Labels: By Ana

One would think I would have left as soon as I walked in, and saw what that man was about, with his crazy ideas of conceptual art. But I didn’t. And it wasn’t out of hope, that I stayed… or love, not then; or even desperation. The truth is there was nothing so noble that drove me into that hell-hole. It was shock, and awe, and morbid fascination. And I am so ashamed.
And I’ve suddenly realized you will never believe this. All of it. But you need to. Because it is true. And because I will never free myself from the past if it is not believed in… and could you treasure it? because maybe it needs to be treasured.
My poet’s apartment always smelled like paint. I think it was a mixture of the blood and the narcotics that lay puddled in the cracks in the floor; heroin and turpentine and things that lose their minds inside the bloodstream, that flood your own mind in effort to reclaim what is rightfully their’s. They say you could get high from walking on his ground, from the cracks in your feet splitting into blood, from the blood meeting the intoxication that thrived between the floorboards.
A lot of poets contracted AIDs inside his apartment. It’s really a good thing I always wore my socks.
(and condoms).
And I think my visions of feet pajamas were my vague attempts at salvation. I was like the woman who flails her arms to save herself from the shark, when he is already upon her. My dreams were flailing little wills to protect his feet, to save his blood, to save his mind, his immunities, his dead best friends. I have just realized this now.
And I am ashamed. I want to banish that noble calling of shame from the faces of the earth, forever. But shame makes me immobile, makes me hopeless. Not even the murderers deserve to be ashamed. or maybe only the murderers. But not the bad children, or the ugly people, or the whores.
I’m listening to shitty kind of new rock music on the radio. I can’t tell if it’s mostly static or if it’s supposed to be like that. Whatever happened to rock and roll? I am ashamed of the generation we have produced. I am ashamed of what all the dead have done in their collective copulation. Because, somehow, it devolved to this. If Einstein had had children it would have been different. The gene pool is what needs this generations’ “technological advances,” not fucking cell phones. and they’re too arrogant to notice. Whatever happened to rock and roll? And I am not ashamed of them for their music. I’m not really ashamed of them at all. Well, maybe a little. But mostly, I’m ashamed of myself for understanding this shit, for being perfectly familiar with the ignorant righteousness, with the instinctual indignation; It’s that sense that you’re born with that life just isn’t fair, but that it’s worthy of your anger…and later, of your shame.
I am so ashamed. My entire life, I have lived wrong. Half the time I knew it and did it anyway because it was easier.
I fucked my poet. You probably guessed. This is like the plot of a movie my brother would boycott. A movie where the audience has been holding its breath, for the predictable attainment of the cliché dream. It’s kind of like sex, all over after the orgasm. Our friendship went kind of like that, it really did. The only thing keeping us happy was the anticipation of the obvious.
The problem was I overstayed the anticipation.
Shit. Is counter-culture poet sex really that predictable? Let’s wax-poetic: Our jazz blood, just about busting through our HIV-infused veins, sinew on starving sinew. Alcohol breathing down the neck, remorselessly.
It’s like a movie my brother would make. To him, as long as it’s counter-culture, it loses that cliché factor that he’s so against. Problem is, he’s wrong. It’s like the grass-roots governor campaign he was so keen on running….and so keen on filming. He does documentaries. They’re bullshit, though, completely contrived.
So I ran for governor. And the upshot was I didn’t even make it to the ballot. My campaign slogan was: The best of both words: famous name, but the heart of an average Joe. The whole campaign was run out of Wal-Mart, because my brother works at Wal-Mart. He gained some converts, though… not to me, but to atheism. And I’ve decided that I kind of hope he’s wrong about there being no god….just for the look on god’s face, just to put the fear of god into him, just because he could use it.
Christ, I sound like an old man.

In case you were wondering, I never thought that I was gay…I never thought that I was anything like that. I never gave a damn.
I think my brother thought that he was gay for a while. He’s hinted at it vaguely in our awkward “getting to know each other” phone calls, oddly reminiscent of conversations with girls I was dating in high school. It was that same rush to pour your life through the phone line, without seeming too over-eager. Sometimes, I could see my brother’s whole life, whizzing towards me, in the phone line, through some town in east Nebraska.
And so my brother hinted awkwardly at some struggle with some sexual identity or other. And I remained silent. Truth is I remained silent through much of our conversations. Truth is I wasn’t trying to pour my life through a wire. I was just listening, just breathing on the other end, unknowingly but unabashedly inspiring unease or acceptance. I just listened.
And my brother knows almost nothing about me.
He doesn’t know my race or my dad’s real last name.
He doesn’t know any of it.
The truth is I don’t really like my brother, but I’m sorry about that. But I don’t know why.
In the AARP magazine that is delivered to my house every month since I’ve been of age, they mention “curmudgeons“. and, I, this 50-some ought year-old didn’t know what a curmudgeon was. It’s a funny word, though. It sounds like a butter substitute.
So now that I’ve read the article, I think I’m a curmudgeon. And maybe that’s the only reason I dislike him.
I generally toss it up to his pretentious artist bullshit. But I’ve been there too. I’ve dressed in all black or nothing and had orgies with men in Greenwich village.


- posted by Joe @ 10.10.03

Labels: By Ana

Monday, September 29, 2003
 
As you may have noticed, I am Joe Dimaggio. A real one. Not the dead one. I'm not some long-lost ghost of baseball. Like the Elvis of the sport, being dug up and revived and paraded around to a full house in Vegas; fat middleaged men (much like myself) milking me of all my stale glory. I'm very much alive. Well, not very much, but enough. Enough to mourn. Last year, my father died and i've lost much of my life, but somehow I'm still alive enough to mourn. And enough to be taxed, and touched, and enough to be lonely. And somehow i am alive enough to run for California state governer. Which I am. I really am. My shrink said it would help.

I suppose this is the introduction to my life, my life runnning non-linear through my wilting brain. Yes, my brain, though only 55, is wilting, I've decided. All the color is being drained from its crevices that grow memories like moss. And the memories are plentiful. And I have no one to give them to. No one to help me understand how they began and became more than images, but whole universes to fall into and believe in and die inside. But i don't want to die inside them. I just want them to be seen, and heard and forgiven, somehow. And...Christ, I'm just so lonely.
- posted by Joe @ 29.9.03


Sunday, October 05, 2003
 
My brother's my campaign manager. My half-brother bastard. i'm a bastard too, actually, if you count that week of pregnancy before the marriage. Does that count? Maybe it only does if you're Catholic. And I'm not. Yes, despite the last name, folks, I'm not even Italian.

My brother was raised Italien. He picked up the accent, and all. He used to be Catholic. And even though he still wears this horrificly detailed cross, and prays to Mary, he says that he's an aetheist now. I I was always so greatful to have been raised Jewish, just so I didn't have an unsightly dead guy around my neck. Really, what a thing to walk around with.
Anyway, my brother says he's seen the light. Or rather, the lack there of. It doesn't seem to me he's changed much from being Catholic, though. He still gets all righteous about how Washinton is against him, and he still tries to convert old jews at the mall. I still pretend I don't know him.

So my brother showed up a few years ago at my doorstep. He saw me for the first time though this big video camera of his. He makes films. I panicked. And so he said, in this dramatic voice that I'm his brother. And I stood there awkwardly in my bathrobe.
It was the 80's, then. Everyone who was young or wanted to believe they were, was dressed in clothes too big, clothes faling off in neon colors. My brother was apparently young enough to make an ass of himself, completely unquestioningly. Not me. I always wore my postman uniform. And later, when the postal service invested in those trucks, I took to wearing my bathrobe out on the job. I'd been working 20 years or so on litle more than minumum wage, and so I figured I was entitled to losing my dignity. Everyone accepted my change in attire non-chalantly. They wouldn't even let me properly lose my dignity. The bastards.

Anyway, when my brother first showed up, my heart skipped. And not because he was my late mother's illegitimate son. It had nothing to do with that, actually. Liked most things in life, it instead had to do with sex.

In 1972, my mother died.

A thought: when are you too old to be an orphan? 10? 20? I think i am a 55 year old orphan.

I used to wonder, when I went to my dad's friends' funerals as a kid, what my mourning style wold be, exactly. Because the survivors always acted differently. They rarely mourned like the perfectly black and white people did in Hollywood, and so it was always disappointing for me. I secretly hoped the dead guy's mistress wouold climb on the casket, pouding the glass and screaming "why?!" then collapse and hug the casket, weeping. But she never did. The mistress was never terribly vocal at these things. But you could never even count on the legitimate survivors for decent melodrama. Sometimes they were hysterical, choking on the air in their lungs, and sometimes they sat stoically, taking in the day's events as if it were a witness' testimonial, begging their judgement; or they cried silently; or sat in smiling appreciation, as if of the beauty of a sunset.
When my mother died, I found that I would have been rather perplexing to a 10 year old boy at a funeral. My mourning style was half-assed. And It was fickle. I went through the 4 or 5 stages of mourning, or whatever the hell they are, atleast 20 times each, and in no particular order. The common thread through all of it was that there was no hope. No matter how outraged or functional I felt, I only had to silence insignifigant voices to hear the trembling that that life was empty. Last year, it was the same, except it roared.
Through all of it, I didn't miss a day of work.
And i found, somewhere in a droning of voices in my mind, a letter in a mailbox that was addressed "to anyone." On the outside of the envelope, all it said was "to anyone." and i was the only anyone who'd ever find it, the only one who'd see it before the person who'd discard at the post office like letters to santa-clause, letters with imaginary adressees. and i couldn't lt it happen...because i wasn't imaginary. and i... i was "anyone."
it was read on a bus home with quivering hands. and it overpowered my hopelessness, quivering too.

you know, all this reminiscent shit is just trying to make these experiences beautiful, trying to make them worthy of something more than my subsistence, or maybe just worthy of my suibsistence. maybe that would be enough. i don't want them to be folded up inside me anymore, like intestines, crumpled into inefficient function, into the longest distance between myself and clarity. there is no access, now, to the clarity that is rumore to be waiting behind the palest eyelids.

and maybe, if i can make death lovely, it will not come.

in 1972, death had alreay come. and not just to me, but to the man that wrote the letter.
It took me a week, after unfolding it, to decipher every word, to place every letter between every other other letter. And it was lovely. And death stopped quivering in my ears. the words slipped effortlessly beside eachother. Poetry. A few years later, the man who write it would be the poet laureate. but then, he was just a poet. my poet.
and so i found his doorstep again in the grid that is manhatten. truly, i found his doorstep every day. i brought him catalogues. but he had not gone outside for the mail. They piled up, forlornly; the lists of books and spices for purchase; they kept company to the bills that were becoming overdue. a fear grew in me that he would be evicted, that they would tear him away from the walls, in feet pajamas. in my fantasies, even the darkest ones that involved my poet, he always wore feet pajamas. i have begged an explanation of this, from my psychiatrist. when pressed, she says that freid said feet were sex, and since my poet's feet were covered, these dreams lacked sexual intent. Even, i wondered silently at the woman in the cushoned chair, when i fantasized of touching my poet? and even when these fantasies were realized? but i have gotten ahead of myself. you are not supposed to know of this yet. only know of my poet's existence. and his feet pajamas, that were, by the way, blue.
So i wrote my poet letters. They were never so beautiful as his. They never succeded in effortlessness. And he never checked his mail. So it mattered little. And one day, i went inside. The door to his brownstone in harlem was unlocked. The walls were covered in graffittied hysteria and he was screaming in the bedroom. He was screaming what i recognized as the roar of hopelessness, what i wondered later if he had began, in that summer of 1972.
He was naked, in the bedroom. He was carving his nails into the wall, and i was terrified. I suddenly realized that all the graffiti was his blood, from under his nail, from it scraping the plastor.
And i held him. And he was cold and white and bleeding, like his walls. And i loved him. Because i knew that the epics of loneliness, and insight, that had been contained inside that envelope to anyone, were still contained inside his mind. I knew he had his sanity, that it was just stored away. And that the only difference between him and i was that the trembling was louder, now, in his mind.
I skipped work, the next day, for the first time, after sleeping there, as he recovered rom a binge on pills in bottles that I didn't recognize.
I take those pills, now. For a heart conditon i developed from taking too many of thise pills. But i strongly believe the heart condition is realy just "Irony" w/ a big latin name to throw me off.

My poet told me i was like him because i had jazz blood. From my dad. and that jazz blood was different from all other blood because of it's pulsing, because of the way it pushed itself through your heart, crying the blues. My poet told me all sorts of beautiful things, and i always believed him.

My poet hated me. And once i saw it, he was spitting it into my face, but i still culdn't leave him.

- posted by Joe @ 5.10.03

Labels: By Ana

Labels: By Ana

Labels: By Ana

Labels: By Ana

and as i'd sleep in class i'd dream that i was trampled as they poured into the school, trampled by sketcher's and saucony, and as their uncaring feet pushed into me, my spirit was ground into the earth, until i became the dirt, and as they all left and the dust rose, i was the dust. and at last there was silence. and at last there was peace.

Labels: By Ana