Another Way to Play
Page 24
not just the order for the start
of our hearts’ flicks . . .
We love being alive
and trying to share the craziness
of what it means to know it! I mean
did we really come too late for true greatness
or just on time? What is this new place
that defines L.A.-New York and all
the rest as just a state of mind?
Energy versus Peace? FUCK THAT SHIT!
The Peace of Energy that makes us
generate a void of minuscule delights
like we once relied on artificial
stimulants for, no more, maybe at last
we can reflect the serious sensuality
of the stars we talk to in our walk
through the sea we have become—
We are the masses who survived
the troubled times that rhymed
our lives the way old Hollywood
serials did, and understand our
laughter matters. Literally.
That’s the secret of creation,
transforming laughter into matter.
We can finally accept and still
hope, like reality is the freedom
of knowing who we are and where
we’re at and the ideal is sharing
that completely, without fear,
then letting go, not hanging on
but knowing anyway, because we’re
smart at last and allow ourselves
to be. What are these humming
motors anyway but mammals of our
fantasies! Sure we talk to cars
and TVs and expect the music to
invade our brains, the motors
of our smarts that drive our
hearts to caring about it all.
Hey, what’s L.A. but the
city of Lost Angels where
we all were born, even in
New Jersey cause what’s
left of that is something
close to nothing, as the
categories fade and rede-
fining the specifics is
less thrilling. Like Elvis
isn’t. I wish they’d fish
him over the rainbow of
telescopic infinitude so I
wouldn’t have to bother with
the memory of his collar
turned up and hair that thick
I thought it was hereditary.
The Shirelles, now there’s
some memories that never quit
changing, big women and still
growing. We made ourselves
in the images of images and
then got rid of it before we
came. Coming isn’t the game
it once was. And neither is
going.
***
I only wanted to go far, be a star,
understand the way you all are.
Love, money, friends, family,
a stimulating environment, some good books,
records, art, photographs, furniture,
place to sleep and eat and work,
make love and shower, shit and entertain in,
maybe a good car,
some free time,
your name in the paper now and then,
or in a magazine,
or on TV,
your image too,
or in a movie, on a record, in a book,
or on the cover,
in the titles,
on the lips of strangers,
in the minds of a worldwide audience . . .
So you move to El Lay
to make money and become a star.
So you lived in New York City
to make art and smart sexy friends.
Which wasn’t enough.
So you move to El Lay where
she has almost transparently blue eyes,
so intense they give the impression
that there has never been a person
they haven’t seen through.
She has to be over fifty,
perhaps well over, like in her sixties.
It’s so hard to tell these days;
or was it always?
Her eyes communicate such strength
when you look into her still beautiful face
you feel beyond time.
Her body gives it away a little.
Small, but not delicate,
there’s something obviously
deteriorated about it
that seems in such contrast to her face,
unlike those strenuously physical
geriatric exercisers whose bodies
always seem to be made up of knots
and wires and strings and really ugly
imitations of some impossible youth.
Anyway,
I love her.
I fell in love with her the first time I
looked into her eyes. I can’t resist a
woman who sees right through me and
is beautiful too. She’s the real thing,
a total woman, smart, beautiful, and
old enough to be my lover, I mean mother,
maybe. Maybe not.
I’m not that young myself anymore, just
having walked through the door marked forty.
The best thing about which was
suddenly realizing why old guys can find old gals
sexy. When I was a kid I could never understand
the obvious attraction
my middleaged aunts could still retain for
my middleaged uncles and vice versa.
Now I know. There’s a girlish glow
to most grown women that never disappears,
and if you went through the same or close-by years
with them, you can’t help but see it,
and it makes you feel some kind of sympathy and
understanding for them, and then
on top of it they have this look
of having been through some things,
around the block as many times as you,
and that creates some crazy sexy feelings too.
It’s all so new,
being old,
I mean older than I thought I’d ever live to be
and still be me.
These are some thoughts that moving from New York
to El Lay has provoked. There’s so much space here
to panic in. The idea of “image” was crucified here
for everyone’s sins and then resurrected to be
worshipped for as long as this place lasts
and influences the rest of the world.
Hollywood, one of the greatest sources of power
the world has known, and no real throne, no armies
or obvious superiority except occasionally
in technical, even artistic, ways.
But oh these fucking days of driving from
one crazy studio lot to another and feeling
as much at home as I ever did
in the apartments of my peers through all the years
of poetic ecstasy and self-destruction.
What other homes have we ever had, let’s face it,
then Hollywood, the New York of bebop & jazz
& street scenes & energy highs (& its flip side:
galleries & Frank O’Hara, off & off-off and then
on Broadway again) or “on the road” or on TV
or radio or stereo or juke box.
Let’s face it Charlie,
we coulda been real home lovers
instead of dream chasers which is what we are.
Only worse than the Romantics of old,
we can get real cold
and see right through that bullshit
as we watch the technology unfold
into a future of dreams & nightmares we never
forgot.
SIX YEARS IN ANOTHER TOWN
&nb
sp; And I can’t believe all that’s gone down—
I’m talking to the trees again
and I haven’t done that since
God knows when—because I guess
it’s Him, or Her, or It I’m talking to
when I look up at a tree and say
you got any advice for me today?—
and they always respond the same way
Frank O’Hara did, when he appeared to me
in the back of a checkered cab
on my way back from cheating
on the then woman in my life
a Costa Rican beauty I still miss
as I miss you all, even if I don’t
call you too often—or at all—
I was high—on boo and other stuff—
we’d met at a literary awards event
where John Ashbery, O’Hara’s close friend
had just received the nation’s highest
poetic honor—or close enough—
and then we all piled into this bus
that took us back to the Plaza Hotel,
where Eloise once romped when I was
just her age only now it was me
thinking about this Canadian Jewish
beauty, famous for her literary liaisons
and how it would feel to be inside her
and know her famous beau, who was a rich
kid still at fifty, wouldn’t know,
but I would the next time he looked
down his nose at me and my much
tougher poetry, the way I saw it—
anyway, I was full of guilt by now—
having been inside her and her home
and done the jitterbug of life and
then got up to leave and though I
had never deceived her, had told
her of my life with Ana and my son
from a still undivorced ex-wife—
she got mad and threw books at me
calling me “you bastard you son of
a bitch” as I fled down the stairs
and out into the New York night and
the checker cab that sped downtown
with me mumbling in the back seat
about my guilt although I’d never
cheated on Ana before and wouldn’t
again and she’d never know—and
when we broke up it was because she
couldn’t stay away from some younger
version of myself who gave her the
baby and marriage she wanted and
followed her home to Costa Rica
and some position in her family’s
mini-empire—but this night we
were still alright except for my
feelings of being a rat to everyone
concerned because I never seemed to
learn that the possibility of making
love was not an imperative—I
felt so bad I thought I was dying—
from the dope and loss of hope that
I would ever be the man I thought
I was—when all of a sudden there
beside me in the cab was Frank O’Hara
in white shirt, open at the collar,
sleeves rolled up, and khaki pants
and penny loafers—he put an arm
around my shoulder and in the voice
I’d only heard on tapes and records
told me it was alright, that if I
hadn’t done what I’d done that night
I wouldn’t be me—the Michael
my friends seemed to love and even
admire—and that I wasn’t gonna
die—or even have to lie—because
nobody would know—and I was so
relieved I cried a little—something
I only do when watching TV or a movie
and when I got home Ana didn’t seem
to notice anything, only Miles, my
little five-year-old locked eyes
with mine and asked “What’s wrong?”
and when I told him nothing, he
kept looking to see if I was telling
the truth, so I added “I’m just
glad to be home” which he accepted
as true, because it was—
Wait a minute, that was so many years ago,
what does it have to do with being here
in Southern California with you, writing
about “six years in another town” for
the new friends I have now, who never
knew me when I jitterbugged through
life’s opportunities, cutting a rug,
giving everyone a hug of true affection
because I knew, or thought I knew back
then that every person was a friend
because inside they wanted just what
I did, to be free to really dig what
life has given us, including each other—
Even the woman I moved here with in 1982,
even the files they keep on me and you
to see if we might get in the way of
Bush or J. Danforth Quayle or whoever
else the powers that be get to run the
show up front while they continue to
milk us all for what they need to keep
that power to themselves, and if that
sounds like another decade, well, it’s
almost 1989, time for this one to end
and leave us, my friends, as Dukakis
always calls complete strangers—and
leave us with only memories of what
someone has accurately called “The Mean
Decade”—and enter the time of
saving ourselves and each other again—
it’s the earth and the universe too
now—what an awesome responsibility—
and how we continue to fuck it up—but
hey, we’re only human, doing our best
to muddle through until tomorrow when
somebody else gets the job we thought
we wanted—I remember after Ted Berrigan
died, who also knew Frank when he was
alive, like I didn’t—two Irish-American
poets like me, haunted by Catholic guilt
and dreams of sainthood and sex—or
sexhood and saint—I always think of
O’Hara as Saint Frank—and Ted, the
last time I saw him was in heaven—
I guess it was a dream—but there he
was, newly arrived—looking better than
he ever did when he was alive, trim and
healthy and clean and sharp and totally
quiet—a big surprise for a man who
lived on speed and machine-gunned his
every thought into the faces and minds
of anyone who crossed his path and even
those who didn’t—he didn’t say a
word, and I walked over to him and sat
down beside him to tell him how good
he looked and how happy I was to see
him because I was, he was my friend,
who helped me out when I needed help—
he knew the same codes I did and lived
his life that way so he could say, when
he loaned me a few hundred bucks he didn’t
really have and I promised to pay it back
right away—“Hey, Michael, it would be
an insult for you to give this back man,
it’s a gift, it’s nothing compared to
all the pleasure your poetry has given
me” and I could say, when I did the same
for him when he was down and out like me,
which we both were most of the time back
then, I could tell him “vice versa only
double”—he was my friend—and now
here he was, in heaven, and not saying a
word until he smiled at
me, as handsome
as I ever saw him, when I asked how he
was doing (dead and in heaven) and he
said “Michael, you don’t know how great
it is not to have to talk anymore” and
it hit me, that must be heaven to a
guy like him, who never shut up and only
because he was so generous and smart and
had such a huge heart did we all put up
with the din when he let us in when we
went to pay him a visit—
Wait a minute! What has all this
got to do with living in L.A.?
Well, Ted passed away after I moved
here, and it pissed me off so much
I got in touch with my own need to
pass up speed and all the rest and
try to be the best I could be for
whatever time I had left—including
letting go of sex as the answer to
my disappointments in life—but
hey, it isn’t always used that way—
sometimes it’s just the most exciting
and convenient and fastest way to say
we’re still alive today and glad of it—
Hey, you all say, wait a minute, he
calls this stuff poetry? I can do
that—which makes me feel real good
because the code of this boy’s art
is the normal heart no matter how
surreal the circumstances—what
I mean is, the scene I dug the most,
came up through, and once was host to,
made it clear that if you’re smart
you don’t have to keep on proving it
in the work so that the person on
the receiving end goes: wow, I could
never do that, it’s so difficult
and clever and precious and like a
machine I wasn’t trained to run—
but we say, fuck that look-at-me-
I’m-educated-up-the-ass bullshit—
we say the work has got to be fun
even while it’s taking on the Huns
of our existence, the bad guys in
the house of lies who disguise it
all as in our best interest—
these guys hypnotize with banality
as mean as genocide—while they
hide their true intent behind the
sense of expertise and techniques
we can only compromise—forget it—
art that makes you go, hey, I can
do that too is what moves me to see
life through to the end and still
be friends with myself—forget
the “off the shelf” operations that
the experts think we’re better off
not knowing about—NO WAY! we
gotta shout our way back into history
because it’s ours, just like these
six years here were mine—a time
when I got clean and sober unlike
any film by that name, but not so