RUDIMENTS, pt. 59
Making Cars
I often make no bones about things -
(I kind of like that phrase, it's a bit of
brute honesty, maybe something I
used to hear around home; don't know) -
but of late no matter what my personal
history and tales and stories are here
about New York City and environs
and me and my time there, and the
places I was in and the things I used
to do, I realize now that that place is
dead and gone. As I walk about there,
now, it's all I can do from laughing, or
crying, abut the horrible mishmash of
a place it's become; mostly a disheveled
version of some technocrat Hong Kong
or Singapore nation, with everyone doing
the same thing, smiling as they follow orders,
and going about rightly attired to eat and drink
their smoothies, veal and lamb dishes, perfect
veggies swaths of this or that, while vetting
each other to see, at essence, what they really
are, girl? Or boy? Yep, it's that crazy. All
the previous world is dead.
-
Now, looking at all, that's OK really, by me -
because it allows me to own it. Now it's mine,
every inclination to memory and wonder from
those 'other' days is owned by me - no one
else shares it, and I'm completely alone. There
are no 'Cats' or 'Annie' idiots intersecting my
old Broadway and 42nd street stories, no
free-days at the museums, no parading gilfoyles
of virginal underwear assault from endless
Victoria's Secret perversions in shop widows,
Saks and Tiffany windows put up by fey-boy
window designers in purple sway-back shoes
and pink-heart socks (I watch these things;
these guys not only work in the windows
putting up displays, but they make sure as
well that they themselves are displayed).
To each his own swankiness, and you
can have it, amen. That's a lot of what
NYC has become now. In 1967, these sorts
of endeavors would have been dark, bleak,
dreary and black - and probably stabbed
in the heart. Yeah man.
-
The dichotomy, the break, is so real. Long about
1968 or whatever it was, maybe '69, the whole
rolling crescendo of world orders and meanings
there came to a screeching halt. Murders and
assassinations. News reports of death and
corruption. No one, of course knew what the
heck they were talking about, but they talked
about it anyway. One good version of reality
deserved another : Rolling Stones versus Beatles,
let's say, and those lines were drawn and
they were crossed. The world or the city, let
me say, had by that time had a bit too much
of the lovey-dovey Beatlesque hippie swarm,
and their dark-shadow Rolling Stones were
about to bat heads. 'Lucy In the Sky with
Diamonds' (LSD - yeah. If that wasn't what
was meant, then CBS didn't mean Columbia
Broadcasting System, and NASA didn't mean
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
and TBS wouldn't soon mean Turner Broadcasting
System - no matter what folderol was trotted out
about 'oh no, it was my kid's drawing from school,
of a girl, named Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.'
Want to buy a bridge?)...By contrast, we were
given the bleak-litany of negative images to
supplant all that - 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' by
contrast was a perfect paean to dark power.
'Born in a crossfire hurricane,' as it were. It
had an entire other complexion to itself and
better reflected rightly about that, what was
really going down, what was in the streets,
how things were happening. 'Gas, gas, gas.'
The prime joke of it all was that whatever
powerful negative space-matter that song
held to 'better' reflect us, it was, for pity's
sake, a playful tune written to profile Keith
Richards' gardener. Yes, gardener! That's what
any of this had come down to - the rabble being
roused by supposed rabble-rousers singing of
their gardeners. Jumping Jack Flash, indeed.
-
I wanted to set my hair on fire and flee.
-
For myself, I was already rolling in a thousand
words an hour encounter sessions with myself -
forget about EST and Alpert and Leary and
anything else. I was free-floating, un-tethered,
a cone-head helmeted only loosely by reason
and logic in an old NASA-type attic of both
disloyalty and craziness too. Writing up this
script of and for myself, writing through my
pain of time, I was trying to get it down and
get it right.
-
About that time, another friend just disappeared.
Just call him Max. Without a shred of evidence
or anything left behind, one day he was just
no longer there. I still never know : but after
he did make the disappearance (not quite the
opposite of 'appearance,' because obviously he
was still 'around' and leaving remnants), I found
this terribly over-written, tendentiously overdone
but also quite nearly perfect few pages of writing
he'd left behind. I couldn't shake it. It stayed.
"...my watery eyes flickering reptilian in the
fluorescent light, I stepped outside and took a
bite out of that blue September sky, and took
a seat inside a sun-yellow cab. The Babylonian
towers locked their shiny arms above my head;
a steely embrace of concrete and glass."
-
Yes, see what I mean? It's not for nothing that
nothing gets lost : like old 42nd street, the
storefronts are yet lined with blood and vice -
the sort of thing today's new touristy type would
never see. Like morphine, and Hubert's Museum.
Back then there was this guy named Herbert
Huncke, a male hustler, he plied his trade along
these streets and sold his occasional body for
dollars. Nothing twice was thought of it. He
just was - he was doing whatever his Herbert
Huncke destiny brought him, All those yelping
crazies around him, he was friends with them
all too. Ginsberg, Kerouac, all those guys. It
as all a world of 60-watt bulbs, the old, round
kind. "Garment trucks lined the streets. The
Walk/Don't Walk signs kept flashing while
women blossomed from subway entrances,
gleaming like diamonds among the trash and
filth, a dream of nipples sweet as sugar melting
in my mouth, hardening between my fingers..."
Yeah, old Max was running on; old gone Max,
old disappeared Max, old Max. Leaving nothing.
Leaving just me, to fend the rest for myself.
Make no bones about it.
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