encyclopedia of the second hand: body

Talk about how much your body weighs, talk about how tall it is, name where it was born, name when it was born, tell the color of its eyes, tell whether it was vaccinated for small pox, polio, tuberculosis, or any other disease for which at the time it was six man was supposed to be prone, tell what language its tongue feels easiest with, its ear can take in the sounds of and not even notice how it puts them together back together as a thing said, even supposing that in the machinery there is reception and representation, even supposing the ear itself in its winding to hear pure sound without on the inside whatever you call the inside the context the mind the geist for God’s sake the attitude has already been set for semantics,  tell about its shoe size, waist size, neck size, all the way up from the little shoes it fit its little feet in fascinated with the little foot measure black with its degrees picked out and the little moving curved metal brace to roll up just to the toes and the other straight metal flanges to put on the sides of it, manufactured always has noticed this in Syracuse, NY, all of them, tell about the dressing room curtain drawn and it looking in the mirror turn around smooth down the pants does it fit how does it look, tell about how it walks, whether it has seen itself in a video, how it thinks of itself in a video if it has seen itself in a video, how it analyzes its movements of arm, hand, hip, buttocks, whether effeminate, whether effeminacy is feared, effect on it of hearing its voice, effect on it of seeing painted portrait of itself by itself, tell what it likes to fuck, tell what it sees in other bodies, tell how it prepares to have sex, tell what kind of things in terms of situations, nudity, particular part of the body of other contact is desired with, how contact is desired, positions such as female, leaning over desk, skirt hiked up, fantasized about, what particular part of its body, dick lips tongue hands, it desires to be especially contacted, tell of its complex issues with its asshole, any piles problems, any problem with hard stools, any problems with excretion that have led to the assimilation of laxatives, purgative medicines, or any other kind of shelf or prescription drug, tell of its relationship with the medical industry from after the scene of its birth, in which, though a player, it was not of a maturity nor by the players perceived in terms of any kind of past history that would make its particular ipseity one to be accounted for by the provocation of any kind of sign or comment to elicit, as has been done innumerable times since at parties, in traffic jams, in beds, its own opinion in terms of some production of signs up to and including slight shifts in the musculature of the face conducive to the rictus of the smile or frown, the slight squeezing of the eyes, the wrinkling of the brow, safe in the instance of that primitive exterior moment, that of a cry (heard) and a response (mother’s, recounted afterwards, subject to question as the kind of memory that would escape the tumult of labor and its result, and also doubtful given a sum of opinions given out at other times about the aesthetic appeal of the infant, to wit having none, or most of them, until about four months, indistinguishable one from the other, but given as you were a beautiful baby), tell of dizziness suffered, nausea from various doctor detected or girlfriend detected or wife detected causes, poison ivy and other rashes, tonsils taken out, fracture of a bone (age of four, accident, tricycle) set, minor case of herpes attended to, fever quenched with bedrest and drugs the contents of which were not at the time a matter of interest, headache once and paralyzing pain, origin unknown, for two days, too sick at the time (in New Orleans) for it to get up off its cot and call anybody to help it until Jan, curious what was up, came over, tell whether seen (itself by itself, the verb reflecting itself) in dreams, tell of fading image in memory, tell angle of vision of things seen in memory and inference of preferred angle of vision, if any, tell probable cause of death, if foretellable, tell lifetime habit of illegitimate drug use, terrible and never do it again, I promise, tell boredom suffered by, sitting (in cars, waiting rooms, in the little official scoop chairs of every office and cafeteria, in booths at hamburger places, at bus stops, in trams, on trains, in planes, in the little compass afforded by the one hundred dollar ticket For ride from Austin to New York), lying (in hotel rooms, recently, after sex with its mate, also recently, on nights of absolute insomnia, recently again), or walking (passage from one place to another in a number of towns, Gladstone Georgia, Austin Texas, Santa Fe, New Mexico, New Orleans, Louisiana, among others, as resident, passing scene unmemorable to the eye that does not even take it in enough that, given a thorough grilling regarding what seen even two hours after these passage states, would not be able to inventory). Tell about the files it is in, files at U.T., art department, grade transcript, letters of recommendation, high school record from one file in Gladstone to another in Austin, the data, file in the Student Financial office, amount borrowed student loan, file  in  the IRS office presumably the one in Austin, tell that it knows people who work there, big thing to do if you want to earn bucks and not work after they lay you off for some months, life style that it approves of and others it knows need, do their real work, waste time, sit around smoke pot, talk about projects, wait for the IRS to hire again, the  file at the NEA, little dark slides of its work, Kath’s shots of the Metamorphosis pieces, forms filled out, form letter award of this Southeastern Young Artists Grant, the file with Doctor Endo, x ray of foot, costs for operation, its mother is Doctor Endo retired last time staying with her cause of Dad,  its Dad dead, a file with Doctor Swoon, the dentist, says here you haven’t had that last wisdom tooth out, hungry to take out its teeth, little moneygrubbing son of a bitch, above it little silver pick in its hand, won’t give him that satisfaction, every cleaning it’s a reminder, picture he’s conveyed of the tooth with a malign rhizome, sunk in the jaw, major operation soon if not removed now, the tooth now some inward borer, so hostile, down in the jaw’s dark towards bone, there is a file with the Blue Cross,  there is a file with the Albuquerque Police Department (complete with a two side views and a frontal view of  face, light glabrous on the obviously damp forehead, patchy skin color as in a late night party shot which when they come out you wish hadn’t been taking, all that gaping and grinning, the deadly flash of light, the skin has he caught  some tabloid disease, eyes blue but all pupil and that pupil lit white with the flash into which countless eyes have glared or narrowed or blinked in vain, a cloud of witnesses,  the file with self’s dealer letter from her your recent work isn’t moving, I don’t know how you expect, and on, until I think your plan, though wonderful, is just not going to be possible, but earlier letter, earliest, I am looking forward to showing you in a venue which is uniquely open to young artists, dated March 15, 1986, a file with Julia’s lawyer, a file with Julia’s accountant, recommended that man a certain merging of its and Julia’s assets, not all of them by any means,  a file with the Western States Mortgage Company, a file with the BankAmerica Visa and the Dallas Southwest Sun Master Card and the Sears credit department and Charette’s Art Supplies and Shell gas company and Texaco gas company going through the plastic that is laid to some account against it feels the very recesses of its being, a file in the Zen Ranch Home Office, its wedding to Julia, June, 1989, got a call recently voice on the other end  a  recommitment special, a woman’s voice,  it’s very popular, asking simply because fascinated by the whole working of this Christian Shaman thing,  the second time around, she said, it’s a party, goes to that what do you mean, what do you people mean by party, the file at Quetzelwood, admission, signature Julia Early, the file with Doctor Vaughan, yellow legal sheets, Vaughan’s notes from sessions with it, answers to questions such as what do you feel about your father dying like that presumably in some short hand of Vaughan’s on sheet, otherwise was there a point to it? Tell that in these files the commonality locating information about it must be some attempt in a net more abstract than the net of a hunter thrown over a wild beast but with many of the same characteristics to present in the end a schema of scenes from the life of, frame by frame by frame, even this hotel the Ten Peso Inn, signing in the flash of one card and another,  the look over them, expecting what the clerk never does, that he’d look up and compare the face in the photo on the driver’s license with the face of the man that gave it to him, no, the data is more important. Tell how it and self are one and the same, tell about that pact the title and clauses of which are forever unknown, the language of it mapped into some known and useable language internal to the system, Erlebnis, as it were, and yet the classic problem of that translation making it unknowable whether that mapping can ever really be affected wholesale, yet the whole instrument of which is to bind in a dualism as real as the twosome made by Br’er Rabbit and the Tarbaby or Jesus and Our Father who art in Heaven self and the body, tell about how odd it would be to make the separation, answering for instance this call as you could have with the body of Street Early offering that to the person waiting on the other side, happening to say Street, why are you in Albuquerque, I thought you were flying home, must be she’s heard the message you left on the recorder, don’t know, I just felt like I needed to be alone this weekend, Mexico City, they did love the piece, but I got very, confused I guess is the word, to finally okay I’ll see you Tuesday, to love you but the phone is down cutting off that last bit of routine, tell what was married, what legal agent,  till death do us part not included in vows made, as it happens wrote the vows under Kath’s assurance that the whole ceremony could be staged as we wanted it, combination she said of pagan and Christian elements, most disturbing to Mrs. Early,  and given this the unspoken premise of the marriage but any vows made otherwise in the shadow, so to speak, what other vehicle does death ride?  Tell envy at the moment of sinful messiah, hours in here watching for the news from Waco, itself  struck with admiration about the starkness of the separation made between an American society it can no longer recognize as livable, the FBI, their white vans, the tanks, the ATF, its least favorite government org, after maybe the Narcs, out there, the perimeter around the compound, and a particular madness which can only be parasitic to that abjured whole, only speak that debased language. Tell what thought concerning question of responsibility, moral sorting out of, division of between some self  transcendent to the particular now and thus subject to punishments and rewards in the future for actions within the past and the it  tripping  and falling, the it in the car, poisonous drunk, weaving from lane to lane.  Tell how  this is finessed. Tell how self is  accessible via it, compare to  the way astronauts in a space capsule are accessible to ground control, comparison covering a certain maintenance of systems, targeting, orientation, shielding. Tell self is not filled in, so to speak, not told about in a very rich way,  but simply given as a part of the world: employed, married, buried, such are the uses of making the tie between self and it absolute. Tell question occurring to it by the by,  do iron bars make a cage?  Do various mental exercises, in pursuit of conceptual clarity, such as: I am hungry, my brain is hungry; I am thinking, my Dick is thinking; I am shitting, my heart is shitting;  my heart is broken, my armpit’s heart is broken.  Think of how it has a  self living in it in some way and using such casual or desperate language about it as to make it unproblematic to locate it, claim it, put himself when the occasion arises in such relationship to it that self is at once separated from it and described by it, tuck the body safely in a file, in a bed in a ward, behind the bars of a cell. Say if  it would claim that, on examining as naively as it can what its self is, there is some agent, some you, playing the Deep Throat who can provide all the information we - self and it - want about it. Tell idea occurring to it that you are a spy on the life of it. Ask do you mind if I call you you? Tell suspicion sometimes you forget your mission, or who you are working for, and you come in from the cold to no debriefer, whatever betrayals on your conscience for no confessor to hear told, bitter abstinences, futile binges.  Ask if it makes any sense to think of it and you as having separate lives, or if the dependence here isn’t as straightforward as dream’s on the dreamer, that one-way channel.  Tell how, when a child, it would  sometimes talk to different parts,  feet, look at its  feet in the bathtub and it’d think of them as fish playing around, stomach,  when it had a stomach ache, or when it was shitting. thinking of the stomach as having something against it, it'd say please. sitting on the toilet it would pretend to be in agony, putting hand on belly, please it'd say, drawing it out, PLEA-EA-EASE! imitating some gangster dying in some movie it’d seen on TV, childish games, years ago, put away, biblical precept followed. Tell how it now speaks to a more amorphous force, when in situation of urgency requiring it to speak to itself, say coming out of that hotel last December bleeding. How it said to itself its all right. How it kept saying that to itself, in the car, aiming downtown for hospital.  Tell how it goes through a distinct cycle of appearance, has asked others about this, how it will notice things about itself in different ways at different times, scholar of its skin, its face, its stooped shoulders, the Talmud of  bathroom mirrors. Tell of after-effects of urination,  when it urinates, sometimes  a drop or two of urine left in the urinary tract and how these drops will come out, will drip out, will slightly wet its underwear.  Theorize, given the line of facts we have pursued so far, that everything that is self is your body, to say self is to imply body, the image of a separated self,  of some atomic unvisualizable  thing, that is self and at the same time is not your body ‑ a soul, a ghost, blithe spirit of whatever substance, a point of vantage, the swerve of the atom, you at the end of the brainstem ‑ is an illusion it sometimes is subject to about itself, tell where this comes from, the need for a controlling metaphor, a story it can tell itself, desire for an instrument to name that point it reaches between different readings of itself, between the log of readings which is vaguely the whole book of consciousness and the voyage itself, which is itself, the body, up on its hind legs and reading  about itself, self’s prose mirrored in it’s eyes.

encyclopedia of the second hand: oddballs

                                        Odd balls

                              Gladstone Georgia, 1969 -1973

          Kickballs

Generalizations of the ball, ideals of round, the rubber feeling very thin over the hollow, air filled core.  Although when the ball hits you, it stings.  It can sting.  The surface of these balls, the rubber rind, is  always a little pitted, pebbly you could call it. Kickball was the eminent ball of the playground for a few years, between third grade and sixth grade. There was, by the fifth grade, a little  ritual. Somebody would find Grady, the janitor, to unlock the storeroom to get the kickballs. He selects the one key from a great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt, and now you are behind him, light on, no windows in this place, there’s the bats, the bases, the basketballs, and in that metal box are the kickballs. You look at Grady,  the thick, tufted gray hair, eyebrows thick, the stiff walk in the perpetural work suit, you see extreme age, you have no eye for the damage and endurance of black skin, your measurements are all safely in white skin.  When you are in highschool one evening  Mom has news, you remember Grady, the janitor at Gladstone? Grady’s been caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked women.  God knows what is involved in such a complexly suggestive gesture, a whole trove of erotica discovered next to the  tub of floor soap in his closet. But to wind back to you, who wound up to that moment with Mom strain to picture some surreptitious passage, something you didn’t understand at the time, a gesture, a smack of the lips, some personal current of perversion, no, well he’s simply gruff, in your memory, the eyebrows, the voice there they are, take em, with  other things to do in it, go down talk to the women in the kitchen, with his broom, be fooling around about these balls all the time. Feeling was he didn’t even like you. You and Kevin and Mike. Part of the respect you had for him, as if he’d studied you all and made his judgment. You all need all the balls, and usually at least one would be soft. When they are soft you can crevice the surface in this way or that way, the folds will cause  other folds to  erupt, here’s a fold, here’s a dent, the sound is a sickly thump of your knuckles a little raw on the rubber, all of which is endlessly fascinating for about two minutes. Then somebody says Mr. Grady, can you fill this one up?  Grady will attach the ball to a  pump, he’s got a hand pump. Up and down on the handle of the thing,  the ball ripens, rounding the way things eat in cartoons, the clever bird swallowed by the cat, the bunny by the wolf, Jonah by the whale. The bird, the bunny, Jonah, they stay the same inside, integrity intact, it is dark in there, hey, where’s a light, they  light a match,  the cat, the wolf, the whale, not the whale so much, although you hear that story and you can’t help but think, smoke comes out of their ears,  or maybe the bird or the bunny has a stick of dynamite, KABLOOM and the eaten thing is out again, a jagged hole in the predator,  the bunny with a characteristically pointed remark, the chase is on again, contained against container. Kabloom could happen with the balls, but long before it reached that point Grady would have stopped. He isn’t into straining himself, he says.

    The balls, round and ready, now, are herded  out of the storage closet, you all hold a bounty of balls in your arms and are kicking the others, get along, little doggie, and this is fun, it is roundup, you all are cowboys, kick, until out the door you go,  and suddenly impish red balls are all over the playground. Boys and girls and teachers coalesce around them, the  teachers that is who aren't smoking in the lounge, they switch on and off on a schedule of their own. Boys and girls, though: I write this, I veer, I am in another perspective with the touch of a word.  Kids. You all were kids among yourselves, you were the people, big kids and little ones. It was important, too, what you were called - like among the boys, the word girl would come out with your lips puckered, as though you’d eaten something sour. It wasn’t a word to speak, it was a word to reject, it was a name. But self description, in the channel between grown up and kid,  is coded with the words they would respond to, and frankly you don’t want them using your words.

The kickball teams sprawl, a hazy web, over an area of the field, once covered with gravel and now a mixture of gravel and gravel dust and sand and red clay, this fine spiculate powder,  the red rubbed on sneakers, on hands, in your hair, that red stain running throughout your years at Gladstone as though a vengeful ghost not to be wholly dissolved by no matter what new ingredient’s added to powder or liquid. The pitcher, you all take turns as a pitcher, on the mound, although eventually you settle on Eddie Munch as the pitcher, who can wheel that ball down on you with curves and speed, pumping sound of the balls skittering over the ground. Leg out, shoe profiling to the kick and then the automatic shriek, if the ball’s good, usually it’s foul, and the race to first. In the outfield, meanwhile, they are sitting down, or wandering away, and the balls when the kicks a good thump you can hear pass rolling by like rocks through  wet tissue paper. You run down a ball, the screaming gets distant, you catch up with it and for a moment you’ve escaped not only the game, but the school, that whole current of familiar sounds, the environment, your immediate concerns, you are an ant on your lonely out there. The clash of voices at your back is small, and then you wheel around, the ball prised up and  trundle back, kick it, watch the distant movement around the diamond, the players come back to life, figures now gone to their positions, the score a sad thing but wait until your side is up, you run and come to rest at your old post.

The most active player is the catcher, who has to run after the wild pitch, the foul. There’s the ditch where the playground ends, the stickers and stand of pine, the backyards of houses the grass towards porches and onward the whole meander of Belle Vue subdivision. The ball’s momentum, though, is usually arrested by the bushes in the no man’s land, wade in through the stickers and scratch your legs, the thin cursive of thorn and twig the jotting on your legs almost constantly, a memo pad of remnant bushes, ditches, the collecting pools mandated by county regulation, the oddments of lots the Effberry’s hadn’t parceled out. You liked being catcher, though, better than the outfield, eventually it becomes a given, Eddie pitching, you catching. The anticipation when Eddie smoked one, to scoop it up from the ground where it scorched along, the complaints, Mrs. Crawl coming out there, Eddie if you can’t throw slower we’ll have to get another pitcher, and under her supervision a slow wobble meets Patty’s askew attempt at a forward punt and she’s off.

In the sixth grade the domination of kickball was broken, and mere anarchy, for an interval, in the form of superballs, basketballls, softballs, footballs, and even soccer balls was loosed upon the playground. In the seventh grade, the basketball had achieved, in your group, supreme power, and the kickball was forgotten, a thing for lower grades. Outside of the playground, you began to go for the tennis ball, you got a tennis racket for your birthday, Woody Davis goes he’ll show you how to play,  all that spring at the  Dekalb Junior college you had Woody, biked out there and the bikes resting against the high chain link fence that separates the courts from the rest of the campus, bat around the ball and come to some semblance of  recognizable play, and as March turns into April more players begin to come out,  kickball and its usufructs, that anachronistic kingdom slips away from you until wind up to now you look back through meshes when what comes back is unconnected, haggard streak illuminating briefly a stance, a blocking out of bodies, but not and never the real face, measures for the real proportions bounded by superlative and diminutive, lost those things altogether.

Superballs

Superballs came out when you were four, they were the modern world, the space age reaching into balldom.  Suddenly they appeared, this was in York, on your street, Dita’s friends coming out of their houses in the embers of the afternoon deposited by the bus, corner of Dewwater and Heidi’s Corner, gone to milk and crackers or a cookie,  then out, Dads not home yet. You were home from kindergarten hours before, slamming these new, wild balls down hard on the asphalt with Robin, your next door neighbor, watching the balls ascending to amazing heights, pop flies, which you could catch and it was a real catch, like catching a baseball, you positioned down below, your hands cupped a cautionary glove, hopeful, the intersection not something you could be neglectful about, Dad slowly looping you a baseball or Dita tossing you a beachball, but positioning and running, a lesson in spin and speed, you stand there and miss it, the ball having become to quickly a speck and then a falling pupil to pass somehow the clumsy part of your hands no longer area enough to be anything more than a quick grab which fails to intersect the second bounce, okay, and with the loss of rubber impudence, zany control as though perverse cosmonauts were indeed in the capsule, running out of fuel though needing your arm pumping the slam down and now dribbling its reentry to  you grabbing it. Roger, Houston, and out. As soon as Dita gets hers you want yours, which one Saturday you are able to point out to Mom there the balls are in a stiff plastic pocket and groovy colors not just black but a wave of gold and green, only fifty cents, so then, home from kindergarten, you and Kofax spend time up and down the street, practicing, Robin growing weary, returning to her yard to play pretend horse, but you couldn’t get these balls out of your mind.

Croquet

It was after Alice Lee came to visit that the croquet craze really hit, and then it was you and Mark for a while, the little wire arches set up, goals knocked in, striped red and white and blue, where Dad would protest the lawn the grass I’ve worked hard on that spot going to have a bald spot under the maple and you would listen and go ahead the next afternoon, prudence calling the game before Dad came home’s all, or over to Mark’s yard although with the way Purse never mows it or weeds it the balls smooth courses have a tendency to be distracted into sudden losses of motion by nettle and uneven cupping among sparse blades of crab and St. Augustine grass. The balls are wooden, and like the poles there are stripes of color that band them, red and green and blue and purple, to tell one ball from another. Balls, in this game, aren’t neutral, exchanged among opposing players, but are territorial, possessed, yours, Mark’s, Dita’s, Alice Lee’s, or whoever’s playing, parts of yourself. Croquet has an oddly board game quality about it, a gentility, a Victorian etiquette of politely muted imperial energy, sideswiping masked by the mandated rush for territory, and partly it is just that, that the balls are your markers, bound and not unbound bits of energy, but it is also the woodenness of the ball, the gravid, grave way it travels, the click as it is hit off your mallet and the click as it hits another ball, the spin of the stripes pressing down the  blades of grass under its roll.

Balls exist, like numbers, in different systems, and the two great systems are the bounce and the hit.  It’s like the rational and the irrationals are for numbers. Different kinds of pleasure attach to the expectation of a bounce or a hit, an elastic contact, with just its hint of an energy free as a spark, or a hard contact, from throwing pebbles in a pond up to bullets shot from a gun. Hard contact, once shaped into a conventional ball - the bowling, billiard, or croquet ball, modify violence into aim, the arm back to hurl the clump of mud at the pine tree now grasping the croquet mallet and, with clean fingers, what was the joy of viscous matter, the swamp, the edge of the lake, come up to the lawn, affecting a silent sweep through the pennywire arch, on to the gauntlet before the goal stick.   You played this game until you suddenly were exhausted by the very idea of it, and then the set’s put away, and the next time you play croquet you’re on acid in college, tripping on the Alice in Wonderland aspects of it.

Encyclopedia of the second hand: Bar

     There is a bar somewhere.  You are sitting in it. You are at the bar proper, the counter which runs two thirds of the length of the front room.  In the back room there are two pool tables and two pinball machines.  Boys with baseball caps on and most of them with the bills backwards  hang around there, either actually shooting pool or the bulk of them waiting themselves to play and in the meantime talking among themselves and not really attending to the science going on on the tables, knowing that nobody there tonight has anything to teach them, all of them mediocre bar players, making their shots regularly and flubbing up easily and generally not taking the whole thing too seriously.  The bar is about three, three and a half feet high, high enough that you, sitting on a stool in front of it,  can rest your shoes on the rail that runs along the bottom of it, and continue to remain a natural interval away from the drink before you. The natural interval is not precisely quantifiable, but it is more a matter of  golden mean, the instinctive proportioning of the body you find in Greek sculpture. Discus throwers, god of thieves, limbs carried just a certain measure away from the matter of the body. When you used to go out with Jan to the bar you worked at, one time you worked in that dangerous environment, drug of your predilection all around you, Jackie’s in New Orleans, she used to sit uncomfortably close to her glass of beer, or whatever she was drinking.  Jan is the shortest lover you ever had, she must have been five three. You are six foot one, and you consider that bars were made for a person of about your height.  She’d wear short skirts and she’d perch on the stool awkwardly, her pale legs separate, swinging in slightly, knocking knees, swinging out, her heels planted on one of the stool’s rungs.  You'd drink with Jan mostly at booths, tables, you'd both like sitting in the shadow of each other's intimacy, which comes out to between one and two feet, depending on whether you all were alone, whether you were leaning towards her, one foot, half a foot, three inches, your arms on the table, her arms on the table. If the table was wide enough it was awkward to lean across and graze on her lips, you’d have to raise yourself slightly in your chair. She’d talk, letting fall from her lips words that were as sweet as golden plums, and you’d try to catch them, not only the words but the very notes and stops of breathing, the intonations, as if broken down by your effort into the elements of pulse you would be able to hear the very origin of speech, here, the forming, material moment of the body’s utterance, Jan in the dawning moment, genesis of Jan - later of course you play back certain scenes, love’s product, the info received and given, all that talk, and having distance on it and with distance an under the surface disgust for the words and the energy and the youth and the nearness, you edit to keep from confronting what you know you actually did get, or what you wanted, the person who would want that, but here in this bar you have to admit, that is how you were, that hungry. So. But all of this was sometimes difficult if a jukebox were playing loudly  or the bar was noisy. Jackie’s was fine, at least on weekdays or nights, because you both were pretty sure nobody Bob knew was going to darken the door. However, risk was definitely a part of this relationship. Risk, which is why you also remember hotel bars with Jan, quiet dark spots. The Windsor, the La Rouchfoucauld.  Where Bob’s parents could have come upon you. You’d listen, watching her ripe lips, trying to catch what she’d look like in twenty years.  Fixating on the way her mouth would pull on her small, stubborn chin.  The chin bobs up and down.  Catching a fleeting vision of her mother’s face when she frowns, pulling her lower jaw in. Jan s frown is absolute  rejection, and you at the time kept mistaking the absolute for her with your absolute, which was consistent and stubborn while hers was ephemeral, what counted for her was format. That every rejection be absolute, every preference be passionate, that was Jan’s consistency. You were always adopting her passions as your own, and she was always forgetting them, you saying but you said last time and Jan going I don’t care what I said last time.  So you listen, you look. It was sometimes a rather terrible vision for you, as if her mother had been, magically, oracularly, projected in front of you, the way her face would suddenly reflect another face, an adult face older than her face.  You were twenty‑five. You couldn’t  imagine age, sexually speaking,  except in terms of panic. Jan was four years older than you, of course Julia also being three years older than you made you think a thing was going on here. Sitting across from each other if you were sitting with nobody else, with another person there usually sitting besides her.  With somebody else you were not lovers, although sometimes you would lean your leg against her leg, let that illicit warmth be there. Jan, after all, is Robert’s wife.  You’d been to their wedding.  You like drinking and thinking about past lovers. Not that you want to do anything foolish, like go out and call them up.  Oh, sometimes you get a little happy with quarters in a phone booth in a bar.  You might call up Julia, why not call up Julia? No, you sit down again, you’ ll wait. Maybe call up your assistant, Mary Rose, she’s in Albuquerque today, right?  You have her number in your wallet. But no, not Jan, Jan doesn't want to hear from you.  Sometimes Jan drank dumb things, like daiquiris. What the hell, you'd even, at first, in the throes of love, take a sip her drink, although there was the immediate recoil, your mouth curling, you can take the latent sweetness of scotch and soda but not the jammy, adolescent sweetness of daiquiris or the gooey disguises of vodka in some lactescent, chocolaty thing only Jan would think it was a good thing to order, usually it was the name, something clever, it struck you as a sort of regression, why drink like that, but then Jan's habits of ingesting whatever were always under the sign of infancy and its various melodramas, take her anorexia or whatever it was, at twenty‑nine perhaps it is a whole new illness, watching her take a jar of mayonnaise out of the refrigerator and polish it off, spooning it down, you had to turn your head. You begin getting nostalgic for past lovers, and then you remember why they are definitely not here with you today, good thing, you hunch a little over your drink, you hunch a little inwardly over this thought, although on the other hand what you did to Jan, you have to admit, you were as Jan said a fink, the word trembling up as if it were the worst word in her arsenal, lips pursed as if one of the golden plums she so habitually let fall from her lips were thrust back by your hand a little roughly into her mouth, and it was sour, what frightened dignity, come on Jan, you’d even said, bastard, son of a bitch, not fink, grow up, I can t stand changing your diapers. You were drunk ‑ or were you drunk?  What was Jan expecting, you were going to say divorce Bob, no way, you weren't going to marry her yourself, there might even be a law against it, cousins getting married, although that isn’t ...  The counter is of some dark wood, or at least it is stained so that it looks dark. It looks mahogany, it has that Edwardian, purplish tone, it resonates, faintly, a mustachioed association with the good old days, barber shop quartets of high imperialism, the genteel aspirations of the regnum middle class. Now of course there are bars that are constructed out of lighter woods, or even of cane.  There are bars you’ve been in in Texas and New Mexico where the bar consists of  sheets of unvarnished plywood tacked together to skirt around a wobbly rectangular frame.  There are bars to which the owners have tacked sheets of copper, or silverish material, or leather. There are bars painted bright, gay colors. But your mind’s eye dwells on mahogany, when you enter a lounge in which is interred  a dark heavy mahogany counter like an enormous stye in the eye of sobriety,  your whole body relaxes.  Especially around the back of your neck, your shoulders, it is as if a heavy burden slipped from you, some papoose of serious purposes. You are home. Home free. The top of the counter must have a certain sheen and smoothness, although sometimes it is a good sign that it is spotted with the impress of innumerable mugs of beer, the crawl of some alcoholic ringworm, because there is a myth about bars, which is that ideally the bartender can draw a mug of beer, sit it there, and slide it down to whoever wants it.  You’ ve never really seen this outside of advertisements and movies and the once when at Jackie’s’s  when one of the waiters, Dirk or something, bet  you you couldn’t and  Rory, the kitchen manager, after the bar closed, tried to do it, with much hilarity, smashing of glass, and  suds. New Orleans times are on your mind tonight, which moves from Jan to Rory.  That isn’t  why you had that fight, you are focusing now, it was because of Bella, always Bella.  You are sitting on your watchtower, your eyrie, your lighthouse purchase, your peak, your Andean solitude, top of the world ‑ your stool, in short. Now of course bars come equipped with all manner of furniture: leather sofas and loveseats, overstuffed padded cane backed chairs, heavy fake oak chairs enfolding you in a funny  Daddy's embrace of arms and splats, but you prefer stools, the ideal thing to sit on while poisoning the beast at your heels, this body. You drink, and slowly you can feel that part of yourself which is pure dog poisoned, oh so slowly, come here pooch and down the throat you pour your pale yellow liquid. You like the bogus stoicism of being so uncompromisingly individuated, the barstools lined up in a saccadic movement one two three around the bar, the being thrust back upon the rugged discipline of the spine, balanced, as if upon a bike, as if sitting at a bar were some kind of talent, with that same air of balance, that play with balance, a phenomenology of drinking as a play with dizziness, with orientation, with being the upright quadruped, who invented that you'd like to know, fire was secondary damage, Adam on all fours, ah, that was paradise, maybe that is obscurely symboled in the upright snake, but we are a long way from Eden here as you can tell by the occasional guy who slips off his stool, drunk, you've seen this, you've done this, even, although not often, you have to defend yourself, you seem to have seen this or done this in this very bar, if only you knew...  You lean forward, you cradle your beer, or your scotch, or whatever. When you worked at Jackie’s, it was like you were suddenly in the mirror, looking out instead of in, you scurried along the catwalk pouring drinks, adding ice, mixing, stirring, adding a cherry here, whipped cream there That would be on Fridays, madness night, only time the yuppies would usually venture out this far on Plum Street. Normally you had cops, regulars, some blue collar types, the artsy. There was enough alcohol within reach to poison a considerable number, but you were not so into thinking about these issues.  Rory and you would break and smoke a joint in the parking lot, and you would return to your duties with renewed distance, distance is the very infrastructure of balance, write that down, you have a pen in your pocket, you grab a napkin, and though you ended every night pretty intoxicated, you got there accidentally, mostly, as if you'd been lead by friends of brief acquaintance from party to party until, ultimately, you found yourself at some orgy of strange faces. A girl would stand you a drink, you’d pour yourself a beer after a rush, or during one, people would say hey, pour yourself a beer, on me, you'd do the same, people come in of whom you know just that they come in and you are giving out beers.  And so by little intervals you would get a little addled, nothing that the bike ride  home wouldn’t cure.  What was it, three nights a week? Summer, New Orleans, the heavy heat of the swamp, why the piddling scion of French aristocracy decided to settle a marsh is anybody's guess, LaSalle had to be the craziest motherfucker of them all, good thing they murdered him. God, you were young.  Intensely working, even with Bella wrapping her vulva around your neck, to quote a line. There was a yeasty smell behind the bar.  The floor, there,  was overlaid with a lattice of small, closely spaced wooden rungs interconnected by two small cords which ran through holes drilled at either extremity of the rung. Under that, a rubber mat. When you closed the place, you would take up the wooden thing, folding it like a rope ladder and then you d take up the rubber mat, and you'd go out to the back parking lot and shake them out and spread them and take up a hose and wash them down.  Hot summer nights. Sometimes you’d see rats out by the dumpster back there. Disgusting work. You lean over the bar a little and you look at the floor of the catwalk of this bar and there is just the rubber mat, no wooden thing here. If only you knew where you were.  The bartender sees you, comes over, want another drink, and you are I used to tend bar in New Orleans, like you are some old pro, you are tempted at this point to disclaim, but your tone has already been set, the exact shade of the bullshit you are going to be doling out, and this guy, wearing a striped shirt, the uniform shirt from some team he plays on, is I been to New Orleans, great fucking town. You look past him, yeah, you see yourself in the mirror, yeah, when did you go, always there is a mirror, and always that curious way they put shelves in front of it, so the mirror has to look at you around things, as if you and the mirror are playing some childish game.  The mirror winks, planning to go down there and really do Mardi Gras, like live it, it is always in midwink, as if all the mirrors in all the bars have something of confidential import to whisper to you, some in joke, something about you, as if you were well known beyond the tain, one Mardi Gras I was there, I got so fucking soused, your eyes shift from that bland face idling above you, a pony tail of brown silky hair, an ear ring, his looks disconcertingly resembling a star in a porno flick you recently rented, same greedy hooked face, hey can I have a beer down here, to the row of bottles, check you later, you have a brief image of the young lady he was slamming into, fuck me in the ass, her mouth in greedy, meaty, nasty twist, looking back,  ah the bottles, all those colors, ambers, greens, whites, deft cool shapes, silver bottles, the clear ones with the rather exotic liquids, bottles from foreign companies with exotic names, squat bottles, bottles with netting over them, bottles with elaborate seals you have to break to uncap them, no other bottles are so interesting, so much like glowing little worlds, or actually no, more like satellites, one thinks of the moons of the planets, or asteroids, when you were a kid you loved that there were asteroids, these islands just floating around which nobody made a big deal of, exotic.  The bottles, you wonder does anybody order for instance that silver one? In this bar beer is obviously the mother planet, whereas that cognac on the shelf that the bartender would have to reach for with his arm all the way out, that is the asteroid. Maybe you will get it, what is it, probably it is that twenty dollar a glass shit but who cares, tonight you are celebrating something. No, what is there to celebrate?  You can't exactly remember.  You came in here to celebrate something cynically, something you saw in the paper, oh, that story about the man who lost his bank a billion dollars, that was it, you were all wound up by that story, a man at an outpost bank, some branch in Asia everybody'd forgotten, hell, a Conradian figure, some Lord Jim of the Islands except now the islands have teletypes, are plugged into computer systems, still you like to think he was out there on his first assignment, and he bets the bank on movements in the Tokyo exchange, nobody notices, just blips, yes, each blip worth a million, a hundred million dollars, who is going to do the radar on that back in the home country, boy is there to make like fucking loans to the Negros to get like fucking oxen and here he is instead just using the bank like it was a car he could go joyriding around in yes, here is to the fall of capitalism,  you liked the erosion you sensed in that small but telling overthrow of fortunes, a glimpse of the Lucretian universe with its own version of freedom and fall, the inexplicable swerve of the atom, rumors in the machine, ineradicable delinquency, seeing the story in the paper you once again touched the event, your own name for that privy maim of what just misses, that wound in the world’s body, illuminated you came in here to celebrate anarchy, soon you are telling the guy next to you all about it, did you see that in the paper, buying him a beer, turns out he’s from Michigan, great, you are talking to him and aware, vaguely, that you have a small problem, a little blackout problem.  Where are you exactly, well you can ease into that with him, no, you are saying, that is where you are wrong, my friend, communism is about the opposite of anarchy, your hand on his wrist,  it is more like another story, although Lenin had some good ideas in the beginning, he is sure, comrade, what about your fucking Soviet Union, that went down with a crash,  you are the state was supposed to wither away, Lenin had some good ideas at the beginning my friend, your hand back to your glass, swirling the liquid there, thing about Lenin is he was really in two revolutions, one was in this dream state in his head, some advanced capitalist society, and the other was the feudal Russia he was stuck with, like a thin man dreaming in a fat man's body, and the disastrous result of putting a dream in power is that it becomes a nightmare. Take Trotsky, you are about to say, but you take a drink instead, as the guy is if they gave everybody the same amount of things, the next day somebody would have more and somebody would have less. Where am I, that would be the startling thing to just pop in. Olive skin.  Pouchy, with a tie, white shirt, his coat unbuttoned.  Ink black, thick beard.  You are trying to focus on where that argument with Jan took place, it seems like it was at a bar, too. Was it even... You scoot your stool out with a sudden thrust of your back and butt, both  hands on the edge of the bar, the four legs scraping on the tile floor, you hop down, sorry, you interrupt him, I've got to make a call, and now you are down at the jukebox, leaning over it, surveying all the little labels under the curve of the glass, the neon light shining up into your face, a chalky white light that emphasizes the dark of the nostrils, the shadowy fringe of eyelash, the songs are mostly country and western and you select an old tune, Ghost riders in the Sky, leaning there you have a moment of looking at yourself and choreographing yourself, your posture, the light, the pleated, tan khakis you are wearing, your awareness of a single woman, blond, in the booth near you, smoking a cigarette. You come into a bar, you push open the heavy wooden door with the sign just inside saying no one under eighteen admitted or the glass door tinted a dark murky blue or green or - if it is a glass door to a  tittie bar - with the paper silhouette of a well endowed woman, the va-va-va-voom curves,  taped to the inside of  the door - and you have a moment in which you attract the loose attention of the boozers at the bar. It is an almost spatial element,  unbound, labile, and spastic, they turn and their eyes, in one measuring stare, are on you. You come into a bar and you immediately are analyzed into your elements of hat, hair length ( and whether it is on your face), sex, and movement, and you are either approved for the place you have entered or you are made to feel that you are out of your frame of reference.  Supposedly sharks are so attuned to the water they swim in that the merest disturbance in the current of it, a wounded flurry in it, an awkwardness scanned from off the displacement of water usual to the healthy stroke,  determines them on direction and speed and desirability of attack. Sometimes this is the case in bars, regulars and drunks having that blurred sense of territory.  There is attention there waiting to lock onto an object, whether that obsession come out as amour fou or visceral, sudden hatred. Alcohol, of course, is the spirit that mediates here between perception and object - which leads to compositions of forces that sobriety would never imagine.  To you, this is one of the great attractions of bars - bars are theater, and entering a new bar is like going through a screen test. You can star for a night in a bar. You can bomb.  The Ghost Riders song makes it click in your head and suddenly you know the name of the bar.  You walk past the booth with the woman and you glance at her and she glances at you. Smile.  You go down the aisle between the booths and the tables.  Johnny O’s. Now you stand at the phone, between Damas to your right and Caballeros to the left, and you fumble in your wallet, looking through the bills in the bill section, three twenties, good, and you spread out bits of paper on the metal shelf beneath the phone, receipts from ATM machines, grocery and liquor stores, bits of unaccountable paper, a napkin with dis. infra. scribbled on it, what the hell, you wad it up and throw it on the floor. On the back of one of the receipts you find the number and you drop the quarter in the phone, dial, and at the other end there is an answer, a female voice, her.  Bright little, tight little Mary Rose.  You dance a step.  Bright little, tight little Rose Marie.  She asks you, after a while, if you’ve been drinking, and you say what do you think and why don’t you meet me.  After a while she says yes, and then you try to explain where Johnny O’s is, and you do a superb job for a man who five minutes ago didn’t know if he were in Santa Fe or New York City. You go on for a bit about the guy who lost his company a billion dollars, you exaggerate.  You claim that he was a high school drop out, you claim that it was a summer job, part time, you laugh, you are I’m not making this up, let’s celebrate, for God’s sake finally something to celebrate. She hangs up.  You hang up, you are laughing, happy, suddenly it seems like a clever idea to celebrate this moment of anarchy, Mary Rose is joining you and she’s a sweet child, sweet nymph, you picked her out when you gave your talk at the university down here, somehow you counted as a New Mexico artist although you yourself point out there should be a residency requirement on that, you’ve only been a summer New Mexican, okay, actually Willet had gotten you that gig, who was teaching photography down there, married and living in that house, his wife a little uneasy around you, Willet must have told her stories about the Austin days, expecting you to pull out your pecker any minute and pee in the fireplace like some Jackson Pollack figure reanimated and let loose in the landscape, but seriously you went on you have been influenced, shaken, really, by the geography blah blah blah, and afterwards, just as you hoped, she came up to talk to you about the summer position you had mentioned. You hang up, but meaning to simply put the receiver on the hook you somehow instead hit yourself with it.  Smart on the nose, bang.  You must have been about to slam the receiver down, too, you were excited, you were overexcited, you get like this, you’ve been doing a lot of astonishingly clumsy things lately, tripping over uneven places in sidewalks, spilling things, spitting when you talk, forgetting to zip your fly, you think maybe you have a brain tumor, something, maybe you’ve always been this clumsy and you just never noticed it before.  No, you’ve always considered yourself a graceful person, leaning on the glass of the juke box just a moment ago you distinctly caught yourself in a moment of pure aura, the blond woman saw it too. Age, sure you are aging, what are you ten years older than Mary Rose, probably, but what with fluoride in the water,  vitamins every day like a religion, the gym, weeks sometimes where your drinking slows down to a thin trickle, thirty three isn’t that bad, it isn’t like fifty three, how old was Dad when he died? Although  in his case, since he himself foreshortened his lifespan... Lately you’ve been feeling like hell, but that is because you are on an absurd schedule, you never seem to get to bed until two and automatically you wake up in a sweat at six. At six o’clock it is all over for you, you feel the burden of being the upside down man, you have been through the mirror and come back to the terror of this unconsciously inversed world, you are a sick man, you are a spiteful man, ridden by ghosts and a ghost yourself indeed, a spiritual cobweb,  lacking  that fundamental grain of reality, if you are in your house in Glorieta in particular,  if Julia isn’t there.  You did slug yourself incredibly hard, though. You hit yourself so hard that you are in through the Caballeros door before you can think, you are bent over, pain, a lot of pain here, your hand cupped over your nose.  You remove your hand and look at it, my God, it is blood.  Your are bleeding, a nosebleed, you are dripping blood on your shirt, your pants, shit, it is a deluge, coming out of your nose, you wince, you couldn’t have broken your nose.  In the mirror you are a mess, you lean over the sink, clogged with a brown towel slimy and slick with the water that saturates it  over the drain cover in the bottom there, you touch it and it is cold, and you try one faucet and then the other, and the other works, good.  Water, you splash water on your face, you straighten up, you lean back, your nose still stings but it isn’t, you are sure, broken.  At this point you start laughing, great, what if the damn thing was, you’d tell her Jule, I did try to stop drinking so much I beat myself up in a bar one night.  You take a towel from the roller, you press the rough texture of it against your nostrils, tamping them, you straighten up and take a good survey of yourself in the bathroom mirror.  You could splash water all over your shirt, or maybe go out and ask the bartender for salt, salt gets out stains. It was in Houston that you had that fight with Jan, it was at your friend Willet’s opening, you’d gotten the invite and you persuaded Jan to come with you since Robert was going to spend the weekend in some hospital in New Iberia. He made a thousand dollars a day, he said, just being on call there, he’d stay in a hotel and smoke reefer and swim in the pool - the only requirement was that he be near a phone.  Like all of Robert’s deals, it sounded fishy, he said he never got a call, or hardly ever.  Some Louisiana or Federal regulation requiring a certain number of  physicians to be on call, he was filling up the quota. So you got Jan to tell Robert she was going shopping in Houston, stay in a hotel, go to some nice stores, go to the opera, and you were hitching with her because of this opening.  Robert would look at you and you would look away, you wondered what the hell he suspected, you assumed that he had to suspect, Jan getting home deep into three a.m., you’d let her go at your door, a kiss, you’d watch her going down the outside stairs, her worried glance back to you  at the turning, then disappearing, the click of her heels on the metal stairs down, you'd wait until the sound suddenly fell dead as she stepped off onto the banquette, she looked to you as you released her like a woman who had just been fucked, she must have smelled of you, you like to think that you have a claiming odor, that no woman can lie under you and not be enveloped in the territory of your scent. You concentrate on getting the bloody traces off your face and drying yourself. Once, in a bar on Maple Street, you got into a fight.  Once, in a bar in Monterry  Mexico, you watched a sweaty, fat woman in a crowded dance hall break a beer bottle and go after a guy with the jagged neck.  You were with a friend, you were leaning on the bar, you'd said you'd wanted to see some whorehouses and so your friend obliged, and this cavernous venue was the last stop of the night. Your friend said it was a real people's place and your friend was that kind of leftist, of which there are touchingly few left, who said people as if he were talking about God's standard of justice embodied on earth - but your friend's parents income kept him at a comfortable distance from authenticity, as you were unkind enough to notice, and this distance came out in his sexual preference, which was for blondes.  So you'd been to whorehouses where the model of beauty was definitely not La Passionara, it was more like Madonna, you'd come into this place and you were frankly in a funk. The standards in this place, as far as you could tell, were all do it yourself. And then this woman, wearing very little, and that at almost the uttermost point of restraint, as if her immense and monumental blubber were about to cast aside the vestments of discredited modesty, in this case a little skirt with a flower print and something that looked like a vinyl vest, pitched with fierce rotundity and a mean and, to your untrained eye, rather skillful thrusting motion of broken glass, into her dancing partner, who jumped away from her and fell over a chair and lay in a heap, like a discombobulated scarecrow.  In that bar on Plum Street you'd been with who? Taking a final glance in the mirror, you had to admit that it looked like you'd been brawling. You'd explain it all to Mary Rose, maybe she would find it funny, you'd explain it all so it sounded funny. As long as it didn't sound drunk. You weren't drunk, though.  It was brain cancer, it must be, so you walk out of the bathroom and make your way back to your stool the same way you came.  You pass by the blond.  Smile. She pretends not to notice. Maybe she can’t see who it is, because the hour has come for dimming the lights.  At least this makes it less noticeable that you are bloody. You get back to your place at the bar. Your friend is gone, and the bartender, looking your way, frowns.  There is another man back there with him, a tall bearded fat man, and your pony tailed friend, looking rather epicene compared to this guy, says something to him.  The bar is getting crowded.  That Maple Street bar was a favorite of Tulane frat boys, and you had been there with Bragg, who was playing up his gay side. He was dancing with you, nothing that intimate, there really wasn’t any place to dance, he’d simply dropped a few quarters in the juke box and in the little bit of space before it he was swaying. You were vaguely swaying, it wasn’t full court dancing, you weren’t really paying attention to the patterns of his movement and following them or making variations upon them,  you all could easily have gone down to the Quarter and danced in any number of gay bars, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. There were bars in the Quarter where it wasn’t a big deal to suck off your partner on the dance floor. But for reasons you cannot now reconstruct you ended up in hostile territory committing just the kind of ambiguous act that would infuriate half the crowd at that bar, which is of course why Bragg was doing it.  The burly, tall bartender comes down and stands in front of you.  That is about all for you, he goes, I think you better go home now.  You look at him dumbly, what, you are I’m not drunk, I’m waiting for somebody.  The man has practiced the inexorable tone, he is sorry, we need you to pay up, what did you do to your shirt, you are nothing, an accident, I’m sick, I have brain cancer.  The man doesn’t think you are funny, something is wrong with your delivery, and then you get stuck on demanding another drink, you keep asking for it, he is I don’t want to come around the bar but I am going to.  In the noise of the bar there is a pocket of silence around you two. People are looking. We don’t want you coming back to this bar. You slam your glass down on the bar and the man has your wrist in his grip, like in a second,  he lifts your arm and slams it down on the bar, you are first of all paying for your fucking drinks and if you made a mess somewhere, I am personally going to mop up your shit with your face, you understand? I was giving you a chance, you wrench your arm free, I am paying, you say, I don’t want any trouble, you are trembling, where is your wallet? You are usually I’m funnier than this, the burly bartender is looking at this couple who are seated a few stools from you, what is it some cordon sanitaire around the poor drunk? You are I’m an artist, you have turned to the couple, an audience, you heard this guy threaten me, I’m going to call my lawyer, I know people in this town, I’m not going to be treated like dog shit, you throw down a twenty, I want change.  The burly guy is you owe ten more, man.  The other twenty.  That time with Jan, you were with a bunch of people, old friends from Austin, from the art school, it was a reunion.  Jan didn’t know most of them, Bragg, Mark, but the main thing bugging her was that Julia came.  It was that night, first time in a year you’d seen Julia.  First extended separation from her since you were seventeen, and you and she were all over each other in a corner.  Jan got tearful and ridiculous, and you got embarrassed for her.  If you only had the balls like that fat woman in Monterrey.  Take your glass, smash it against the edge of the bar.  You’d be at a disadvantage, the burly guy has a large reach and you’d have to make your move across the bar, off balance, your body in a movement that would naturally carry it out of its center of gravity.  The move would only work if it had a lot of force in it. The guy steps back, he’s out of your range, and then he goes for the baseball bat. You aren’t going to get your head split open for nothing. You make your way out of the bar, pushing back against the crowd of people that are suddenly in the bar, between you and the doorway, out the window you can see that aching lingering evening light, it is going to be a long summer evening,  and these people make way before you, you feel yourself collecting looks as you pass, any minute somebody is going to snicker, laugh in your face. Around the bar you can imagine the wisecracks, the quips, the ritual of servility, the customers that saw it trying to get the bartender’s comments, the laugh at your expense, you hate them all briefly not even because in this case it is you who are the victim but because these are the bystanders de toujours, the people who lived outside of concentration camps for five years and then claimed that they had no idea, well isn’t your expulsion from this bar a symptom of fascism, yes, on the micro level, you look at all these greedy, pretty, plump faces, the panicked narcissism that has emptied out every eye tonight and you know in your gut that they will automatically, predictably take the side of power whenever it is a question of a crisis, they just will. Not one of them has the balls to get kicked out of a bar,  you have  worked up your head of steam at last, you are standing in the doorway of this place. One thing you can say for yourself, at least you don’t have that complex, you’ve never had it, you don’t find the stupid application of mechanical force erotic, but those cretins do, they all bare their little bottoms when the man tells them to, oh, it is disgusting, especially for an upside down man.  No one ever sympathizes with the guy who is kicked out of a bar. You pace up and down, trying to think about what to do.  You now have that humiliation in you like a sharp object and you have to either let it go, the Buddhist thing to do, or you have to get revenge. If you let this go, you let everything go: Julia, Dad’s death, your choked art like all of Rousseau’s abandoned babies, politics, memory, your debts, old hatreds, worse old loves, pity, humanity, the lineaments of your common movements and the body of your desires, lines of fate in your hand and elsewhere, the one ball that sags more than the other, birds, the trip to Mexico, hope, your Jeep, the marvel of driving drunk late at night under the inverted cup of the night sky, what’s going to happen with Julia, what’s going to happen, how you are going to get home tonight, Ruth Parquin, credit cards, resistance, rock n roll, every book in your head, every scrap in your studio, parties, anything you have to do or any person you have to meet tomorrow, Mom’s present craziness, Dita and Brian’s money problems, Jan’s hard middle age, the grip of cold selfishness on your heart like someone’s soft white hand squeezing an exhausted tube, Dad’s death, death death... You start hopping up and down, a big red rose of anger is blooming inside you, fantastic, you feel its huge, thick petals stirring, swelling, a vegetable splendor in your chest, maybe it is a heart attack. Mary Rose.  She is supposed to meet you, you have to stay around here.  You are hopping up and down on the sidewalk and a couple tries to get by you and enter the bar, so you stand in front of the guy, you are you all don’t want to go into this bar, this bar... discriminates! A man and a woman. The woman giggles, the man (in bermuda shorts and baseball cap) says get out of the way, man. The SS of bermuda shorts and baseball caps. You move, for some reason you say I’m a black man. Now you have it.  You start hopping up and down, marching in front of the window, the door, you are at the top of your voice Two Four Six Eight, Johnny O’s discriminates.  A little demonstration, you notice people looking out the window at you. You look down at yourself, you do look a sight.  Your shirt is spotted with blood, there are red spots on your pants, Christ, you should have asked the bartender for salt before you left, the least you can do is give me some salt.  You laugh, one two three four, what is it we’re fighting for? You scare a few people away, at least they looked like they were heading toward the place until they saw you like Tom o’ Bedlam hopping around, chanting.  Two people enter despite your pleas. You actually kneel on the sidewalk, please, massa, please don’t enter that place of shame, that abattoir, that drinking parlor where dey puts de strychnine in de beer! You are starting to feel better, next person who comes in or out you will kneel at their feet, this is your best revenge idea ever.  Except killing that bartender. No, you have decided the buddhist line is correct, and you hope at the end of this demonstration you will feel able to let go. Then you will bless the place.  Mary Rose. Mary Rose is coming, and you will have to explain to her. Tom o’ Bedlam is good, in a way all the fools in all the King Lears have been turned out in our streets nowadays, although there is a slight income differential between you and any one of that crew of jesters.  You will explain so much.  Someone to explain so much to. The first thing you have to point out is your evident sobriety, my God. The next person asks what Johnny O’s did.  You are this bar discriminates against drunks. Then the burly man appears, he comes out of the door, what the fuck do you think you are doing? You are I am demonstrating. Look, he says, if you don’t stop this I am getting the cops. Get the cops, man. You are down on your knees, don’t go into this house of misrule! Two girls.  One of them laughs, which is a good sign, the burly man has moved out on the sidewalk, you are still down on your knees.  The thing is to go limp, please don’t hurt me, please, you scream. The girls have gone on down the sidewalk and they have stopped at a certain distance to watch this.  The man is trying to pick you up, which is a mistake on his part because you are limp, so he looks like an utter fool, he can’t catch hold of you, he pounds you once on the back. Dangerous warmth above you, you can feel inside him the restraints breaking down, locks giving way.  Stop it, you scream, stop, alright, man. You feel you and he are poised, here, for something bright, brief and fierce.  You could go further, oh just a little bit further, a needle’s span further, and something would happen. A flaw in the civil order, a man beating another man in an access of that hysterical passion that must be put down, what need for these sweaty brawls? Reptile versus reptile. Creepy twins of disorder, two heavy breathing old farts. Your hand has got caught under your knee and is being scraped on the concrete of the sidewalk. A car has stopped by the curb, you are thinking about rolling a bit both to dislodge your hand and so that you can end up at the feet of this person as though you were some wildcat temperance preacher, on fire with the unpronounceable word of God a permanent drunk on your tongue, clothed for a sign in bloody khakis and a ruined oxford shirt,  you look up, and getting out of the car - oh fire, fire, fire! - dressed in a white miniskirt with white go go boots and a white halter, an expression of indignation distorting the clear, tan skin of her beautifully high cheeked  face (directed, as you can immediately see, at your persecutor and not at you) and thus endearing herself to you forever,  is Mary Rose.

from encyclopedia of the second hand

I wrote a series of chapters to a novel in the 90s. It centered around an artist - Longstreet in some versions, Laff in others - and the things he remembers. The chapters, then, are grouped as entries, and not chronologically. I have finally decided that I probably won't finish this. So I think I'll put them up on my blog, occassionally, to please the few punters who come here.
Here's Kickball

‑    Those inflatable rubber balls, the rubber feeling very thin over the hollow, air filled core.  Although when the ball hits you, it stings.  It can sting.  The surface of these balls, the rubber rind, is always dented.  Not smooth, but always a little pitted.  Pebbly.  You never saw this type of ball outside of school unless someone stole one.  And then everybody would know that this person stole this ball, because it was so distinctive, so it wasn't a great thing to steal, in terms of other great things you could steal, like magazines from stores or the little knicknacks, batteries and disposable razors and such, that they always have hanging up at the checkout counter, or (like your friend Eric's sister, Brenda, did) a necklace from someone you were babysitting for.  Of course, Eric's sister wasn't prudent in committing the last mentioned bit of larceny, because it didn't take a genius to connect  Brenda babysitting last night with the necklace no longer glittering whereever it had been glittering this morning. The lack of necklace loomed large enough that the next day it was restored to Mrs. Phillips by Mr. Klimke, and Eric's sister got punished as she was always getting punished, by being grounded, and as always she glided out of her bedroom window like a little sorority cat burglar when her boyfriend Bobby drove up before the house in his big black Oldsmobile. Which Eric saw, of course, but even though he didn't like his sister he still didn't tell about. That is to his folks. To us he told about it. He always did tell us. Eric's sister never cultivated prudence, which was why, on the back of the Thrift Village there on Shallowcross road you could read that Brenda sucks donkey dicks (a dismissable slander) and that Brenda suck Bobby (grammatically doubtful, but accepted as gospel truth by the Gladstone seventh grade).

     Kickball was the eminent ball of the playground. There was the softball, the basketball, the football, the baseball, and the program was that as we got older these would be our balls, and we would be sorted out according to what ball we were around most. (Oh, you forgot the bowling ball. But that was church. The Sunday School class, organised for a rainy Saturday excursion to the bowling alley and you watching the movie must have been made in the fifties, say, that guy looks funny, he looks like my Uncle, yeah my uncle always wears his undershirt and not a shirt over it and the movie voiceover telling Longstreet to take his steps up to the line like in the diagram step a and dot dot dot step b ahead of it and the arm back hey though these finger holes are too small and the after swing ‑ perfecto, man, but the ball I don't think the ball is right see it keeps curving like you know that means they must of unbalanced it by putting more weight on the right, man, and that isn't fair). But up until the sixth grade we were all sort of under the sign of the kickball. Liberte, egalite and fraternite, translated into elementary school terms, meant kickball. If Engels had been around we might have reminded him of that stage of primitive communism when everything is pretty groovy and even the girls get to play on the kickball teams, and then later on he might posit an Asiatic feudal stage in balldom, when the huge project was sorting out the bats and finding the things like petrified pillows for bases and then setting up our configurations and all of this division of labor tending to establish a definite tyranny and caste system, with the outfield getting to play the pariah parts. Any clumsy jerk could be stationed out there, and a lot of times they doubled or tripled up, so there are three right fielders at a time, two left fielders, and so on. 

‑    I should try to be more conscientious of the limits of my world, or at least put in markers here, little surveyor's clues, even if the real limits are by their essence such that the slave to them cannot see them.  The real limits are invisible and function invisibly, the real limits are self‑suppressing, the real limit is not the wall I touch but the interface between touch and wall. I  am talking about the Gladstone Elementary School playground as if it were representative of all elementary school playgrounds, at least of a certain era, but I have to say my sample is limited. The only other playground I had any familiarity with is the Dallastown, Pennsylvania Elementary School playground. The Earlys moved to Gladstone, a suburb of Atlanta, when Street was nine, and Mom was happy about that cause she didn't like living up North so much and so she really got on Dad when he got the opportunity to come down here, Dad was doing a little of this and a little of that and had ended up there in Pennsylvania working on a newspaper for, Street was surprised to learn twenty years later talking to Dad on his porch and Dad reminiscing about that time, Dad making six thousand a year. And it was only four thousand more, the ad agency in Atlanta, but Mom kept pointing out it was a ground floor opportunity, look, honey, this article says  Atlanta is the new New York, it is like the place to be. Honey. Like it was the opportunity of a lifetime.  We could live near Grammy Shillowford. It is important to note that Longstreet had, by that time, incorporated playground in my paradigm of how to be ‑ yes, it was that stark, in those stark terms, that I thought, since I was a melancholic child ‑ and so my memories of kickball, which don't go back to Dallastown, where we played rather chaotic and un‑ball‑organized games, plug into my playground and classroom routine.

‑   In Dallastown you were beaten up on the playground. No, that is an exaggeration ‑ you were never physically beaten up, but you were the object of a certain amount of bullying. The bullying made an impression. For instance, there was this tyke Amazon who would come after you with her coat. She'd swing her coat so that the zipper would hit you. Of course, the zipper didn't hit you very often because you ran away. Now why she came after you with the coat in the first place, that has to do with the reasons children find the targets they do, and that has to do with miseries that are accumulated from elsewhere. From one's relationship to Mom and Dad ‑ standard answer. From the air, from God, the curses of angels or mad toothfairies, who knows, but the important thing is that children, with their back‑to‑the‑primates program of selecting out the weak, are going to find your weak spot.

     Now, here is the thing: by the time you got to Gladstone you were not tormented, or not particularly, and certainly not by children of your own age.  The reason for this is that you were a quick student, you liked to read, you impressed your teachers, and that gave you a certain amount of power, a power base, and it taught you how to use powerful allies to establish yourself.  Not that you told, you didn't have to tell. It was that you could have told and didn't, actually, that made the difference. It is easy to caricature what I am talking about here, we have the vocabularies we inherited from childhood, we  know about sneaks, queers, snitches, bookworms, bullies, but if I turn my back on that sad gallery and really think about it what impresses me is the diplomacy involved in classroom and playground survival, the ability to pick the right moments for remaining loyal and the right and legal moments for jettisoning one's allies, ah, the terrible beauty of Realpolitik in Kinderwelt, ah, the friends who turned out to be mistakes, or somehow became mistakes, not that at first they were mistakes but it was like the effect of some terrible hidden gene, you would be gone a summer from them and you'd come back and there your friend would be, a mistake, a pud, a sucker, coloring the very air around him with unhealthy vulnerability.

‑   So in Atlanta you have a system down, you have a power model that you have discovered, you are very quick to establish yourself.  By the fifth grade you have established yourself on the playground.  All of our models are so crude, it goes along with picking my nose or my butt and not worrying about it, it goes along with poking a straw in my nostril, it goes along with the thing Eric can do with  his eye by putting his finger on the lid right at the corner and pulling it and like pulling his eye right up so that you only see the runny white of the eye, gross, this all goes along with the rawness of the assertions and surrenders on the playground. You have got to where you are in the middle of the kids who are selected for Jackson's team. Jackson Whittemore is the biggest kid in fifth grade and his team usually wins, so you are comfortable, this is the middle management level which a lot of these kids will go into, it starts from here.

‑    The kickballs come out of a closet.  The janitor's closet.  The doors of all the classrooms are wooden doors, easy doors to open, but the special doors in the school, the door to the office, the door to the bathroom, and the doors to the storerooms, they are all heavy metal doors. The janitor unlocks it selecting one key from a great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt.  The janitor, the main janitor of the Gladstone Elementary School is an old black man (which means around fifty, to Street the thick, tufted gray hair signifies extreme age, and he has no eye for the damage and endurence of black skin, his measurements are all in white skin) who at some later date ‑ when Street is already in High School ‑ has to leave the school because he is caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked women.  God knows what is involved in such a complexly suggestive gesture. A teacher will get Grady to unlock the door and he'll be attended by volunteers.  Maybe the teacher will go with Grady herself, but most of the time the teachers' point of view is that playground time means going to the teacher's lounge and taking a drag on a cigarette. So without Miss Petty or Beston or Muldive we would get nine balls, and sometimes they would be deflated and they are neat when they are like that because you can crevice the surface in this way or that way, and if you knock a dent in the ball and then knock another one in it the dents you form will interfere with each other, and that is endlessly fascinating for about two minutes.  The other interesting thing about hitting the ball to obtain these dents is that it makes an interesting thump, and the other interesting thing about it is that when the ball is pumped up the dents will pop out, and that is good to watch. The ball looks like it is alive when this is happening, a strange seal or something, like it is eating, or at least the way things eat in cartoons where a lot of times what is eaten is swallowed whole, gulp, and it just stays the same inside, in fact if the thing eaten is the smart thing, like the Roadrunner, then it just lights a match and the thing eating it, like the Coyote, has to spit it out.

     Okay, the balls come out of the storage closet and suddenly they are all over the playground.  Little impish red balls, around which coalesce groups of boys and girls and teachers, the ones who aren't smoking in the lounge, which it must be that they switch on and off.  Boys and girls, though: this is a teacher's words.  I write this, I veer, I am in another perspective with the touch of a word.  Kids.  We were kids, I was a kid. We were big kids and little ones, we were girls only in a special tone (geerl. You're a geeerl ‑ a special taunt among the boys) and we were boys only in pathetic moments when we were licking the ass of some especially chosen adult, like going home with some story of malfeasance to a parent (he was a big boy ‑ he was a bigger boy ‑ phrases to evoke sympathy and, one hoped, rage ‑ maybe Daddy will go over there and beat up Mr. Whittemore!).  We could all easily be pretty pathetic lackies, childhood being a wonderful discipline for later acts of supererogatory servility

‑     But normally we werent lackies ‑ we were, as I have tried to point out, diplomats, secretaries of state on delicate missions in perilous international situations.

‑   Shift a little, Street, shift the focus.  Because I want this to be clear ‑ to actually describe the world of kickballs involves a lot of subtle stuff, it involves the whole metaphysics of description and depiction, that stitching between art and life. 

‑    My dream is to describe myself into existence.    

‑   There is always a word, but not simply a word: a charm. An open sesame, a one if by land and two if by sea.  The lock is unlocked, the stone is lifted, the agents meet in the park at twelve and exchange briefcases. Yes, not simply a word, because its synonyms won't do, the place that it holds is uniquely its own, its function is to transform the situation, to make visible the threshhold between absense and appearance.  Like a stage mindreader, your challenge is to pick out a few  experiences from the nattering psychic throng, all those unnamed lifes, all those random vibes. Except here, in the palace of memory, those lifes are one life: your own.  Your own, splintered into a thousand aspect

‑    There is another kickball game which comes later, comes in high school.  It is called smear the queer, although like all these names there are official and unofficial titles and I'm pretty sure Coach Sick, who had a hard enough time saying sperm when the time came for him to say sperm when we got our sex education class from him, I'm pretty sure he didn't go around saying smear the queer, he probably said something more World War II like, like bombardment. Anyway, the game was played inside, in a room that had one wall open so you could lean out and look down on the gym floor and the girls and their little uniforms down there.  I should explain that you are in a school district where they have compressed Junior High and High School, because other people I talk to, they say ninth grade was Junior High.  Well, not for Street.  Now, the girls were inside for the same reason we were:  it was raining.  But you didn't have much of a chance to look down like that, because smear the queer was a hyperbusy game.  It was simple;  two teams, lined up each before a wall, faceing each other.  You could run out a certain distance, to a line running across the floor. You hurl a kickball right before the line.  If it hit some boy, that boy was out.  The tempo of the game was different from the kickball games you played at Gladstone .  Those earlier games were sort of slow fusion jazz, a lot of riffs of inactivity ‑ retrieving the ball, watching the pitcher pitch it, the exchange between catcher and pitcher, neither of whom was better than anybody else at catching the ball, since to catch the ball you had to have a developed sense of speed and the curves that the ball would take and we were all a little primitive about that. Most of the time when the kicker did hit it the ball was foul, and somebody had to go retrieve it, and even when he did kick it and it was legal it usually didn't have to involve you.  Mostly you could confine your involvement to yelling, maybe a little sympathetic movement towards the part of the field where something was going on. But in smear the queer, Coach Sick kept tossing in kickballs, and since there wasn't any set time for anybody to throw a ball balls were constantly in the air, so you could be dodging one and be hit by another.

‑    What do you think is going to happen? Do you think this is going to end with some more profound knowledge about the meaning of kickball?  Do you think, yes you do think, that if you do it right, if you reach the magic moment of greatest specificity, the sound one day of the ball crunching on the sandy mixture they laid on top of the playground that you had to dig down a foot through before you reached clay, the ball bounding towards you segment by segment larger but not so that you had time to mark the stages of its fascinating trajectory, the ball actually heading in your direction and the screams and yells suddenly receding like the soundtrack going out, something screwed up  with the friggin projector as Mr. Dupley in exasperation and shadow said one day, the ball almost in your hands and you squatting down in the catcher's squat for it, if you get this in the crosshairs, see it, know that posture and the waiting and how suddenly you don't want to be here, it will be like a kickball will drop out of the story, memory's relic take physical form, Lazarus as kickball come back from the dead come to tell you all I will tell you all.

ukraine, russia and crimea

I’ve noticed with some amusement that the hawks have come out about Russia and the Ukraine. Timothy Snyder at the NYRB is practically foaming at the mouth, warning that if Crimea is annexed it will mean the end of the “European order”. Similarly, David Remnick and his reporters at the New Yorker are pulling out propaganda tricks that were old in 1991, when they were used to propell the US into the defense of tiny, embattled, and surely democratic (or semi-democratic or completely feudal) Kuwait.

Myself, I think Putin’s annexation ploy is probably a feint that will allow him to get what he wants anyway by “compromising” and making Crimea totally autonomous. But even if Crimea is annexed, there is little Europe or the US can do about it.

However, there is a certain lesson, here – a lesson that we are forced to swallow every four or five years. The lesson is that America’s gung ho gang of interventionists always cause immense and long range trouble. For instance, the Putin who Remnick spits on is, what? The product of Boris Yeltsin. And as those who have memories longer than your average tv anchorman, Boris Yeltsin’s second term was the result of a massive and unprecedented use of private funds and government power, and was influenced by the same American government/NGO nexis that has traditionally gone around making a sham of elections in various “strategic” countries.

Remnick’s comments on the 1996 elections are, in this context, extremely relevant. First he quotes from Adam Michnik: “Today, Russia stands before a dramatic dilemma to which no one yet has given a reasonable answer. What is better: to disrupt the rules of democracy and chase out the totalitarian parties while they are sufficiently weak, or to respect the democratic order and open these parties to the road to power?” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/17/1996_06_17_005_TNY_CARDS_000373659 This is the kind of orotund stuff that is the cat’s meow to American pundits. Kissinger said it much better about overthrowing Allende:  "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due  to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

In the event, though, Michnick’s dilemma was solved by a judicious use of power that Remnick compared to what John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Rutherford Hayes did – to which we can add George W. Bush, then not on the horizon. So the state media saturates the zone with pro-Yeltsin news and fake photo ops.

It was a classic operation, and it even involved a photo-op war – the war in Chechnya. The war had a strange effect on Chechens – they seem to multiply right before the election and vote in overwhelming numbers for your friend and mine, Boris Yeltsin, putting him over the top. A winner!

In fact, Time Magazine was so proud that they impertinently put out an issue, Yanks to the Rescue, in 1996, detailing  just how the Americans had rejiggered the Yeltsin campaign. Of course, they avoided talking about the really dirty stuff, but the model was created that would elect Putin in 2000, and thereafter the Russians could take over the reins in running dirty elections.

However, butter does not melt in the mouth of yesteryear’s interveners, always straining at the bit to visit some new disaster upon the world, and spitting on those who oppose them as the friends of totalitarianism and the murderers of Mickey Mouse.

I resent that latter charge. My son loves his Mickey Mouse, and I wouldn’t hurt a hair on that Mouse’s head.

But the official mediasphere, for too too long, has had its run of DC’s toys. One of the effects of the Bush-Obama deal, which solidified the plutocracy on the top of the American economy and has allowed the bottom 80 percent to slip decorously into the shit, is that it is hard to get that 80 percent all excited about our national interests in Crimea.

Just as with Georgia, Putin is playing for low stakes, and the US will lose and give John McCain an ulcer. To say this isn’t to celebrate Putin, a true butcher and an heir to an illegitimate and corrupt system.  It is to look at the real effect of the 90s fun filled shock therapy, mafioso ologarcho takeover of industries, and the skewing of the very beginning of Russian democracy by the farce put on in 1996. The let’s do it again crowd should not be listened to.