SENDING ME HOME
TO HARANGUE
And arrange for something different this time around -
the police are festered and the military sends me away.
Learning how to handle guns but not be let to shoot
makes little sense. Can I learn to read, and not read?
Propriety enters in here, always too late. The landlubbers
in China are dying in droves for Freedom?
-
When I was 28, I spent most of my time, off-time anyway,
at the Mayflower Cafe in Chinatown. It was the kind of place
that was nothing of what it said it was - certainly not a cafe.
Low-level but great - Chinese food with a few cranky
waiters, a kept-busy counter with coffee urns always
ripe. No Starbucks or Small World. This was killer.
-
On the rest-room door, someone had long aso pasted a
comic book sticker of Batman - the original Batman,
not these movie-star ones. Michael Keaton can go to
Hell. No one ever removed it, or even talked about it,
but layer after layer of cleaners and scrub had weakened
its colors to a pale, outlined ghost of - something -
no was sure of. You always remained wary.
-
Checklist this : food was cheap, I mean a buck twenty-five,
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, any assortment of fringe-framed
hipsters might show up to sit, no one pushed you out,
it was cramped, down three sairs and occasionally
smelled. Everyone was stern and angry. A few women
waltzed in, though mostly male was the make-up.
-
Long before pride and gays and queers; whatever you
were, you just were : tempestuous as an accolade,
a fighting Marxist Jew or a stumbling writer's new
apprentice. No phones. No computers. Nothing.
I read a lot of books in there - and
sometimes I never left.
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