RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,085
(pound until her eyeballs popped)
There are a couple of famous
cemeteries out around NYC.
By now, I've visited most of
them and have seen that which
I wished to see. Woodlawn
Cemetery, with its entire section
devoted to the graves of jazz
greats. There one can visit the
tombs of Miles Davis, Duke
Ellington, Illinois Jacquet, and
so many others. In that same
place are to be found - though
not in the 'jazz' section of course -
the graves of Herman Melville
(and family), and Celia Cruz,
to make the great leap. Of course,
in 1967, these people were not
dead yet (except for Herman
Melville), and I had not visited
any of this, nor even known of
it. Since those days, I've double-
trafficked myself to see and do.
It was worth it. I am not ghoulish,
and frankly little care for the actual
assembly of the dead, what the
monuments look like, how they
are arrayed and kept. As I see it,
the older the better - new style
monuments simply are too glossy
and flamboyant for my taste.
-
I never quite backed into the
normal things - caring little
for most endeavors. Others could
swoon over this or that, become
fans and boosters of a personality
or a cause. They'd get actively in
the mass-mob middle of the
current cause. My heart, on the
other hand remained sourced in
space, somewhat stuck between
New York City and the Plain des
Jarres. It seemed Armed Forces
Radio had just again played LBJ's
March 31st speech saying he would
not run again for President; the
sergeant to my left said, 'What the
fuck is this? How we supposed to
fight this goddam war if even now
the President has bailed?' I made
myself wonder if I'd just heard what
I thought I had. Why were 20th
century Americans and tiny little
'Nam gooks fighting and killing
each other on the site of ancient
and wondrous megalithic ruins?
How did this humanity bullshit
go anyway?
-
And then like that the reverie was
over and there were the people in
the streets again, wailing and
crazing over having lost a brother
in the jungles of death, a boyfriend
maimed and slathered. Or there were
the maniacs - wild girls with huge,
floppy tits, newly unsupported, who
mistook their 'opposition' to the
Vietnam War with their new cause
of Lesbian sisterhood, not yet even
Understood. Our Bodies, Ourselves
was still under the sofa, safely out
of sight. The Boston Women's
Collective was not yet fighting in
Laos. Screaming hordes of ladies
and kids : Jew-boy flaming nostrils
and Intellectual add-abouts spouting
rhetoric and nostrums before Yom
Kippur. Some steamroller guy in
a dump-truck from Jersey, rolling
down Fifth Avenue or Broadway,
intent on running down a few. The
opposition to the opposition was
trenchant - which always reminded
me of mathematics and the square
roots of numbers and the negative
exponential rates of the dead soldiers
from Pleiku who would never have
kids who would have kids who then
too would have kids - so that any
ONE loss of a male soldier equaled,
forty years later, probably the loss
of 12-20 people all told. Like the
multiple of Death, the expansion of
the Negative, the long, American
growth of a vast, social, black-hole.
Which is when the guy with 'Tyler'
as the last name on his green Army
tag, high as a kite, says, 'He don't
know nothing man, that guy ain't
jive, all's he wantin' to do is have
us out, take us down so's he can
keep talking his Texas motherfucker
white-man jag. Man, I hope he dies
from jungle-juice, jes' like you and
me.' Then I watched as he slowed
way down and just fell to the ground.
Where he remained, eyes rolling back.
The other guy named 'Jinson' said 'He's
OK, flyin' high again, he's sleep it off
and if his nigger ass don't get shot he'll
awake again and do it all over. This
war-shit's got to end. I've had it. I'm
ready enough to go shoot the sergeant,
and the lieutenant too!'
-
I had heard that before too. Back on
the elbowed streets of old midtown,
how drugs had infiltrated the war now
and guys were shooting their superiors,
or blowing up tents and bivuoacs. These
jerks now were willing to take the whole
place down! 'Fragging' was the new
frontline checkers - instead of guys
sucking cigarettes and playing the
game of chess or checkers outside
their tents, they'd go hunting for Lt.
Reilly instead. No one was safe now,
let alone LBJ. Again the thought arose,
how 'fragmentation' had evolved into
'fragging,' and the wonderment of
language and what it all meant, and
all I wanted to do was grab any one
of those girls in the street and pound
and pound until her eyeballs popped
out. The world was too much with me,
late and sweet? I thought again of
something, but was too confused to
get it right: "Bare ruined choirs,
where late the sweet birds sang.
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth
take away, Death's second self,
that seals up all in rest."
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