days that
you were probably faking those perfect orgasms
but what the fuck did they know? we were kids
who learned how to make love together—
sure we’d been around when we met, so much more
than most in those days too, but we knew
what didn’t work and what did, and we taught each
other, and we got to a place where every night
after we turned out the light and turned to each
other under those covers we could make everything
good for a little while, we could make each other
feel like we’d just discovered the secret of life,
like we truly understood the reason anyone could
take pride in words like husband and wife, and
yeah I still had a lot more to learn,
but honey, we had enough sensual
power between us those nights to burn that quonset
hut down if we’d wanted to, but all we wanted to
do was become one, and we did, good enough that
night 20 years ago to create a son,
and a beautiful boy he is Lee—you’d be proud of him—
as you would of our daughter—as I truly was of you—
standing up to the geeks and assholes who wanted
to know what happened to your face or wanted you
to replace it with a plastic one—I never understood
completely your reasons for leaving it the way it was
but I also never gave a shit Lee, I respected you
and I believe you respected me, and you know,
I think that’s what it was that made it last as long
as it did, and that made it possible for us every
night to reach that same sensual height
at the same time together—goddamn it kid, we
knew what we were doing in bed, no matter what
anybody later said—I grew to sometimes hate you
Lee and some of the things you said to suit
those later feminist days, but hey, you never revised
that part about us in bed, and neither did I,
no matter what other kinds of things I might
have said about you—
you were my love, my little darling in that bed,
and I was your man, your boy, your loving friend—
we didn’t have the fancy moves I learned later—and
maybe that was just as well, we just did what came
so naturally and felt so goddamn swell—
yeah I’m still throwing in those really dumb rhymes
from the old days of toasting & dirty dozens—
aw Lee, Lee, Lee, when our daughter came to
live with me I used to see you in her sometimes
and it would get me mad-—it was always the stuff
that made me leave you finally like you always
predicted, only not because I was some great success,
but because there was no more room for those sweet
nights under all that feminist duress, and because
I wanted to finally see what it might be like with
some other bodies I guess—and I did, it has been
sometimes really great and amazing and even
now and then full of love and grace, but you know,
now sometimes when I look at our daughter’s
face, I see you still, only not what I grew to feel
bad about, there was a sweetness in those days Lee,
to those kids with their kid we used to be and
especially 20 years ago tonight when we created
another one, I see you too in him, our son—I’m
sorry it didn’t work out, and I can’t even express
how bad I feel about what happened to you, at least I
don’t feel guilty about it anymore, because I’ve learned
that guilt is just pride in reverse, taking credit for
things you have no control over—and I had no control
over that fucked up operation and those six years in
whatever state you were in inside that comatose body—
but you were always afraid I wouldn’t be able to take
care of the kids, after the years of poverty and
crazy Irish irresponsibility, at least it seemed that
way to you—so now the kids are taken care of—
thanks to lawyers and malpractice suits and it’s
all way out of my hands—and here I am Lee—thinking
of you and how strong you were for such a tiny lady—
and how you always knew something the rest of us
didn’t—I wonder if you knew then that I loved you—and
just didn’t know it, except when I would show it in bed,
and no matter what went on in my head later or does
now about me and you—I guess it’s about time I
admitted I still do.
DISCO POETRY
I remember where I was when
JFK got assassinated, when
Martin Luther King got shot,
when the first man walked on
the moon, when Elvis died,
when John Lennon was killed,
and when I first heard Barry
White—I was in a record
store in a Black neighborhood
of Washington DC, known on
those streets as Chocolate City
—a young handsome platform
shoed, extroverted gay Black man
was talking to the clerk about
what he had just discovered on
a trip to New York and when he
said Barry White the clerk says
<
br /> “We just got it in today” and he puts
on “I’m Under the Influence of Love”
and the album sold out in the next
few minutes. Everyone in the store
bought it, including me, the only
white, but also in platform shoes—
now why does that seem so tacky and
shallow and all the negative adjectives
just the simple word “disco” seems to
conjure up these days, unlike say “rock”
—I remember when I first heard Janis
Joplin, it was at a party in a
farmhouse rented by some University
of Iowa students, I walked in, pretty
high, and got higher when I heard
her blasting her version of “Summertime”
into the black rural night as George
K. shot some adrenalin, he said—
that he had copped from a hospital—
directly into his chest and then slammed
to the floor and shook violently while his
one real eye rolled back and his skin turned
a whiter shade of pale and several of
us long-haired guys picked him up and
walked him around outside for over an hour
until we were sure he wasn’t going to die
and then we came back in and did our own drugs
and danced and forgot where we were or
who we were or anything else about that
night except George almost o.d.ing and
Janis singing—“take a take another little
piece of my heart now” well now, how can anyone
compare that kind of thrill, or the first
time we saw Elvis on TV or The Beatles coming
to America with fucking disco—come on man,
Travolta in that sappy low rent white suit and
low rent white flick, shit, disco was black
music first, emphasizing the bass beat, giving
birth to “rap” in a basic kind of way no rapper
would ever say I’m sure and then taking the tour
of the white world through the “gay” clubs first,
not through some Italian thugs in Brooklyn—
but still, where, outside of James T. Farrel’s
Studs Lonigan, had we ever seen a more accurate
portrayal of the male ritual of getting dressed
to go out then in that scene in Saturday Night
Fever—and what else inspired Michael Jackson to
inspire us with some of his hippest stuff in
the lyrics and music of Off the Wall, or got
an expatriate diva back from Europe where her
soft porn sound gave birth to the Euro trash
that followed only to become the most powerful
and successful Black woman of her time, Donna
Summer, who in her prime made us love to love
her bad girl moves and glamorize our need to
dance and summarize our post-war angst with
songs that satisfied our frenetic desire to
outlast the collective shame and confusion by
singing “I Will Survive” and how better to
do that than by just “oh-oh-oh-oh staying
alive”—yes, it was the ’70s when the reality
of everything we had raved against for fear
it would come true did—so we partied like
being bored to death was a true possibility—
and rediscovered style with a relentlessness
that even made the ’50s look like happy days—
the ’50s that looked so lame in the ’60s like
the ’60s looked so lame in the ’70s and the ’70s
have looked so lame in the ’80s—but it’s
almost the ’90s now, and if you want to be
on the cutting edge, just go back 20 years
and you’ll be there—hey, in the ’70s it
looked for awhile like the Republicans
would never gain the presidency for the rest
of the century after what they did to us in
Vietnam and with Watergate and all the lies
and dirty tricks and secret wars that were
uncovered, the Democrats might be corrupt
but the Republicans were corrupt and
self-righteous, is there a more repulsive
combination than that? they’re like blow-
dried Noriegas, and the ’70s gave birth to
AIDS and the Bush conspiracies that led to
the power of people who continue to sell
this country and indeed the world out from
under us as we turned our backs on the
moral obligations we understood intuitively
only a few years before—hey, the ’70s weren’t
a bore or so bland and free of style as we
thought, in fact it might take a while but
if we start to relate what really went down,
we’re gonna find out they’re gonna come
around again to where we all can defend
the right to live a life of love instead of
greed and fear and constant reinterpretation
of the year we first heard Barry White—
& maybe we’ll go out & dance all night or
maybe I mean talk or maybe I mean hold each
other like we are the light, me & you, & maybe
we’ll make peace with ourselves & the rest
of the world again like disco once helped us do
THE SOUND OF POLICE CARS
& rain accumulating in
the light fixture in
the bathroom—the most
dangerous leak in the
house—like that time
in the loft on Duane
Street when Miles yelled
for me—there was a
mouse running up my
mattress-on-the-floor bed
getting close to his head
as he watched the TV
& I took off my Doctor
Scholls and squashed it
without even thinking
& he went on watching
TV without even blinking
& not too many
nights later I snuck in
a 22-year-old woman
after he went to sleep
and we made love for
hours and then laid there
thinking until she said—
“how old did you say you
were?” & I told her—38—
and she said “that’s
amazing”—& I said,
wanting to hear her say how
good I was—how young I
looked—how whatever it was
that amazed her about my
being that age that time,
so I said “what’s amazing
about it?” & she said “a
guy your age, still sleeping
on a mattress on the floor.”
HAVING IT ALL
When I was a kid,
I had no doubt I would win world acclaim:
a Nobel Prize for my novels, plays, and poetry,
and be the first Nobel Laureate to also win
an Oscar for writing, directing, and
starring in the world’s most popular
movie in the history of film—
and all this after becoming the world’s
most famous and successful singer and musician
who would destroy forever the boundaries
between rock’n’roll and jazz and blues and
all forms of popular and esoteric music
with my enormous talent and universal appeal,
and of course I would accept the Nobel
while serving as the most effective
and most popular president of the USA
in its entire history—which natural
ly
would be merely a prelude to my accepting
the presidency of the world, united finally
as a direct result of the influence and impact
of my political theories.
This is all true.
I believed this,
and continued to believe it throughout my life.
In one way or another.
How could I help it?
When I saw James Dean trying to do what looked
like a way too self-conscious bad imitation
of the little juvenile delinquent I thought I was
or believed I understood first hand at the time,
I knew in my heart that the truth I thought I saw
missing in his acting was present in me
every day of my life.
And when I saw Brando on his motorcycle
or Elvis on TV, I could see that these guys
had something, but how could it compare
with me? They were obviously pretending to be
something I knew I really was.
Their sexuality was like a game they were playing,
but my sexuality was no game to me,
I could spend eternity in hell for what I was feeling,
and the only thing that kept me from reeling
my way into an institution, which was where
they put lower-middle-class teenagers with too much
passion then, the only thing that prevented that
was the revelation that what I was feeling was
not only not a sin, but in fact an assignment from God:
to show the world how to love, again.
Now maybe that was just an Irish-Catholic kid’s
way of getting around sin,
but I believed it with all my heart
and knew it was true,
and was sure that the world would see that too,
when they finally put me on film or TV,
or stuck me on a stage with a band behind me.
I had no doubts about it,
I didn’t even think I had to put any effort into it,
really, though when it came my way
I did learn how to play some instruments
and did get up on stages and perform
or talk or walk around and let the inspiration
come out of me in words I found profound,
if nobody else did. I truly felt
I had a mission no less ambitious
than to embody love so perfectly
in all I did that the people of the world
would finally let go of all their fears about each
other and we could all just be ourselves at last
and leave everyone else alone to be themselves—
or maybe help them out if they needed it,
because we might need it sometime too,
you know, all that stuff that people did
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