Monday, March 20, 2017

9307. HIM THUMP WITH MY OLD IDEALS

HIM THUMP WITH 
MY OLD IDEALS
You don't have to be too special to get 
in here, we take most anyone. And I've 
heard it all. My old friend AG once said
'you can't aggravate nobody if you just 
keep talking about old westerns and 
John Ford and John Wayne.' So I took 
his advice and I drove a Ford, and not
just talked it. Halfway measures have 
some value. But who wants to end up 
watching Hawaiian movies while sitting 
on a couch? It's all stuff like they used to 
have in the fifties; Eisenhower was President 
for way too long a time. Once, the Village
Voice did a feature on me  -  yeah front-page
stuff, with a full carry-over. It read pretty
well and we were in Hoboken when it came 
out. Why Hoboken, you say? Well, they 
told me; it wasn't my idea. They said they
didn't want me around their newsboxes on
the Wednesday it came out. 'Too incendiary,
perhaps,' they thought. They actually said that.
Like what the difference is in a PATH ride to
Hoboken, I never knew. This was in the mid
nineties, remember  -  when half the paper
was sleazeball porno ads and movie listings
anyway, and Bill Clinton was getting his
bell rung under the desk  -  and they were 
worried about me? Too incendiary? So,
we waited in some big bar by the old ferry 
slip. They had a gigantic, salt-water tank,
filled with colorful, beautiful, very weird
fish. I found myself feeling like one of them;
I knew what they meant, and they didn't
even talk. We shared the vibration  -  all those
bright, tropical salt-fish colors, and some had
weird shapes too. Ever see those fish with 
heads like hammers? Yeah, real stuff. Hard
to be inconspicuous, even if drunk. Too
incendiary, my fish-ass. I felt like John Wayne
fully powered by John Ford, driving a freaking
stage-coach over the cliff just trying to find
what's at the bottom  -  if I survived. Just think
about it. Not like a lemming, more like Masada.
So damn hopeless you just jump off the cliff.
They call it a complex now: Masada Complex.
Sounds like a car to me.



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