RUDIMENTS, pt. 223
Making Cars
Yeah. Do I ever. Every
so often I get the blues
so deeply down that the
foundation has a foundation.
I once or twice thought of
getting involved with psycho
stuff - analysis and the rest.
But talking things through
with some by-the-hour cash
register guy makes no sense.
I'd rather write through it all.
It's raw material for me. I was
never a fan of those people who
go running to a shrink to get
straight; and I've known a few
who have. Their straight is my
crooked, and they end up losing
any vitality they once (may have)
had. A writer, an artist, as I saw
it, was supposed to be unbalanced,
wired, strange, and out of joint.
That's what makes it all worth
doing. Going though analysis
kills it. And besides, that's all
old-world stuff, as old-world
as you can get. Concepts and
fixations still swimming in
grease and butter, while the
rest of the world has moved
long on to oleos and spray
margarines. If I had to go
through any of that stuff with
some Indo-Euro pipe-smoking
dude I rather just off myself.
Take a handful of pills and
fall asleep forever.
-
My friend Paul and I used to
sit and spend long nights at the
White Horse arguing about stuff
like this - except it wasn't arguing
because we both had the same anti
analysis bias. So we'd end up each
trying to out-abuse each other in
making fun of other people. We'd
sit there and watch these hanky,
half-drunk babes come in - with
a guy or not, or in two's and three's
(girls seem to like to drink together,
but so do guys, I suppose, now
thinking of it), and we'd ask like,
'Hmmm, wonder what else they
do together.' Oh, we were tough
and real wise-guys, sure. We'd
pick people out for being miserable,
were sure of it, certain that their
lives were a wreck and that they
were spending 70 bucks (back then)
an hour letting some mini-Austrian
guy listen to them. Promising to
work out their lives with an 'Aha!'
and an 'I see...' What a racket; and
anyway were were the ones who
were screwed up - artists, writers,
pikers on the lam, sitting around,
gurgling beers down the old
windpipe hoping something would
happen around us. This went on
for a while - jukebox camaraderie.
Paul would sob his sorrow away
(just having lost a girlfriend to
his best friend) and play, over and
over, a jukebox tune by Joe Jackson.
'Is She Really Going Out With Him?'
Real schlub stuff. (I almost felt he
needed analysis).
-
The White Horse was famous, and
cool, a real watering hole in the old
'beat the hell out of you if you're
wrong' style. Sometimes it was
cramped. Sometimes annoying too.
Not real drinkers always - you'd
get NYU kids, with girlfriends or
pickups, ordering hamburgers and
fries and all that bar kind of food
that smelled. Trying to impress
each other, or at least stay friendly
until they could hit the sack about
five hours later. Too much high
fashion stuff, people conscious of
being sexy, looking hot, girls running
to the ladies room (a little dip-shit
closet in the corner), re-doing
themselves every twenty minutes.
Guys would just go on getting
drunker and louder, unable to
handle anything. The place would
start stinking, and a blue haze of
smoke would just invite everyone
to die. There might as well have
been a sign that said 'Cancer Ward.'
The men's room was a sink and
about four square feet of stand-up
room, if your were lucky. We
sued to joke that most of the guys
going in had units bigger than that
and probably couldn't get the door
closed. The drunker we got the
better the jokes, right? ('Oh,
you better go in there and close
it for him')...Anyway, if it wasn't
that tune on the juke box, it was
a Rolling Stones grouping going,
or some other mass-market sound.
An undercurrent of FM hip - blue
smoke, meat smoke, beer smells,
the real hard whiskey guys pounding
at the boor, yelling each other down.
There were tables outside, usually
filled with people, eating. Passers-by
would stop, linger, look. There
were lesbians, there were gay guys;
the whole world met here, and lording
over it all was the mythological dead
drunk poet Dylan Thomas, whose
oversized portrait hung, heavily
framed, in the rear drinking room.
With a sort of half-bemused, stern
gaze, the mid-century's most famed
drunk-writer had his place. He'd
drunk himself to death right here,
staggered out, something like 1956,
walked a bit and toppled over and
died at St. Vincent's Hospital,
just a few blocks off. St. Vincent's
was famous, and even more famous
through and after the 1980's AIDS
death-epidemic. By that time the
whole area here was gay, and the
plague swept through here like
Black death, which it was. Prayers,
vigils, fires, dreams and heartbreak.
all hours of the day and night,
ambulances screaming in. Death
on the installment plan - as
Ferdinand Celine once put it.
(A writer). Journal of the plague
year(s), by Defoe; same thing.
St. Vincent's, alas, is gone now.
Million dollar condo units for like
a three-block square. Yuppies,
hipsters, college dwarfs, whatever
they're called; they're there now.
So blamed sad I want to puke.
-
I don't know who it was who was
most responsible for wrecking the
world I knew. But boy, if I knew.
I'd squeeze my hands around their
feeble neck and squeeze til the puss
ran out red.
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