PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
UNDERGROUND UNDERGROUND ((BENEATH THE DUST OF MARS))
PART TWO.
Forty-five.
5 a.m. train 15 blocks North, towards the lake, howls thru pre-dawn Sunday, thru Erie, a whoosh-clack repetition at half-speed & the jangle of loose rails, one thousand times mightier than one elephant galloping, shooting for Buffalo, New York, steel cutting thru shadow & mile & Northeast America delivers new cars, chemicals, commodity, possible contraband. Brakemen are human.
In 1974 I had little idea what the Spirituality of Marijuana was, like being a Christian kid I just followed, smoked to be somebody else, but smoking dope was a prerequisite to a social furthering in those days, us College guys had that secret commonalty, stoned before work in the summertime, stoned on breaks, & joints for the rides home, stoned all the time we worked in the Steel-Mill for the summer. My department was Yard Shipping. I was on swing-shift between 2nd & 3rd. I pounded spikes & pulled railroad ties, ran a tamper to tamp gravel deep under creosote wood, helped re-rail box-cars that ran scrap-metal into the last-chance furnace, the last building before woods & workers' houses appeared out Big Beaver Run. Above all, I smoked with the rest of the College guys, kids of dads who worked there.
Jerry was 3rd shift foreman. He had one glass eye, a bad limp, death on his breath, an old dago built like an ox after a few axes have cut thru tough spine; he was almost retired & he had Army tattoos & wore his white hard-hat tilted like a grunt's helmet in European combat, an eternal Sergeant, raspy & deep, sometimes breaking into Italian to curse us. He often worked with us, demonstrating how to quickly drive spikes, how to shovel mounds of gravel like we meant it, & of course, we were high, we laughed & mocked him. He did have Power over the regular workers on the crews. He was a fair man who lived in the fox-holes for 40 years. He cld not teach us how to jump a moving train, with his bad leg & all, so Al showed us. Al was near Jerry's age & had worked for Jerry like a faithful soldier, & he always smoked cigars, driving spikes with that cigar in his mouth, eating a bologna sandwich..., but Al was ok, he didn't bug us, he went in when things were toughest & we all sd fuck it, another derailment. We stood & watched Al work where Jerry pointed, sweating & grunting with that cigar under the waiting crane's floodlights. It's a pure wonder we all made every jump onto the chugging & zipping box-cars, altho the final summer of my employment some guy who was sort of pre-disco had half his foot chopped off under the wheels. He was a brakeman.
I was a long-haired dope-smoking hippy who 20-some years later is remembering things, the great metal echo & cauldrons of lava, steam & ash & men, & nobody realized this was the end of an Industrial Era, the Mill shut down like a dissipating echo of World War Two & Korea & crazies back from Viet Nam who smoked with us, the wars were over & everybody was a Veteran suddenly laid-off. The American Steel Tragedy. Jerry died soon after retirement. I imagine Al's been long dead too. My dad was a foreman in the East Works, tube-reducing department. He smoked those dog-turd Italian cigars. I was very stoned in a truck with dirt on my face when once we had to pass thru his area, & he was so happy, he boomed with smiles & laugh, he introduced me to some guys, proudly. I always felt inadequate under the pride from my dad. I wonder why. His heart-attack came at age 44.
Listening carefully now like a dog sniffs air for smell, a wispy, shrill, distant whistle; goodbye trains, they always say goodbye.
Forty-six.
It is 7 a.m. so the completion of Chapter 45 took two hours, 3 cups of expresso-enhanced drip-coffee, 6 cigarettes, one awakening pipe, & a Life-time.
Forty-seven.
Judy's 38 year old son left his wife, his job in an 11-dollar an hour factory, left everybody & everything for 4 months. Judy sd she was near a nervous breakdown during the time she didn't hear from him. He finally phoned. He's in Ohio working for 6 an hour in a bakery factory, but likes the job, & he likes it alone. She left what she told me about it at that, & I didn't press.
Forty-eight.
Nothing is ever enough, no accolades mean Freedom. I am an Industrial Slave Writer. I work a regular, extraordinary physical labor job surrounded by serious Company hate, & I can't complain about the pay, I just can't handle money correctly because I'm fucked. I need a windfall of at least $100,000 for something to matter. There is no way in THIS Life there will ever be a $100,000 windfall come coming. Nor, I doubt, will I ever go totally Zen non-possessive, crazy alone in the woods, growing food & frying furless bunnies, vegetarianism I don't think so, nor the mazes of fates befit unharnessed responsibilities of Daily Chaos, goofy stuff of the Real, lowest denominators, & the speed of age & hours & perceptions. I can be happy as an Industrial Slave Writer, but I'd be happier if I didn't fuck with the basic concept of primary debt. Shut-off notices, cancellations, & there is only a couple hundred in checking, about a thousand minus what I need to fully pay off everything like utilities & up-to-date loans. I will make the average Erie family-of-four yearly wage, & then some, but everything will still be minus. & I'm not even spending money on drink! It all goes into the Daily Family Chaos mode of existence. I cannot pay the mortgage this month remotely close to the due-date. Meantime I run the machines as Zen-like as possible thru night-shift amidst the situational madness of my brothers & sisters. So few do not have big-time money-problems. Some know how to handle money wisely. Some Writers get paid to write, but this is nothing like that, & it is a paramount aspect to Freedom, to write for another Purpose, an Unknown Purpose, an American & Modern Purpose beyond Entertainer Cash as vast as professional Media. Beyond the Beyond! I'm dancing cha-cha dad stoned in the kitchen, sun-glassed & cool. Yes, I cha-cha, but slow, surreal. I admit I fuck up paying bills. I need a shower. I'm broke. I return to work tonight.
Forty-nine.
I stop Steve as he passes my machine. "Let me posit the hypothesis there is no other creature, no other condition or thing, excluding yr own religious conviction, that shares this Consciousness, this unique, Human Consciousness."
"What do you mean?" Steve loves intellectual communications.
"What do you mean what do I mean? I mean nothing else nowhere in any form or aura is involved or can be involved with Human Consciousness, Human 'awareness', this waking-state of Reality, nowhere in the Cosmos."
"& so Mankind thinks he's in the center of the Universe?"
I look into Steve's eyes. I think, Fuck, he don't got a clue what I'm talking about!
Fifty.
I'm not sure how many of my fellow Union employees I'd have been friends with in High-school or College. Some of the guys must have truly been abused & mocked. I wld've kept a far distance with just a hint of Pity & disdain. Their pimpled, dirty faces & bad grades pointed them into Serfdom, into the same Factory Fate is fucking me now. Educated people are stupid & Factory-rats, most of them, are Heroes, adept side-steppers, who know more than numbers or Success, & I have learned this first-hand.
Fifty-one.
HEAT, i think I hate heat, July as thick as fish-head soup, sticky mist of clover honey catches at the hairs of the body. I wake with heavy, old-age eyes, lightly sweated & completely naked on familiar sheets under our raging ceiling-fan, 3 p.m. nova daylight, Christ! A RAGING hard-on, RAGING, I tell you!
Fifty-two.
If I only lived my own Life it'd be cool, I have an ordered existence: work thru the night, sleep into early afternoon, drink coffee & write, do herb, eat, & it's evening, a nap, & then another night of work & the cycle spins again. It is a simple equation. Toss 3 other lives at least, into a Simultaneous Concoction of Alchemy & Destiny & Serendipity, as a Human Salad. Everything dangling sparking jumping a sea-weed wave a whitening Sun, wherefore & to how. What better example of Surrealism than The Real of The Mind?
"What a BEE-UTEEFULL morning it is!" Diane notes. I have just returned home to our thin cave, turning the corner around the open bathroom door, & unusually she's awake on time & getting ready for work.
"It is?" I ask.
"It's BEE-UTEEFULL outside!"
"Diane, the heat-gauge read 106 degrees on a table, plus these molds are 300 degrees, so add sweat & fiberglass together & pressures of Production from machines made in Dinosaur Days...," & I'm like a zombie wearing me, I feel heavy, I drank a gallon of iced tea & pissed 2 gallons out, I'm heavy & tired that's for sure.
She side-glances me.
Fifty-three.
"Whatchya doin' daddy?" Rachel flowers thru my door.
"Actually I'm writing UNDERGROUND UNDERGROUND BENEATH THE DUST OF MARS. I'm going on 53 little chapters. Various themes & people run thru it..."
"I WANNA BE UNDER THE DUST OF MARS TOO! DADDY!"
"Huh?"
"I WANNA BE UNDER THE DUST OF MARS TOO!"
"Ok, you can be. Ok?"
"Good. I feel better now."
"That's great, Rachel, that's really great."
"Thank you, daddy."
"You're welcome."
"Daddy?"
"Yes Rachel."
"If I had five dollars I cld buy the hair-dye I need to color the wig for the show & Michael sd I had to have that wig dyed & I really really need to dye the wig but I need five dollars daddy so I can go to Rite-Aid at the Plaza & get it & dye it for the show, that opens, in what, 2 days!"
Fifty-four.
John Waters bought a copy of Kurt Nimmo's SUSAN ATKINS book, & liked it. John Waters directed WOMEN BEHIND BARS in NYC in 1977. Opening night in '97 in Erie, PA, is tonight, & Rachel's picture is again in the Entertainment section of Thursday's SHOWCASE via THE ERIE TIMES, Erie's one & only newspaper, with a write-up on the play. Rachel is so very photogenic. As a Father, I don't want John Waters to ever see my daughter, & say Aha! Eureka! Delicious!
I cringe at the thought of Nimmo wooing her.
What does a man, who has such a Stunner-Beauty as a daughter, do?
I bought 4 copies of the paper.
Fifty-five.
No, Divine acted in WOMEN BEHIND BARS in 1977, but Waters didn't direct.
Fifty-six.
There's this girl who is really almost a guy with breasts & high voice & you'd think she's all female, but he has a penis, she has a penis, altho the operation is just a few months away. She's an actress & Rachel's friend.
I think about the after-surgery pain, the focused fire of pain between the legs, bloody diaper bandages & a mind convinced it's for the best.
Fifty-seven.
Blowy joint by the windy window, Mister Poe.
Fifty-eight.
The Doomtown Jug Sluggers do Hopper's Brew-Pub. It is a strange gig for Mark, especially, but none of the band-members wld ever normally frequent the high-priced establishment on a Friday night, especially not Mark, who lunges across the table towards Diane & me. "Man this place is SICK. All I can think about doing is getting back home & smoking a nice, fat joint..."
"All the alligators, there're more alligators in this dump than a Mississippi swamp," Diane phews, shaking her head.
"Alligators?" I don't get it.
"You know, on their shirts. Alligator on a shirt."
I get it.
"There's a weird history to the word 'alligator' in Jazz," Mark points out, "& now look what it means."
"A yuppified disintegration of Spirituality," I guess.
Mark tells us the history of the word in the world of Jazz.
I guzzle my second Drake's Crude Ale, a delicious dark beer brewed here in Erie. "I haven't had a beer in...", I look at Diane.
"A long time," she nods.
"Well, I quit drinking three years ago, but ya know, being here in this shit, it's like, yeah, gimme a couple shots of Wild Turkey & keep 'em coming!" Mark laughs.
Fifty-nine.
One fire-engine blasting its whirly siren closer closer like a screaming, slowly twirling, face up Raspberry Street; then Soul-deep horns shower thru, quite loud. I rise, open my door, walk to the windows & look out, even sniff the cool breeze, but the fire-truck, somewhere invisible, a few blocks away, spun a beep into Silence & I don't see, hear, or smell fire. It is 9 a.m. Saturday morning in July, very sunny, surprisingly chilly. I feel like driving fast on a highway West, drinking champagne with a blond bomb-shell, giggling with so much Freedom & Money, & she squeezes my knee...
Sixty.
The girl, or the boy, he prefers to be referred as she, is a perfect Louise in the play. Hilarious. What a campy production of summer comedy, & tho Rachel's part is more subdued than all the other characters, I'm glad she didn't play Mary who was woozy off Quaalude humped by The Matron side-stage. Whew. Ida Lupino licks a banana. All of us are WOMEN! Earth as a Female Earth-hole in Space! O Alien Species come fuck us! One Big Dildo Ship thru Blue Moisture Hymen Atmosphere! All men are girls, men are just shells, girls are the real meat of the insides, our inner holes are entirely feminine & fuckable. Is Diane a secret Dyke Lesbian? Men want Women, & Women want Women, & I spoon Diane, grope, caress, explore, with large male hands. She barely responds. I try for reaction, for movement, for involvement between bodies, my cock's thick sausage, & then I feel that's it, it's my cock, it's my cock she don't want involved with, I feel severed, I see my bloody penis clutched in Diane's rising hand as if a decapitated victory developed via one knife swoop, swoosh, a fat purple bleeding snake she shakes in the air over masses cheering. I ask her what's wrong but she is silent. I sleep on the couch, me & my teddy-bear cock, alone like a hole in the dark, old, balls swollen with alien-sperm, I am sure in a wrong piece of the sky this time, I think, wondering if my wife of nearly 20 years is a Lesbian?
Sixty-one.
Will you please just tell me the Story of yr Mind.
From what angled perspective you dream
all lurid details secrets history dreams &
involvements
& People, People, Live Human Chapters &
what is Real...
what is the Meat...
what is Sex...
what is Love...
lurid secrets detached from my cock
jetting loosely o hot white gel!
that's it, I cum, I shoot, I spill
seeds & poems
once you splashed & frolicked
& handled
me hefted
a meat spike
showerhead of sperm-splatter
slippery log...
what is wrong...
what is the issue...
what is happening...
what is this meaning...
Will you simply, unequivocally, word the Story?Sixty-two.
"I'm sorry," she whispers half-a-day later. She embraces me. A line flashes in my mind: The Alternating Current of Electric Love.
Stirring electrons into crazy soup, feeling fuzzy & brightened by pain-pills, she hears a crackling as synopses brown in the front of her brain, marshmallow-brown Logic of Remorsefulness/Repair, brown parchment schematic edged by neurotic jumpy flames, the Plan of Sanity burning.
First, Rules. Secondly, No Rules whatsoever. Thirdly, Wide Open Impenetrable Void holding Holy Silence of Everything Forgivable.
Sixty-three.
Altho we go to buy tickets at noon for the evening game, only bleacher tickets remain. We are at the very end of left-field. My only option was the very end of RIGHT-field, & I look across at them in the sun as we are cool in angled shadow & the HUGE full-moon is slowly swinging up thru still-blue sky between railings in right, a real eyeful like a giant Baseball of Galactic Spheres. Penultimate Baseball of the Grand Design of God, America's conquered Baseball. A Movie Baseball projected onto deep blue eastern evening sky-screen, a Gigantic Magnification we think is the Real Live Moon. The Erie Seawolves are like 24 - 6. The Stadium is spilling like a flooded fountain because it is Free Cap Night to the first 1,500 kids, but we miss out, & shuffle in a long line a long time, but finally enter the gate, turn left thru throngs & a speed-pitch, make a right, make a left & weave to the end section of silver metal bleacher seats where we finally sit.
A very strange man who smells like the 1940's unfortunately sits beside me, his speech is all garbled, he makes very strange sounds, he stinks, he ain't all there. I move into Diane.
"His meds must've just kicked in. He's harmless," she whispers from my other side.
It's a good game. 3 home-runs in left, right there, from the moon across the retarded stranger the balls soared with shore-screaming Destiny, frozen moment all loud & stinky with slow-motion garble of meds & beer, & the warmth of Diane's body.
Sixty-four.
I'm telling my mother about the guy who is a girl come September, who Rachel has befriended. "See, it's just that Theater People are strange like that," I trail off, "like ARTISTS, you know how strange ARTISTS are."
"You mean WRITERS, honey, oh, I remember. I think that's what happened to yr marriage after all those years drinking: you were WEIRD RON, you were in Outer Space, & then when you stopped all the beer & booze you became the Ron we knew & loved again, but yr wife didn't even know you."
I chuckle away from the phone. "Ummm...," I say, letting her wend thru a piece of her Story with her mental sword of Love, her machete of Answer.
Sixty-five.
Reading William T. Vollman & feeling so very tiny. This is the problem with Great Literature, it is so BEYOND one's "normal" mind & general thinkings. It presupposes a rough-draft of simple hours. What eyelash cloudburst is pages long? No, melodrama isn't as unified as an array of minutes tensed with depression & improper anxiety. While Mr. Vollman is a Master, a sensory Shaman of words, & while he is such a pleasure to read, the disheartening truth of the matter is the falsity of microscopic squashing. Academia loves microscopic squashings of the masses. It is their primary motivation to thus create The Virus, The Intelligent Mind.
Sixty-six.
Blowing off Sunday night work on a humid, sad Sunday night full of incredibly loud trains & their mammalian-like songs, I strip in my room, light a gray candle, turn off the light. Sweat-itchy, mentally itchy, encased by black shell bleakness (beyond thick steam atmosphere & the final muffled grunt of engine whistle), I sit on a brown cushion, & thru flickering light & lion-leg shadows across THE BEST OF LICKIN' LEZZIES, I cum.
Sixty-seven.
There's a novel a minute outside fairly consistently, from a sassy-assed pony-tailed neighbor-girl who slow-jogs the bouncing-ball of her sweatered plump breasts up & down 33rd street, to Nick the paper-boy as he's aged thru his teenage years firstly full Italian but somehow African-American now in gesture & stance; from the clover like a green carpet full of soap-bubbles, to popcorn clouds thrown across a blue mirror. The mail-lady with good strong tan mare legs is perhaps the representative angel of Pure Erie, tough-mouthed, tender with personable carefulness, a daily Warrior with great State benefits (on days she's off her replacements bumble, late, confused with a truck-full of confusing mail on an unfamiliar street), possibly a long-distance runner? Bow-legged like bows of Beauty, taut & horse-muscular. Black-root auburn short-sculpted hair. Her keys jingle at my front-door.
Sixty-eight.
The Writer isn't the Mind-Reader. The Reader is.
The Painter is not Nietzsche.
Man Ray was a Conquistador of Human Hands. Humbly they pray inside microscopic bubbles of blood. Dali, like Presidents, was always 16. UFO investigators swear by the Bible, & I smile, fully aware we are & the World is what we believe most firmly. Aliens, yeah, in spaceships, sure. Yellow-jacket walking on the window-screen, this side!
Sixty-nine.
This is the final weekend of WOMEN BEHIND BARS, & the beginning of August, the end to this long narrative, & now what. What of Doug & a bunch of neighbor-kids yelling "LEMONADE! LEMONADE!" on the corner. What of Charlie snoring on my wooden floor like downtown applause in lakeshore fog. What of Jennifer & her 150 I.Q. & her youthful theatrics. What of Judy's thought-slippages in the middle of the night as she listens to "Stardust" in the far back corner of the dilapidated factory, 3 years from retirement. What of Diane, Eve's most mutated daughter. What ever happened to Joe & Nimmo & the all-nude dancer at JIGGLES who limbo-ed her pussy from fucked-up guy to fucked-up guy on the horse-shoe dance-floor smiling like a billion angels orgasming & why is Earth remotely unique because of our term "Intelligent Life". How viral, parasitic, symbiotic is the Human Species in Galactic Conditions. Mom, I cannot explain my urges, my compulsion to write, nor meanings of anything.
I'm Mister Silence.
I am dust & rust in the Universe of Senses.
THE END