13,234. RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,090

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,090

(kindles of magic)

Conglomerations of dreams never

come to this. I am reverent. I sit

back, thinking about...myself? I'm

at Christine's, as I recall, some

shithole maybe Polish Restaurant

dive on First Ave, between, oh, say,

hard to remember now, 13th, 14th.

Barley soup, Pierogi, Polish ravioli,

and the rankhole Suyvesant Town

bitchiness, sitting right next door.

Sort of, anyway. Blintzes, red

cabbage, cabbage soup, rice? All

that too I really forget, but I was

eating something. Colored sodas?

Drinks? A bar right next door, for

Bourbon? A whore?

-

My life amounts right now to nothing

but the vacant past I used to live in.

I had hammers and wrenches and

tools; painted birds and stretcher

bar'd canvases. Another world of 

language back then was opened up.

Yiddish, and German-speaking

maniacs. Fedora-Jews, and Slavic

revolutionaries; most of Kiev's

debris was on the street. "My

poshlem tsarskikh prispeshnikov

na mnozhestvo smertey, sozhzhennykh

uzhe etikh mnogikh gorodov bol'novkh

i umirayushchikh..." [We will send the

royal henchmen to their many deaths,

these cities already burned down by

these many sick and dying...].

-

You think I knew what they were

saying? No. I had to ask  -  some

50 years out of date crap about

the Revolution and the Czars and 

all that crap. The fucking-craziest

part of it all was The Rolling Stones

start singing about it and everyone

goes about believing they know

all about it. What a bunch of fecking

crap! You want to know what 'fecking'

is? It's a word I learned, over at the

White Horse, from the Irish and

English people there. They'd never

just say 'fucking,' as Americans would;

to them it was always 'fecking.'

-

My gay, dead, friend Paul used to

say, about Ithaca NY, when I was

there, how much he liked it because

it was so 'Cosmopolitan'  -  way out

like that in the middle of absolute

nowhere like that. Living on 1st

street Colonia NJ sure must have

made him weird. Even queer, I

guess. It was about as cosmopolitan

as the UN  -  which is a mix, yes, but

an enforced mix, kept within confines.

When I was in Ithaca, the streets still

smoldered from the Black Power

takeovers, and none of the new girls

wore bras. I was in favor of one, and

not so much for the other. Black

Power comes and goes, but girls

are forever.

-

I can't say, like the song does, 'I

been everywhere, man...' because

I sure as hell have not. But within

my stalled constellation of time, and

the remnants of place that I dragged

along with it, I was in pretty wondrous

times, at any one time.  Over by 11th

street, 1967, the Polish guy who used

to serve me gruel now and then  -  25

cents for oatmeal and endless coffee  -

he had concentration camp tattoos

on his forearm, a string of numbers,

and his one eye, or maybe two, I

forget, was pink and always tearing.

I loved that old sonofabitch, and

would sit there for hours with him,

just watching. We got pretty close,

that old, sad, lower eastside guy,

though we hardly ever talked. He was

sad, through and through, and by him

I read the history of the world. At

6am each morning, the Con Ed

guys from the generating station

down at the river on 14th, would

come in for their breakfasts and

cigarettes and bullshit. They sit 

there talking, updating each other, 

who they'd fucked and who they'd

screwed, what their wives knew

and what they didn't. I'd sit there,

knowing that, over at my apartment

at 509 east 11th, the radical activists

of the day were underway with their

plans to blow that very substation

to smithereens in November. I never

really felt guilty, though I pitied those

poor sons of bitches with all their

Con Ed mouths and presuppositions

and crapola stories. It was all going to

be coming down, and soon. 

-

Fact of the matter? Nothing ever 

happened. My apartment got raided; 

police-taped and sealed off. 16 people

in that hovel I never heard from again.

Stupid is as stupid does. Yep. There

were one or three dead bodies too,

chopped and channeled like

Hot Rod Eddie's cute girlfriend.

No one ever found out a thing, and
I was gone with the morning breeze.

Funny about NYC...those streets

can chop you up, or they can

take you in.