SMALL-TIME LETTER
TO A BIG-TIME FRIEND
Hi. Just a note about nothing. Time's running out I don't know where these
nights go. All it seems I ever do is run back and forth to Princeton, riding the
horrid train or walking the horrid rain; all those early-morning sleeping black
skeletons, kitchen workers, laborers and landscape Mexicans in their weirdly
pointed leather boots and cowboy hats. Tell me what the fuck is that ! and then
the ones on the phones in the middle of nothing, and nowhere too, talking and
laughing, arranging lunches and telling where they are and where about to be
(should I say again 'what the fuck is that!) and then all this negative stuff
comes back and a real nothing ends and I'm at the station once more to walk up
the crazy hill - past all those Princeton buildings and all those behind-the-scenes Princeton labor-workers who keep all the kitchens and cleanings and
laundries going without ever being seen. They laugh and cavort like cadavers
from paradise retuning again and I'm silent in the middle of dreck - I ask,
what language is that you're speaking, what accent?' the man he smiles he says
back 'Creole' and, after thinking, I shrug. I say 'English' and we laugh it off,
but I want to know Creole for myself. And on the train the two conductresses who
never charge me, smile and wave my ticket off, four bucks a day at least saved
just by them. I occasionally buy them cookies or cupcakes or a donut for their
morning runs. We have a silent secret deal worked out, me and them. We are
train-ride friends and they always cut me their break. Every so often something
changes, there's another conductor for that day and this replacement guy takes
my ticket. No brownies for him. I'll send you some more Frank O'Hara in the
morning. I like the exchange we have - all those odd lines of his, and I watch
the way he reads and the way he talks, and I think to myself - 'no, no, it's so
not me.' But I stick with it, just something about it all, and having just
finished again a careful read of that book by Brad Gooch, 'City Poet', I'm still
so with it and just like to learn. I love the atmosphere of all those NYCity
days - all that painterly abstract-expressionist turmoil, his art crowd, his
writing crowd, the women, and - for most of the men - the other men. How
weird. So much gay shit. Like James Baldwin and Truman Capote and Andy Warhol
just after all that - they all were jumbled and mixed together. 1940's driving
right into the 1970's careening and jagged. People and places. Darkness and
light. Everybody there, so few mentioned. I guess a lot of it is because for so
much of it I was there, the waning days, the breakdown of all that and the way
it all fell apart. I had the lonely leftovers, at the Studio School, all those
people coming around in 1967 as nearly old men and women, wishing just to talk
and work with us, be allowed something, not seeking importance anymore, not
really, just some quiet form of acceptance - Philip Pavia, George Spaventa,
Mercedes Matter, David Hare, Milton Resnick, Charles Cajori, Esteban Vicente,
and more. It just went on - music guys, Morton Feldman, even John Cage, even
Buckminster Fuller, even Philip Guston. Franz Kline was dead. DeKooning was
distant. Pearlstein was around. Alex Katz. Every nook and every cranny of my
space and time was like (for me) walking a bit amongst gods. I think about all
this stuff and then realize again I'm on some stupid, fucking, free train ride
to some rich-man's university boro filled with rank and money and circumstance.
People who wouldn't recognize me if I was naked and my name was tattoo'd on my
dick, at full extension for all to see. I'm invisible, it seems, with or without
cover. (reminds me of 'You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal'(?)).
But why. Why do I even bother? Why do I try? Or do I try - hopeless puke-fest
mendicant dying hep-cat old-time loser hustling for a penny holy hell me. And
now fuck-o I'm fell to flat in love all over again. Jeez-o caribinieri. (That's
the gun-toting Italian militia, national police force guys that patrol Italian
cities, called 'carabinieri' or something like that because of the carbines they
carry - something like a national police force there). Who knows what we take
from what we see? Sitting on the train instead here I go again - reading, I
try to stay with it - but the train's bumpiness and the swerve of the ride and
stop and go makes it nearly impossible for me to write legibly or straight in any form of notebook - or even small notes or underlinings, so I look out the
creepy window instead and just see the same old landscape rolling by me -
occasionally broken up woodlands and just beyond them. always, the sick New Jersey crawl of new homes, flattened and bared land, remnants of old farms now
sundered and turned into group-collections of strange light-colored new homes,
clusters around courts and cul de sacs with not a tree in site except new
plantings and fresh driveways and curbs and furnished windows and yards and not
ever never a person in sight - I don't know what spectral creatures would even
deign to live in these places or enter these realms but they're apparently never
seen or seen rarely and I only think of the kids who must come out of here, at
some point, who will be raised and grow up through these parts and in these
fashions - bare, clinical, generic places make bare, clinical, generic kids
with nowhere to go, no sense of place, no connection to anything real - just
the car and the ride to get anywhere, the strip-shopping of malls and plaza in
highly-controlled places and the isolation of living there in bare and barren
manners - yards and streets of nothing at all - inside instead, all that
electronic and virtual crap, a huge endless nothing and I know trouble will brew
from this for only something bad can come from being brought up in this manner
- it's all wrong, it's all error, and anything instilled from parents who would
do this to their kids, in turn, has to be wrong, barren and even evil at best.
Like I just finished saying - 'who knows what we take from what we see', know
what I mean? The silent lilt of the steel wheels tapping the tracks, cutting
through everything and anything old falls away - that guy's old upholstery
shop I pass every day - an old white building from some other era, a shack
almost, hugging the tracks, close to the passage, near the train, from whenever,
'Andrew's Upholstery' it says - weird - still there, I guess busy enough to
remain there, a small, old offshoot of a town or a place which once centered
there, fallen away now and mostly gone - some tacky pizza place, a Chinese
Food dumpy restaurant ('junky' would have referred to a Chinese junk, their old
kind of water-craft, and of course dumpy can hark back to dumpling. How
quaint!). My father's name was Andrew, and he was an upholsterer too - so small-world damn to all that! No matter; I love the little white shack and wonder each day how it ever got there, placed so close to the tracks, along with other things but by itself. It just seems to have never materialzed into the modern - it's like a small, clapboard, white little shed, a workshop, a few windows, an open room where furniture is worked. Of course, I only see the back of it, the working area with the garage-open door for the truck to be loaded with chairs or sofas or whatever, but I imagine there must also be a regular business front to this place - like a fronted old, white, clapboard shack would have to have : small and quaint and homey as Hell. Small-time and beautiful to me.
...TO BE CONTINUED...
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