PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
UNDERGROUND UNDERGROUND ((BENEATH THE DUST OF MARS))
PART ONE.
One.
A 20ish girl in fat pink shorts lumbers all flesh-weighted & down-gazing across the intersection at 33rd & Raspberry under breezy afternoon summer oak & maple trees. I turned around on my back steps because I heard a voice indecipherable in the warm wind leaf-rustling light traffic. She's very possibly mentally-handicapped, the facial bong of retardation, but she's TALKING to herself, alone, walking past my house in beautiful weather, all blue in June & perfect & I made coffee & brought my notebook & black pen outside to sit & write. The girl's engaged in a sort of bewildered serious loud self-discourse, & her exact words slip away thru the breezes & trees, although I strain to capture them, she's voice only & disappears quickly under a giant pine.
This particular scenario wldn't seem unusual except a similar occurrence stopped me & my after-work mind this morning. A lady jogger walked in the middle of the street as I closed my car-door. She conversed in a logical, urgent voice. Our eyes met, but she didn't see me. She wore shiny red short-shorts & her hands flew over her bare shoulders like flowering owls flapping by each of her ears as if twins of question & answer were setting dreams straight. "Mr. Martin? I can't find the file...Holy Shit! Like I read minds. I wonder if Stephanie is sleeping. Is she up? I'll ring the bell." The jogger jogged away as I entered my house. I thought that was pretty strange, so now, again, a girl is walking alone at 33rd & Raspberry TALKING to herself. Neither woman appears self-conscious about the act.
Two.
I'm not shocked, I brush the feeling fast from my thinking, & I am composed for a response. "Make me a movie," I don't hesitate, "& I'll do the same."
She laughs, deeply, licks her thick lips, & I look at knives of diamond-shine spike out from her nose-stud in her right nostril. "I'm not joking. I masturbated thinking about you this morning. Does that bother you?"
"Not at all! I like the image of that."
"I'll bet you do."
"Tell me about it."
"Really? You want to hear how I masturbated thinking about you?"
"Of course! Tell me how it happened."
Jennifer hesitates. She looks around to see if the foreman is out of his office. He isn't. His door is closed. Her facial expression is serious, & she seems a little nervous. "I got home from work, & I read some of your books you gave me in bed, I got wet, really, & I thought of THOSE HANDS, I love your hands. You were really good." She smiles, glances at my smile.
"I'm twice as old as you, Jennifer, two times your age."
"Does that bother you? Does it bother you to know how much I think about you?"
"I thought you're a lesbian. You like girls."
"Yes, that's true, but I make exceptions. Most men are pigs, but you seem so wise & make me feel naive. & THOSE HANDS!"
Three.
"I'M ON THE VERGE OF A MENTAL BREAKDOWN! I AM! THAT MACHINE IS GONNA KILL ME!" Judy huffs. They've put the 300-ton injection-machine on full-automatic, & the job is very manic & continuous & insane. "I'M ON THE VERGE OF A MENTAL BREAKDOWN!" Judy screams at the time-clock a couple minutes before 7 a.m., & Dan, all goof sarcastic, eyes gleaming, smiling big, splurts out, Oh sure, Judy, you get gravy every night! & Judy slaps his arm. "YOU JUST WATCH IT. I'LL KNOCK YOU ONE GOOD!" & I have giggled into full laughter & her old gray eyes shoot at me, "YOU TOO!" she yells.
Four.
Yes, last year & years before I wld've popped some of Diane's pain pills, washed them with beer or whiskey, turned Captain Beefheart up loud in my writing-room, & dug the swirl of intoxicated revelation & discovery, escaping from foreign sobriety. Drugs & drink fueled my poetry, at times very shamelessly. Raw Soul like sirloin under a 1,000-watt grow-light, glistening. I felt alive & wanted to die too many times. The drugs & drink certainly contributed to my eclectic depression, my low lows & bursts of long prose firing pipes & slamming bourbon & 12-packs, eating old prescription narcotics to really feel the fuzzy spin of Time & Space & Consequence. It took years, but I learned to write when very drunk. Bravado, the critics call it, Too Much Bravado.
I quit alcohol altogether for some 9 months, but recently find it OK as a social drinker, lightly, lightly, knowing full-well the dangers of booze as related to me & my over-consuming tendency. I was a heavy, daily drinker for many, many years, & that was fine when getting drunk was celebration; later, the party turned lone nightmare. Dry-heaves off warm zinfandel & percocet, fresh, resinous marijuana bud, a ton of chain-smoked cigarettes in my little locked room; almost airless, christmas lights strung across the ceiling & poems written all over the walls, room stuffed to the gills with papers, photographs, arrays of strange things & I nod insane in my chair in the middle of this narcotic explosion dry-heaving into an empty coffee-can, & I just wrote the end of my book, SPLATTERED IN ERIE, I was done, gone, smoke & shit made me sick, 3 a.m., I got the words of chaos out & I knew the book was complete, that a couple months work was done via madness, booze, & fury. Dry-heaving painfully into a coffee-can & 40-some years old & is it worth it. Full-blown misery in every part of the mind. Mind as exposed by thought, saturated with the depths of alcoholism & mental disease. I was sick, but I finished my story & probably almost died that night. 200 copies were produced by Smiling Dog Press into a fine chapbook. I don't miss the intensity Diane bruised her tailbone bad, & the ER doctor prescribed muscle-relaxers, Lorcet, & 600 mg. pain medication, which all soften her groans of agony when trying to walk or function.
"According to the x-rays the tailbone isn't fractured, but we really can't see maybe minute splits. You've bruised it badly. Did you catch the bass?" The Doctor smiles.
"I sure did!" Diane beams from her slow shuffle, holding my arm as we walk to leave the hospital "But I don't wanta break my back for no fish ever again!"
"I hear ya!" The Doctor salutes, spinning around the corner.
The pills knock her out, but she's improving, & so am I.
Five.
"I didn't even remember being there! I thought it was all a dream! I never drank in that bar in my whole life! But Mark's telling me I was buying rounds from about 10 til noon! I know I first went to Hunter's Inn & drank beers & shots talking to Doc about my troubles with Linda, I remember doing that. I don't remember leaving there. A black-out! Mark called in the evening, woke me up, to see if I was ok. You were rip-roarin' drunk! he told me. Shit!" Joe shakes his head. (I hear him shake & he coughs & he clears his throat) (clearly) "I can't imagine how I appeared to the cops, but they drove me home. They knew I had this PFA order on me, & maybe figured I was going to see Linda in that condition, needed to sleep it off. They didn't know I was driving because I was parked down the next block. Can you give me a ride to get my car?"
"Sure, Joe, Sure. Now?" I ask.
"Whenever you're ready."
"Be there soon," I say, hanging the phone like hanging a piece of Joe's agony on my wall. "The dumb fuck," I whisper & smile.
His tiny house reeks of stale beer & booze & cigarettes & cats. He's fixing 2 cups of instant coffee in the cubby-hole kitchen. He has been a bachelor for some 35 years. An old baggie of pot sits on a halved table at the grimy window, & he chins me to it. I roll a small joint as he finishes the process of fixing the coffee.
I light the joint. "So what in the fuck is going on?"
Joe pinches the bone of dope from my fingers. "These black-outs are a motherfucker!" He splashes vodka from a pint on the sink into his black concoction. I refuse the addition. "The luck of a drunk I wasn't driving when the cops found me!"
We laugh. We smoke the joint & drink our coffee & both take pisses before descending into Joe's weedy alley with the rats & secrets.
Six.
What you do to me, I want to tell her. There's this attraction, something like a magnet in my heart & the thought of you pulls me, I can't explain it. I really want to give in to the passion, surrender the logic, sacrifice everything safe...I want you to be my secret lover, a total sanctuary, THE PASSION unbridled. Something's happening here. Why is there such familiarity as I look in yr eyes? Do you practice magic? I was 21 when you were born. You were probably birthed the autumn morning I remember, physically, so vividly: A vampire & Anthropology major, Barry, scored precious, pure LSD & him & crazy Gus & me ate it on a midnight Friday, maybe it was Halloween, it probably was Halloween 21 years ago in the mountains of New Hampshire at Franconia College; such surges & peaks to the trip thru the night so that by dawn & sunrise I felt quite chilled & drained but went with Barry & Gus into the woods & the owls hooted before they hooted & rustling leaves tinkled & my eyes hurt like torture on hours of trampolines, & walking nowhere into the trees & light & shadow, passing joints to ease us down to Reality & Blessed Sleep, a moment I recall so exactly there, that is the second you slid into the air as a new-born.
Are we possibly related thru our Italian heritage a century ago or so? Is there some cousin linkage making it all feel so comfortable when I look in yr eyes?
It's insane, really. I'm a married man with a daughter just a few years younger than you. If you're intentionally wooing me, you shld be spanked. & what's with this admission & declaration of Lesbianism? You see, Paradox is the Fire, the Energy, of Love. You are a young girl & I am an old man fucked in the head by a working-class existence. You are Enthusiasm, Growth, Diversity; I am Futility, Psychological Fury, & unkind Fate. What a crazy, crazy world Life creates from the seeds of lost ancestors & human possibility.
It's true, the image I envision best is when you mocked how porno films portray a woman's tongue long & curved like a lilac, & you sd "It's better to get yr face right in there & be sloppy!" How can I hold off wanting to do it like that to you? Yr tongue fluttered like a serpent's, like a scene from THE EXORCIST, demonic & echoing cackle of Truth from the Devil's point of view.
Jennifer, is my desire a Sin?
I don't mean from nobody's viewpoint but my own, & I can't answer that. Which one of us is more dangerous?
Star-crossed Spirits, let us simply & fully be friends, or cousins. We don't need heart-ache & detraction & complication, but if you don't mind an explicit discreetness...
Seven.
This is a True Story & nothing but the Truth. I have no way to verify what I will tell you since Cheryl's story of the Actuality is somewhat different, but she's not writing this.
I'm writing about the black panties she sent me years ago.
They were a newer pair she bought on bargain from J.C.Penny's where she worked as an undercover security detective. She slid them on after sliding out of her pink ones in her basement office, locked from a sleeping husband, she wore them with her skirt hiked high & she looked across her typewriter at my photograph on the wall & her fingers moistened the panties she slid her hand down into those panties & flicked at her flowering clitoris & inserted 2 long fingers & humped up & down in her chair focused on my picture she came all hot & waxy & the silk was wet with her juices as she moaned & groaned & repeated my name...
She mailed them to me in a baggie along with a nude of herself & very neatly trimmed cunt & lovely, full, deliciously-nippled breasts. I taped the photo on the wall over my typewriter & INHALED her luscious perfume in my face. I unzipped & shot cum in globs on the linoleum floor. I did this many times over the years & Cheryl's now 40 & won't admit to her indiscretions, nor will she send me another pair of her panties because, let's ok this, I'd tell everybody & look at all the guys, the Poets, who have visited me the past decade & sniffed her black scented underwear.
Eight.
She was raped, at age eleven, by a neighbor. 30 years later she remembers it, & he's been dead a while. Shining her mind of the tarnish like erasing the very thought, therapy funded by the U.S. Government; understanding flowers of fear & numb nights & edgeless sad pools of blood, death-wish cold-sweats that time of the month. She was raped so she is always raped, what men dutifully brand to Beauty, nipping it in the fucking bud early, Mac. She was terrorized silent as he spread her on his wife's bed. 30 years later she finds the mirror, the movie, the smile on his face. A number of times thru the decades she has gone nearly catatonic for inexplicable reasons, or simply so desired that sort of Nothingness she had faked it, like to skip school. She just would not rise from her bed, not speak, not move, but she heard everything, everything doctors muttered & the moo of nurses & her mother's sweet songs. She was raped by a neighbor-man when she was eleven years young & hid it from herself for 30 voided years.
She was raped, at age eleven, by a dead neighbor.
He was the father of a friend.
Nine.
A Zen Master sits on the beach. The Fourth of July weekend has enticed a record migration of vacationers to Presque Isle. They don't bother his meditation at all. No beach-ball bounces off his long hair, & the dog-sized gulls don't even see him. He sits on the sand facing Lake Erie. Northward the magnetic pole of Earth machine-guns pecks of Woody Woodpecker's laugh thru his Soul, his Universal Connection.
"Karma & Life & Nirvana is simply attainment of Understanding the Opposite Sex, it is All Answer & the Only Thing, where we transcend into, unto, The Sex of Touch & Explanation of Flesh."
I roll my eye. I think Wait til the fireworks, motherfucker.
Ten.
At CAT'S IMPETUOUS BOOKS & THINGS, in downtown Kent, Ohio, in the alley down South Water Street, Cheryl moves thru her small store like a red-haired Cleopatra. Her cat, Bukowski, is a playful, furry, thing. I read to a small, curious audience & afterwards I feel like a ghost, an alien, somebody disconnected from the coo of conversations. Cheryl floats toward me; her sweet face ascends & it's a kiss, a kiss on the lips, & then she sucks my bottom lip & my eyes close on a dream whereby I slip my tongue..., & she backs off.
"HE SLIPPED ME THE TONGUE!" she yells.
Eleven.
Yellow nodules of cum in the toilet-water like candle-wax congealed, golden pearls swirled with my own unique DNA descend in clear H2O, soft gel balls the color of sunrise cloud, yellows & golds & whites.
Diane is shopping. Rachel is at an audition at the Director's Circle Theater for the play WOMEN BEHIND BARS. Doug is at the Seawolve's home-opener with Adam & his dad downtown.
It is nearly 7 p.m., June 17th, in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Jetting in the dirty commode, I figure I am not alone. A prerequisite to being a Poet is utilizing masturbation on June evenings, alone, releasing all possibilities of Life into a whirlpool into the Lake, on Earth, in some nanosecond of Cosmological Time. Our mark: Seeds & Poems.
Twelve.
It's slightly disconcerting, but what more can there be but a few kind words from a few kind friends in the mail. What the hell happens to all my books, 1,000's over the years? 1,000's of people have read my work, know my name in some vague sense of memory. 1,000's over a 20 year span. Tens of 1,000's? What do I know? Is that "being known" as an underground writer? Is this underground fame? Am I an "unknown"?
Are there more readers who like my stuff than not? I've certainly contributed to the tradition of the Underground Press & its History, the Literary Underground is very alive in America in 1997, & I think I've had an impact, an influence. I've always tried to help the best I cld at the time. Some people acknowledge my influence, some resent it, some deny it, some don't know what the fuck I've done.
"As I see it, Ron, you're right on the edge of being well-known. All you need is a break from a Big Publisher. You deserve it," Mark pronounces at the downtown coffee-house.
I don't know what to say to that.
Thirteen.
"I had an accident on my way home."
"Oh?"
"Up-chucked all inside my car!" Judy carelessly declares.
"I thought you meant a wreck," I say.
"A wreck might've been better!"
"You feeling ok now?"
"I never feel ok, but I'm not up-chucking anymore!"
"I guess that's a good thing," I slip in, set my hand on her soft, grandmother shoulder.
"That machine's gonna KILL ME. I don't know HOW Jackie makes rate on it." Judy shakes her head.
"Some people lie about their numbers, Judy. Don't sweat it. She's 20 years younger than you. You don't have to make rate. They gonna fire you?"
"Oh right. Right. They'd be doing me a favor!"
Fourteen.
Are they DOING anything? Nor shld Artists have a specific answer.
Fifteen.
I wrote my sister, Kathi, a love poem. The title is "YOU ARE A SMILE OF LOVE". She is my gene-twin. She's immersed in Jesus, & that's really ok. Kathi loves me, unconditionally. David, her son, my nephew, found & certainly read a one-copy play I wrote entitled AN UNAMERICAN PLAY.
"I threw it out when I saw what the first word was," Kathi informs me.
"I don't remember what it was."
"The F word."
"I don't even remember what the play was!"
"Well, I threw it out. Maybe you can get the boxes of yr books & things out of the cellar? I don't know what else he's all read."
Sixteen.
"I wish I was back working at the shop."
"You scared me, Jennifer, I thought something was the matter at home. I never get phone-calls here."
"I just hate school so much. I wish I hadn't signed up to take summer courses. Did you get yr job yet?"
"Yeah, the Savage #4. That gray job." I know Jennifer knows what job I mean, because she ran the part a few times during her month stint with us 3rd shifters.
"Oh, I remember. I just wanted to say hello."
"That's nice of you."
"I guess you have to get back to work."
"Yeah, I do."
"Ok, well then, have a good night. Bye."
"Bye." I hang up the phone in the break-room smiling. Back at my machine I hum an Ani Defranco tune. Steve has given Judy a pink tea-rose from his garden at home, & Judy's all smiles too. Not knowing anything about Jennifer calling me, knowing I know about the rose he gave to Judy, Steve says, "Sometimes a man just gotta be DEBONAIR!" & I say Yeah...
Seventeen.
I don't think the American Public wants to read this. I have heard there isn't an audience for this kind of writing , but all I write is Truth, Reality, with a dash of intensity. Isn't it entertaining?
Eighteen.
Aw, nothing feels right, up an hour on Sunday afternoon. It is one of the most beautiful days in History, blue blue awe-smile sky, the purr of the perfect sun. Billions of birds behind the echoes, billions of happy people in Erie, Pennsylvania out in Summertime Afternoon Bliss.
I'll be mowing the yard soon.
I've been mowing grass three decades I figure. Well, four decades. My Dad demanded meticulous cutting & trimming. I don't hold it against him. I understand his passion, now. My Grandfather made it more worth my while since he gave me a few bucks to do his yard plus a bottle of cold Rolling Rock beer afterwards, & he wasn't worried about a few blades poking up here & there. Presently, I do not keep a manicured, precise lawn; I just cut the shit down when it becomes necessary. I mow stoned & it's OK.
Tired, like just thrown from a whirlpool after days of swirling, washed ashore from dreamy exhaustion, wet from sweat & dream-water hours, a wet pink feather, a feathering mind...an exploding swan...
90 degrees, deeply blue, completely cloudless, 3:30 in the afternoon, & high grass, yep, is a sort of formula. The equation is nearly solved just as mutations occur from within algebraic reality, & the answer changes, always changes. We all so strive for reduction, a simple Spirituality, friendliness with Earth. Earthlings, all of us, along with amoebas & automobiles & spider-monkey & nuclear-power plant. Culpability spins the planet. The neighbor-kids, many of them, are splashing, hooting, screaming, laughing, in their new pool. I feel better, Don hasn't cut his grass yet so there isn't a radically distinguished line separating our yards. Wait until he hears my mower!
Nineteen.
Rachel played Suzy in the play HOTEL BALTIMORE at The Director's Circle Theater downtown at the end of Spring, & the ensemble cast clicked so fine. Rachel is 17. She is a pure knock-out sweetie, a sort of Fate for the Dad who went thru girls obliviously as a youngster. She had her first rehearsal for the next play she's part of, WOMEN BEHIND BARS, just last night.
"But my character DIES, daddy!"
"I thought it was a COMEDY."
"It is! It is!" & she's excited, incited by the participation in the theater group.
I've always found theater people very strange creatures. I consider them mis-guided Poets.
Since age 3 we've called Rachel Bette Davis, always happy on a stage. She's grounded & innocent now, likeable & hard-working, dreaming about going to NYC to act in soap-operas, Sharon Stone's from this area, & she'll make Hollywood & win Oscars, & ol' Dad'll be working 3rd shift in a fiberglass factory forever...
She did a very fine job as Suzy, prostitute with an attitude. I saw the play 3 times.
A Dramatic Art career, why not! Seems like a karmic ladder with 100's of roles in one's soul, & the histories...
But theater people are so exactly FREUDIAN! Aura-ed by a shell of Sex. Strange scenes in Reality.
I'm going to make chicken for supper, & microwave-baked potatoes. I killed a big bee in the kitchen earlier, thinking It's him or me, & the battle lasted a good half hour. I had just tumbled from bed & weak sleep. Before I had my COFFEE.
Let satori satellites spy & film our every move!
Twenty.
It was probably 8 years ago. It was definitely between 1982 & 1994. I'm thinking 89, but who knows, Diane found me at the kitchen table with my snoring face in a plate of cold scrambled eggs at like 2 in the afternoon. Joe & I both worked the same shift at the same plastics factory, & we were long friends connected by drunks & drugs & & a fucked occupation as an injection-molding operator 3rd shift in a small concrete box in Erie, Pennsylvania. We'd pulled many rebellious shenanigans over the insane years, but were then downright alcoholics of rage & misery; I wrote much about Joe & his Way. He gave me much perspective, & the booze so opened me up, & all the smoke dramatized the futile moment & low wages, writing was my only actual Luck. Eventually Joe's nuclear implosion of mind-scape suffering belted his ass into jail, vastly nuts & enraged & savage on the vats of bourbon we killed, & then we fell apart after job-losses & deaths & his marriage then divorce. AA did not help him. Nobody can change Joe's mind that Life is Fucked. I wrote a poem titled "JOE'S SUICIDE" years ago, & when he read it he got royally pissed since he wasn't dead, & had me write a poem titled "JOE'S REAL POEM". Joe played bass, but badly, but so enthusiastically involved I had to dig it. We slammed green cans of Genny Cream Ale, hit off the Beam, did crackling bowls at my kitchen table as my neighbors rose & went to work. We watched them from the bay window, & we were biped pigs as my kids were at school & Diane was at work, biped pigs swaying in knee-high mud. Living felt correct. Correctly fucked. Diane was not a happy camper. I was writing at breakneck speed, working at an insane pace for way too many continuous years, drinking, I felt, SLOWED me down, allowed utter relaxation. Those liquid moments of peacefulness in my early 30's & Joe's Zen-like Rage! & Diane, bless her, "put up with" so much drunkenness & chaos & madness & stony weather logic. I drank heavily, I worked like a pig with an electric prod up my ass, & I wrote, I wrote, I wrote it.
Twenty-one.
"Never write anything you wldn't want other people to read," my Mother warned me by age 12. Honest. Decades & decades later I'm shameless! All things are woven with Human Truth like multiple colorful optic-fibers. Some things make sense, some don't.
Plurality is reduction. Prismatic Plurality.
I've been masturbating since I was a teenager.
I've smoked pot steadily some twenty-five years. Pot made me Poet.
I want to admit everything. I want my mind clean to my soul, that Black Sun of Everything & Infinity; not words of mind, not the psychological sculptures, powerfully unsensory thudding; not active consequences, nor zoological adaptation, nor childhood development. Clear to my soul that is All Soul, All Silence, All Bliss & Black.
I'm a hypocrite. Diane usually doesn't read what I write. My Mom neither. I've refused a Web Site. Sometimes when I'm writing it feels very good to write. I be 5'11" walking cock! An Artist! A Writer! I am my biggest fan, I coalesce like cum, I won't refuse money. There's this guy who works 3rd shift in a reinforced-fiberglass plastics factory making $600 a week gross & he's a Poet, he's a Writer, he's made a name for himself in the Underground Press, he's been around a long time since the '70's. Word is he's just a normal guy who writes all this shocking shit.
Twenty-two.
Siren, far off under oak of chickadees' chirps, a green & yellow-spotted umbrella of birds, behind the fence whoosh of back-street cars, & the yackle of kids mixed into a tired barking dog who must be parched, the siren stretches away thru trees & streets & curve of Earth like a delirious twirling fish in low atmosphere. A last kiss from the dead.
Twenty-three.
A Zen Student attempts to compose a poem. He is supplied with pen & paper & a rock on the river to sit on in solitude. The next morning the Master cannot find the student, who has disappeared without a trace.
Twenty-four.
Charlie is a loud panting fur bag with droopy red eyes & scaly snout, long lax water-melon meat-colored tongue sags down old yellow dog-teeth, how he huffs & pants & down that throat, that hole of oxygenated Life, his old heart-valves slap a summer pulse, it's hot, I'm sweating & shirtless in olive-green shorts sucking the smoke of a resinous herb here at the keyboard & Charlie, he's a an old dog, & I am old too, & Earth is a lifetime teenager, it's humid & even lawnmowers sound softer in the mist of heat outside, while here Charlie's an obscene breather on the floor & my green clock is ticking & a truck is pulling around the corner thru the window, great crunches of gravel. My wife & kids are gone, & it's just Charlie & me, my stabbing fingers, moist skin over plastic slides, there's a puddle drop of my sweat smudged on the letter G, it means little metaphorically unless we force Karma's first hand. This is World the one Mind is Center, & we spin. Spinning is an intrinsic condition, & the root of Knowledge rootless in the Cosmos, we have SPUN, we are SPINNING, & we WILL SPIN! SPIN! Orbital, Zen becomes Mimicry. An Ice-cream Truck just turned up Raspberry, & its horned music was beautifully European-sounding with bells & magic I did rise from this chair to look where the music was delightfully playing, & I felt for my wallet like an action of Primitive Man, mouth-watering antelope's sweetest meat, frozen flavored cream & it's turned into a pink-aired evening, there ARE delicious lips in the sky, to kiss spaceward! Swooning on my back-porch steps, Charlie shits on the sidewalk, I swoon under reddening skies ecstatic I have lived!
Twenty-five.
She will not survive. Judy will die within the next 5 years, within the next 3. When somebody asks How you doin' Judy? her pat reply is "MEAN, ORNERY, & NASTY!" When I suggest she turn down the overtime, relax, because having the money at retirement means being alive when retired, she goes "OH GOD DON'T WANT ME YET, I'M TOO ORNERY!" & I say Listen Judy, how much money do you need? It's never enough. & she yells "DON'T I KNOW IT!" I say Listen Judy, I'm worried about you. "YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ME! I'M JUST FINE!"
Twenty-six.
I wonder if Kathi remembers the little brass stash-box, octagonal & oval, smooth, golden & used by now some 25 years, some 25 years ago as a birthday gift from my little sister who knew my love of 70's smoke when head-shops were alive & clerks were stoned & how the box is so goddamn perfect to hold a piece of 90's bud. Now I ponder What is the oldest piece of paraphernalia I own?
18 years old in Amsterdam at, if I so amazingly recall, the Hotel Toritz, Radio-Free-Europe Radio in a parlor blasting "You're So Vain" that so textured the song in my Life forever, that STONED sense of vastness & melodrama & Sue suckling my young fresh cock on the other side of the World, & that aware stone of hashish, widening of Wisdom come with simply thinking something you've never thought before, & there are kids who do live internationally all the time, rich kids & college kids & lucky kids & fucked-up kids & adventurous kids & wild kids & kids with warrants, & kids in star rock bands, & kids like acid hyenas, & strange mystic kids, & kid poets & kid artists, kid scholars & kid virtuoso & kid clamped to momma, well, I enjoyed European drugs, & I was in College, I actually passed a Chemistry course without ever going to class, 30 of us in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland in 1973, 30 kids, & yeah, Jeff the prissy house-parent with his strange palm-reading wife, he took me aside at the small, dark bar & he sd Ron I know you're selling drugs, you sell hash don't you, & I was of course obliterated but I sd No, No, you got it wrong, & I assume I was believable because I sincerely did NOT sell hash I just bought & smoked it all so I was innocent anyways & I sd Jeff why are you giving me a hard time?
"My wife thinks you need to see a Psychiatrist. She read the poems you gave us to read."
I'm sure I laughed.
Twenty-seven.
Am I writing something like my Life? Why the fuck do that? I do not know. Few people know why they do anything larger than breathing. Enjoyment? A sort of narcotic habit? Delirium? Pounding down the written word I feel POWER.
Something like Art remains because I have Created myself.
I am Legless Zen Dream, I am Roots of Rhubarb Diarrhea, I am my Mind in the Physical World.
Twenty-eight.
Jennifer & her lover travel to Pittsburgh for a Gay Pride Parade, but she writes it's lame with "washed up drag queens & expensive rainbow shit". If America is a Land of Sexual Diversity, of Cultural Leniency, of sad-assed faggots & hip girl-girl lovers, on top of Everything Else, I certainly feel valid expressing MY point of Experience: Marriage & Masturbation go hand in hand, if you'll pardon the pun & futility & admission. I masturbate to the image of (delicious...) female flesh, & I like Lesbians just fine. Young ones more. Jennifer is a Sociology major, soon a Senior.
Twenty-nine.
I'm not sure what to do, nor what the right thing TO DO even is, if there IS a right way to go with this. Jamie was Rachel's best friend when they were in Grade-School, then Jamie moved away to Phoenix with her mom & little brother, but she's kept in touch thru letters. A few weeks ago I heard Rachel EXCLAIM off our back-steps "OH, I DON'T EVEN BELIEVE THIS! I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE COMING! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!" & Jamie & her mom arrived by surprise. Jamie & Rachel have hung with each other a lot, so when I saw Jamie sitting in the livingroom when I woke at 2 this afternoon, things appeared normal. In a while, after I had some coffee, I find out Jamie is hiding from her mother because they had "A Royal Fight", & her mother hit her, slapped her more than once. So she left & came & woke Rachel & now she's hiding from her mom who has been here TWICE already (I slept sound) looking for her.
"I'm afraid of her," Jamie whimpers.
Diane, when she gets home, will know what the right thing to do is & I'll feel stupid all I did was write this down.
Thirty.
What a sickened, dangerous Society this wld be without masturbators by the millions. How bleak America wld look without strip-bars & crack-addicted whores & lap-dancing & porn-stores. The rising staff of a lonesome man on a phone, $3.99/min. & a live voice. The spurt of cum is a sport. Magazines, videos, a Real Girl behind plexiglass fingering her baby-oiled pussy, & cum sprouts like a melted-wax flower from a stretching stem.
A few months ago over the telephone to Lenny in California when I was feeling sex-deprived, complaining to him about the long spells of nothing, & he's even been married a few years longer than us, 20 years, he sd, "Man, that's the way with ALL OF US at this age. That's how it is. It's maybe once a month for me. She's tired, or just isn't interested. Me, I want cunt every day! So we jack-off a lot, because that's what men have to do. Most women don't understand or don't care, so figure once a month is normal & the rest of the time spank yr monkey!"
Thirty-one.
Judy hurt her back bending down & up 462 times a night for way too long, she's out after the Doctor put her on a 5 pound weight limit & the Company does not have any "light-duty" work for her. "My back is out in four places!" she told me the last night she came into work before they sent her home. Judy, Physical Agony Lady. Judy, "I'm too ORNERY to die!" Judy, Queen of Injection Machines. Judy, Monarch Cigarettes & Love of Refrigerator Magnets. Judy, 3 boys raised into their 30's now & she's been divorced since '73 & that night her husband was so drunk he'd passed out in his clothes on the bed when she picked a rifle up & had it to his head & "if I knew anything about guns he wlda been dead & I wlda accepted going to prison!". Judy, he hit you & hit you & hit you & "in those days women didn't say NOTHIN'", & you wanted him dead. Judy, Big Bingo Girl, 15 cards at once!
Thirty-two.
It is 2 a.m. on Wednesday night & I'm on a 4-day vacation. I plan on cleaning the bathroom walls tomorrow, & then later Dougie & me are going to see Men in Black with Pete & Sarah up at Tinseltown Theater. I got the grass mowed today & the car partially repaired, plus made Doug's promotion to a Camouflage Belt in Taekwondo Class, which I am very proud of him for, nearly envious I never had the opportunity to study the Martial Arts when I was 12. One of his Black Belt instructors is this girl named Kara, probably 18 years young, with a face whose Beauty intrigues me with just a dash of Oriental in her smiling eyes.
Is it perverse to discover such Beauty in such young girls? I'm approaching 43. I am Baby Boom ex-hippy Poet, slanting toward Industrial Slave.
I just remembered what Tank sd to me as he passed, sweating profusely within his large roundness, my machine yesterday, "It always gets more interesting...," he kind of muttered.
My reply, "No it don't."
That was that. I regret my pat response to such an exhilarating idea from Tank.
Tank is like 5'8" at 300 lbs., with a teddy-bear heart. I have to temper how much I fuck with him. I used to whistle at him when he walked by, pretending I didn't. What tempers most of us on the shift is the fact we are Fathers & Husbands in Real Life. Pollock, Jeff, whose Polish first-name sounds like Jizz-Lips, is still an Asshole tho who never knows when to quit, when to grow up.
Thirty-three.
Rachel's room is directly above this writing-room of mine. She's still awake & it's the middle of the night. She'll be 18 in a few months. I try to gain perspective as to who I am & who my daughter is at 18. Who I was at 18 in 1972. It is karmic understanding. The play opens in 2 weeks.
An older girl in Rachel's play, Vanessa, is True Beauty. Beauty to stutter for, to say everything wrong & boy, she's delightful to gaze upon. I guess she's like 26. Her eyes stun me humble, & I'm an old man, I'm old & fucked & poor.
Married.
There is no zoological Life beyond Earth, period.
There are no other creatures in the Cosmos who share this Consciousness.
Thirty-four.
"I learned how to cha-cha last night, daddy! Do you know how to cha-cha?"
"No."
"Well, this guy came over from the Playhouse to choreograph, & in a scene I have a fruit-basket on my head I come out doin' the cha-cha. I know how to cha-cha now!"
50 years pass in 3 blinks. Rachel knows the cha-cha. When I was very young I cha-cha'd with my Mom in the kitchen. Now my daughter cha-chas out of my room this windy, pre-rain morning.
Thirty-five.
Cheryl is organizing & hosting the 1998 UPC, Underground Press Conference, at Cleveland State University. The previous Conferences in Chicago at DePaul University validated much of what we do, not that validation is a balance; but there, in Chicago, under tv-blue sky, a strange array of Poets gathered, Editors & Publishers, Artists, Generation X piercings & a chick, a fox, from Florida who publishes wild punk stuff, grabbed my eye, grabbed there in Chicago stoned on Nimmo's Michigan smoke checking young underground-lit girls. At the Bop Shop Cafe Saturday night I read poems from A MUTATED AMERICAN DRAMA & BLUE, BLUE, BLUE, BLUE LABOR to a big dark quivering room of my peers with lights in my eyes in my oldest blue-jean jacket. Then Mike started acting like I was some God in Batya's car, the 3 of us smoking fat Puerto Rican joints on a circus-like back-street at midnight, drunk.
"You've influenced so many people. Ron Androla. Everybody knows of Ron Androla."
"My balls are really melted pyramids, see."
"I wldn't be writing if it wasn't for you."
"Me neither!" Batya yells from the driver's seat.
"You guys...," I mock.
"They talked about you at the Censorship seminar, & we mentioned you in an interview on the radio yesterday. Ron Androla, Major Underground Poet from Erie, Pennsylvania!" Batya insistingly declares.
"Will you review my new book?" Mike asks.
I am a blank-check sinner. I open the car-door & step out & there are so many molecules in the air in Chicago, the moon is a taste, spice.
Thirty-six.
Sean is a large man with a large Arab nose & he has a shaved head & thin goatee, 30, he's my younger cousin. He was a wild kid, a pest when I was a teenager who wanted to be wherever I was, & he thought I was a hero. Kathi & I used to tease him a lot. He always had natural talent in getting into trouble, enmeshed in it, tickled by the discovered energy; Sean was magnetized & trouble was a metal. As he became an adult that element of attraction didn't change whereby he landed in a jail-cell for passing bad checks, etc..., i.e., purchasing a sweater with a check then returning the sweater for cash, meanwhile Sean's account is all minus & no longer usable.
So now, Sean's sitting across from me loading his pipe with "really great stunner bud from New Jersey", New Jersey where he now lives & works, he's home for July 4th, with an 8-month pregnant girlfriend named Julie in the kitchen talking with Diane. Diane is surely giving her the scoop on the Syrian side of the family since Julie does appear to be a sane, intelligent girl of 25, & this is her first child.
I talk to Sean trying to impress upon him various responsibilities that develop when one has a kid. I want to make sure he understands. I feel like a big brother saying listen motherfucker..., to a little brother. Sean's bald head glistens like the sparkle on his magenta sunglasses, assuring me not to worry he's got everything under control.
After they leave I express my concern to Diane.
"How were we any different!" she blasts.
"I was sane," I say.
"Nobody else thought that way, Ron. Nobody."
Thirty-seven.
Standing in the shower in the afternoon wondering how people write Fiction, made-up stories like movies & Real Entertainment visuals, Porn Writers for instance, no matter based in Reality it ain't IT. It ain't sudden, unmerciful Fate unlike & like anything one mind can imagine. It is a Situationlist smoking stunner-bud 33 blocks from Lake Erie where Alchemy is strenuous & bass bite out of water & the masses of summer skin converge; stunner-bud on a Saturday, a blue, cool, bright day in July; smoking while I write; stoned, wearing new black sunglasses at the screen typing & blue-blocked & man, amazed people wld write something other than realized urgency of Facts & Life & Personal Importance.
Dreaming up a Dream, yeah, that's what I shld do. Here is a relevant poem in LILLIPUT REVIEW by Bart Solarczyk:
POST-POLITICS
Dreaming we'd dreamt
a new dream
we slunk off at dawn
ashamed we'd been
dreaming at all.Let us all avoid the constrictions of classification, but I cannot call first-person narrative FICTION. Maybe Earth is fictive, maybe more dreams make up the human mind than zoological instinct, maybe Truth is a fracturing construct of clogged dreams & the speed of light, maybe Mankind is simply galactic seeds, a Space Virus, a disruptive question amid Lifelessness. Maybe Everything shares equal importance of Existence in the Inanimate Universe, but life-forms on the planet Earth are greedy & hungry & vicious, steer clear! Human thought is a Cosmological Pest! Dudes of Zen need to recognize Alien fear. We are BRUTAL BEINGS. We shit & we fuck-up & we dream...
Thirty-eight.
The Terrible Sacrifice. Ensuing Suffering. Uncomfortable Discovery. Paycheck of minus & pay-back. The Truest Balance. Feeling Physically Fucked, Mentally Sodomized. Black Spirit-shine Quark we name Soul is not Brimming with Angels of Delight. God does NOT share this Human Consciousness. Words are all Man's Mind, Man's Dream, & Man is all Alone with Awareness.
This I have learned as a Writer in America as the Millennium folds upon the Book of Earth like a translucent page of a Dream.
Thirty-nine.
"THEY SD NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH ME! HAH! THEY SD IT WAS ALL IN MY HEAD!" Judy is quite excited & pissed. "OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH MY BUTT!" she hoarsely hollers. "THEY ASKED ME TO RATE MY PAIN ON A SCALE FROM ZERO TO TEN & I PUT TEN, BUT THEY SD I'D BE IN THE HOSPITAL WITH TEN & I LOOKED AT THAT GIRL & TOLD HER 'YOU DON'T KNOW HOW CLOSE I CAME TO GOING TO THE HOSPITAL LAST WEEKEND', BUT SHE DIDN'T EVEN SEE ME. THE COMPANY MUST REALLY PAY THEM OFF GOOD!"
I agree & touch her grandmother-soft shoulder. "You ok?"
"I'M OK, BUT I STILL HURT ON THE LEFT SIDE OF MY BACK! THOSE PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT WORK IS!"
"No, they don't."
"THEY THINK I'M NUTS! THEY THINK I DON'T HURT! THEY SD TAKE TYLENOL!"
Forty.
July, 1997, & so We are Martians. Scientists realize Mars was flooded with water billions of years ago, but is now desert, cold, & rusty. Spores in a blasted chunk of rock from the Red Planet slipped into Earth's soupy primal possibility, & Life as we know it began here eons upon eons ago. What a simple formula begat the mutating calculations & algebraic Cosmos, Life as a sort of intentional accident, the serendipitous pragmatism of Evolution!
We are Consequence!
Sequence!
Eternally Infantile! We've discovered our initial womb. Mars, my lost Mother, so dead with Time, so red with rusty dust & methane ice-caps blushing; Mars, my obliterated, generational Father full of Seed & eventual Human Poems!
Forty-one.
You bent to pet Charlie as he sniffed yr knee, you bent & crouched & there in my kitchen I stood looking down yr skimpy blouse: Jennifer's youthful breasts. I understand dirty old men with every middle-aged year passing. Dreams of skin, sex, & fantasy fill pre-death voids.
"That's a wonderful tape you made for me, thanks." I hoarsely come to my senses as Rachel suddenly strides in the room. I introduce my daughter to my lesbian friend.
"Oh, I'm glad you like it." Jennifer smiles.
I melt in her ultra-dilated eyes. "Come on in. I want to show you something." She follows me thru the livingroom into my room. "This is where I write. This is MY room."
"Oh," she turns in one slow circle, "I cld spend a lot of time in here. All these books...,".
"In my younger days there were as many beer-cans too!"
"& all the pictures..., who is that?"
"Uncle Louie. He died in World War One. In England, in the Royal Air Force. Like my great, great, great Uncle on my Dad's side."
"No kidding." We stand with crossed arms & I feel my genitals warming, shifting under my dulled, green shorts. We stand & shift. "So...," she says.
"Where is Holly, anyways?" I met Holly once.
"Oh, she's out in the car, waiting, so I really have to go. I just wanted to give you the list of singers on the tape."
"It's a wonderful tape, thanks again." I want to hug Jennifer & kiss her goodbye, but I hold back.
Forty-two.
So many times in the past 20 years I have done this. Writing instead of cutting the grass when the grass needs cut. Sitting, I'm not pushing a mower outside, smoking a pipe. Where does this GUILT originate? Was I chastised for writing poems in my enclave teenaged bedroom when I was told to mow the lawn? That's a possibility. I wrote notebooks of love poems thru my teenage years, the stupidest things; but I felt overwhelmingly compelled to write poems. There, there was some focus. Emotions surfacing thru the lakewater mind, Rod McKuen emotions. & like now, while everybody in the neighborhood is cutting their yards in cool, gorgeous weather in the middle of the afternoon, I spend Time writing, writing away, about this, & about that.
Forty-three.
Chaining Charlie outside to pee & poop on the sidewalk, early Saturday morn, absolute blue sky completely cloudless, Eastern Sun still low in the trees, awful haw of mourning-doves thru beautiful birds at their happiest, gangs of blackbirds in the top of the walnut heavy this year with young green walnuts, chipmunks living near the barbecue, jumpy brown little squirrels scurry over our roofs & thru maples & oaks & pine, I know fat night-crawlers are whirling under my uncut lawn, & bumblebees languish over a ton of clover-flowers (weed every neighbor around me poisons); standing at my back-door, I see 3 walkers walk, 3 women walking for exercise at a stepped-up pace, perhaps grandmother & mother & daughter but I can't be certain they walk quick & my great oak branches across the back-door view, then I remembered Kurt Nimmo because 6 years ago he parked under the oak as I stood at the back-door, he drove all night from Detroit smoking bowls & listening to The Clash, Diane & the kids were away for the weekend with Mary camping, Lenny Bove was coming into town too from San Fran., it was almost Independence Day, Joe was still around here so there was much beer & vodka, but we were short of enough smoke, Joe eventually scored us opium, which we bowled with old dirt-weed, we smoked opium with some beer in the afternoon & went to Jiggles for the mid-day show of utterly naked skin, young girls with shaven & trimmed pussies & sweaty, sparkling breasts, hair to cum upon, sexy faces, twirling around silver poles, sticking their assholes in the faces of fucked-up guys watching & laughing & hooting & laying a dollar folded pretty between the bottom of the ass-crack, just touching cunt, she squeezed & took my dollar & turned around on her knees tilting back like she was doing a backwards push-up & her pink-meat pussy blossomed before my nose, but I'm on Venus presently, Nimmo came to Erie & we smoked opium & got drunk at an all-nude club, Kurt, Joe, & me, I bent a girl down with my dollar speaking into her long sweet hair, "This is Kurt Nimmo & he's a famous writer, be nice to him", she snatched, & with one leggy leg she laid it over his bald head & sort of footed his face closer to that bare & pulsing cunt, an inch & he cld lick Heaven. He was certainly smiling, & as soon as his tongue poked out the girl lifted & giggled & danced away.
"Holy Shit!" he exclaimed 6 years ago in downtown Erie, Pennsylvania. We came back & Joe also had ups, 90's caffeine speed I guess, we swallowed many with beer in my writing-room with music blasting, between songs we heard Lenny yelling for us under my window, Lenny Bove! Celebrating Everything opening citrus Absolut, it was totally appropriate we tape, wait, we picked Lonnie up downtown, Lonnie was here too & we taped, stoned & drunk & savage, the cassette INDEPENDENCE DAY 1991 ERIE PA, & it is very wild & magnificent, it's a wonder the top of my house didn't explode with the 5 of us up there in my little room, recording poems & things & drinking heavy, I remember most of that, but then what? What did we do after making the tape?
Forty-four
I owe bills & letters & thanks & love, I owe pay-backs & surprises, kisses, insults, ignorance, poems, gifts. I owe way too much money, too much hatred, insomnia, care. I owe my Life to some people. I owe for Everything I got! I owe, I owe, I owe Big-time. Sweetest Mother Muse, Womb of all Word, an octagon prism of crystal for a Heart in the Mind, I owe for sensory description, for the taste of crystallized smoke. I owe for having a bunny in my fresh-cut yard under the huge shadow of the walnut as evening cools, I owe for a sun-burned forehead, I owe for the smell of Charlie after I washed him outside after washing the car, wet great-grandfather dog hands, whew, I even washed my hands, I owe for the cigarettes I gorge, I owe for food & water & roof, I owe celebrations, misery, grief to select individuals & corporations, I owe the Corporation of the Self vast amounts of Time & Waste, I owe NASA for making me feel like a beautiful, unique specimen of Space, I owe for trusting pictures, for feeling for birds & bunnies, I owe for not owning an AK-47, nor a nuclear bomb, I owe the Government a vast amount of Eternity, I owe America, I owe Iraq, I owe Erie another book, Mother Muse doth giggle like I was a boy, I owe for entertaining somebody, & I owe for continuing.