Always remember that you are here having realized the necessity for contending with yourself; therefore thank everyone who affords an opportunity.
- Thirtieth study house aphorism of Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjief
The Quantum observer ceases to fiddle between particle & wave and simply assumes the position.
- Hakim Bey, “No ontology without pharmacology”
How old were we when we met, you and I? You’d suppose I would have to have been an adult in official terms, though I’m not convinced I’ve arrived there, adulthood, in any credible sense, ever, not to this day. Neither of us treated the other especially well, and I heard some stuff later on, you understand, but I never thought of you as a conspicuously mean or underhanded person, nothing like that. I’d even say I miss you, though I’d hardly be offended were you to remind me that us inmates are widely known to pitch woo at anything flashing a pulse. Well, nearly it’s so, I go ahead and I confess for us.
From day one, for me, the main thing I wanted to do was just basically break away from the squares, the normies, and I find out that normal society gets annoyed by this, persists in harassing you, and that you yourself, having set out to make a go of it your own way, are gonna best-case-scenario stumble a bunch before settling out anywhere.
I once took to heart words written by the author Milan Kundera but told to me by you, something to the effect of, like, you know...physical love isn’t possible without violence. This isn’t really news to you, is it? And he who raises his fists thoughtlessly risks losing them. Uncle Peter would advise people respective of the latter aphorism in order to goad them on. That’s the rub. Cottage gnosis. Fool me once….
Mind if I smoke one of these?
No, excuse me if I’m heavy and weird a little quick, but though I loved Peter I guess I was glad his end was a comic and stupid one. My whole continuity of essential self is founded on the thoughtless raising of my fists. Growing up with Watergate and the Warheads, I thought all the repression demonstrated around me daily pretty fanciful, but slowly it outraged me, then sickened me. It sickened me real bad. I tended to work too hard at things that went nowhere and when I lost my virginity Ronald Regan was about to be elected president.
A lot of vengeance can get stored up in a brainstem, for a long time as though it were passively minding its business. You are forced to put on masks, then hate them, hate yourself; your sensitivity; your fears, anxieties, and perversions. You know what I’m saying?
I started to beat the shit out of the other kids. I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t feel good—felt very good. What is so bad about the possibility of losing one’s fists? Are they not on lone, essentially? Now, I don’t read a lot of books, that was always the case. I was always surrounded by myriad bookish types, though, people who read a lot and never seem to shut up. Recently my councillor, Patty, was talking about this bit in Freud where the good doc puts the fears, anxieties, and perversions on the phantom umbilicus that keeps us tethered to our mothers, our fathers, the flicker show of memory, certain death, and, hell, maybe the mother ship. We wouldn’t get turned on by naked flesh if we didn’t know our number could be up any second. We wouldn’t bother writing books, we wouldn’t have babies or set goals. We wouldn’t, as you
always used to say, have to ‘help make a better world for the chickens.’ We wouldn’t get into fistfights either.
Scared little mammals wary of getting smeared across the asphalt.
You may not get to enjoy death and dying, not in any sense you’d reasonably be expected to credit, but all your joys are linked nevertheless back by that diaphanous tether to the foreordained terminus and its highly irregular certainty. But, really, the angry kids have an early chance to know about the living power of certain death and the loss in the fists that becomes their gain. Afraid to lose my fists? No. It is this energy that I am channeling.
Really young, I played the piano for a while, having it appeared a natural knack. Whatever I was doing at the piano became the same thing in an augmented, back-part-of-town form by way of fisticuffs and vice, or, really, strictly, fighting and fucking. You are playing and playing and you get sucked into this place where you are playing faster than you can possibly think about playing. This is the thing. You are at the threshold, and then you are at the faster than fast, where heroes sink or swim. Above your body, the soul comfortably seated, feet up, watching those fingers dance across the keys. It’s the key to the martial arts and also why there are still those who steadfastly declare them an art. Poets have to be doing some version of this, don’t you imagine? Opera singers produce vibrations from their ribcages that surprise even them. Philosophers must find themselves in concept-thickets by which they are sometimes appalled and mystified. Deeper than deep. Painters, monks, onanists of muse-time. Quieter than quiet, more real than she. After the piano, which had a best-before date, I had to opt for beating folks to a pulp and jumping their bones. In sixth grade I beat up this kid Roger, who was big, and it became sort of a big deal. He had been teasing me for weeks, him and his four compatriots. They’d beat me, pull my hair, rip my clothing, declaim their tired epithets. They’d sometimes do this in front of the girls, some of whom would giggle, and that got to me. This one day, Roger and his friends had followed me home from school, for the first few blocks just whistling and sort of cooing, a safe distance—at first. I was sweating very heavily and then it was all of a sudden like I was having my personal revelation of God. It just happened, as they say, but what a thing to have happen! A busy intersection, just before my neighbourhood, cars streaming through rapidly, bullies breathing down my neck, here I am—one of them’s just called me ‘a baby,’ suggested I’m ‘scared’—violently wielding a roadside construction sign, one perfect arch of which connects with Roger’s jaw, putting his lights temporarily out. The twang had been loud, Roger had collapsed in a heap. I hit him in the head with the sign when he was down, his friends were running away, and there was this horrible sound for a while which, like the aforementioned Opera singer, I was confounded to discover issued from me. I basically fucked my pillow and mattress all night that night. Like I was trying to expel a ball of fire.
I hadn’t really beat Roger up, you see. I’d really attempted to cave his head in.
After that, I would beat all five of those guys up individually every time I found one of them alone with girl bystanders along to oversee. The girls didn’t like me any more than they had previously, but their petrified awe delighted me.
The one big fracas I would always tell about, and which you always liked to hear about, was from grade eleven, you remember? I was already over six feet tall and physically uncommonly strong, but I’d not yet taken on any kind of regimented program of daily aerobic and anaerobic exercise.
The extremely wealthy are annoyed and irritated by consumer goods. It were as though they'd always aspired to a kind of immateriality. Like users of intravenous opiates. This is perhaps also my natural violence in another form. You couldn’t really say, could you? Ha ha. I just did. It’s officially sufficiently so, goddamn. Brad and myself, in grade eleven, were not into the downers, alcohol I guess excepted. We did not shoot smack; we ate speed like icing sugar, drove around, listened to The Clash. Liquid courage plus accelerant. Anger filled me like helium and I was buoyant with it. The party where I fucked all those dudes completely up was at a house where the rich kids were always having parties. Brad and I were not wanted and we did not customarily attend. We only went that night for trouble, but we didn’t talk about it in those terms, and I can’t say whether or not either of us consciously thought of it that way.
There was a girl. There always is, always was. Cassandra. You know that, or once did. Brad and I crash this party, and it’s about trouble and about Cassandra, which are each of them coiled around one another. Brad is this greasy punk who buys liquor for everybody but who nobody likes. We’re deviants, and since it’s what distinguishes us, we’re working on perfecting it—greasers, almost, like in The Outsiders—and I am in love with being around Cassandra and not knowing what to do with myself around Cassandra. There’s all these girls dressed almost like bridesmaids; Sunday-dressed. We’re wasted. There’s this guy, Josh, captain of the various teams, right? Girls are drinking fancy foreign beer out of the bottle. I’m a little wasted on Jack Daniels, heh heh, and I see Cassandra walking, dressed like the other girls, a kind of tawdry doll person, and immediately everything I am doing or saying is wrong, weird, and happening to me like I’m watching another guy, but, really, it is hostility and I knew it was there but it was like the proverbial iceberg with only a teeny bit showing…above the surface. I was feeding whisky and Budweiser to Josh’s dog and Brad was holding the dog down. Ha ha. Blowing cannabis smoke in its snoot. We’re laughing so hard and so desperately we’re gasping. As though what we are doing is clever! Ha ha. We may not even have been conscious that we were starting a brawl, difficult as that may be to credit.
Josh Miller came out of the house followed by Eurotrash 80s synth-rock and some field hockey girls in dresses and stockings, everybody yelping after the dog’s welfare. Naturally, the sequence of events gets even more hazy from here, which is kind of how we know, incidentally, that violence only further intoxicates. ‘Leave my dog be,' says Josh, you know, ‘or it’s your ass.’ And I’ll be damned if I don’t lose my fists right then and there. Other rugby players attempt to intercede. Brad was explaining how very fond of the dog he and I are, but shortly after that there’s just a basic oceanic, sinusoidal uproar. Thwack, thwack, then, like two-by-fours are dropping in from somewhere, and I’m just fuckin’ swingin', man. Josh has those big upper arms, but I’ve wiped his face off his face, real righteous-like. Who does Josh think he is? Well, his head is quiet for the moment. I’d cut the pig open all the way from stem to stern, were it up to me, as I inhale this whole fuckin’ back deck, all these rugby cunts and bridesmaid doll-person wastoids. Am I serious? You know very well! I hurl a green beer bottle through the air, see it spiral in its sheeny pulchritude. I’d sort of known, I guess, that I needed to take Josh down with full efficiency because I had a bunch more guys to deal with. Your instincts go into survival mode, but of course my instincts are much worse than merely that. You’re processing data you don’t have time to fuss over. I’ll have to remain quick on my feet, I thought, maybe. I have to bring Josh down and pivot into a position of maximum readiness respective of all comers, the rest of my adversaries, one after the other. I won’t really be able to spare more than a strike or two on any one individual. The throat, I thought: I’ll go for the throat. The throat is where my soldier cousin always said you strike if you're after instant pacification. Jab, jab, jab. But you fake with the right and then jab with the left. That's Gospel. The Adam’s apple, like a bullseye on the wall. I’m looking at myself and I cannot believe how hard I am hitting these people. Josh on the deck clutching his throat, hissing noises. I spin around: thwack. Again: thwack. Land a punch, leap over, who’s next? The autopilot, light’s out.
The categorical me.
Drunk and elated, back at Brad’s mom’s, he and I stayed up all night and talked nonsense. Eventually, a number of years later, I made love to Cassandra, twice, and it was beautiful. I bought a Harley. Violent stories don’t make me proud, they just get me hard. Ha ha. I’ve not once in my life been proud in the manner of the serial teller of tall tales. I don’t ever flatter myself. Guys in the pub? All I want the do is knock them out. Mostly because they don’t have anything to be proud of and neither do I. I’m not as angry as I used to be, but I still need it just as bad in a fundamental way. I found in my depths a shallowness and it made me dizzy. Maybe I was a little proud when I was beating those rugby players up and discovered to my mystification that I wasn’t angry with them anymore. Artists and scientists do magic as long as you don’t know how they do what they do, right? I think it’s the same for all true warriors. It was always important to me as a man of violence and confusion that I not know how I was doing what I was doing. This is what happens to you when you learn to see the invisible. That’s probably why I killed your sister. Is that heavy?
Remember Ted? Ted blew off his head—his own. Blamo! Just like Gerry. He’d been fired from the garage he worked at; the missus said something emasculating. Or something like that. I was closer to Ted than to my old man, who was no kind of father. Ted never got his diploma. He killed himself because I graduated from high school: that’s how I always saw it. It happened, the offing, three days after graduation. Now, if he got fired from the garage, sure, that may have been a factor, but I cannot stop advancing a case for my responsibility. I think I may just be a narcissist who tries way too hard not to think about himself, and then just finally can’t stop under a certain amount of pressure. Ted’s suicide made me feel like killing myself. I got in a lot of fights. I told you way back when that this was when fighting actually started to save my life. I stopped thinking about the quick exit then. At least until they locked me away.
On my Harley in the state of Connecticut is how I met Jim and Gerry. Right? I wasn’t technically on my Harley. That’s right. I was trafficking controlled substances using my Harley, but was not physically perched atop it at the time. I was betting on fights in which I was fighting. I fought Gerry long and hard, it was a draw, and we became lovers. Heh heh. It actually isn’t any more complicated than that, though I’m plenty aware you all tell yourselves stories. We exchanged blows in that backroom at least an hour. He looked like a rock star, as you were all always saying. He was a rock star. He was also, you know, one of those funny funhouse mirror walls. He certainly lifted more and ran more than me, but he was not quite as totally fucking evil, was he? He was sort of my daddy, though. He led me around and showed me the ropes. Well…some of them. I was a little effeminate as a kid and I’ve been told that as a fighter I’m really quite ballerina-like, but I had never previously been conscious of desiring a man, and, you know, right away, I was super conscious of way more than desiring Gerry, the whole business immediately a matter of subsumption or a sublimation. I fell in love with this fucking person in the way I think any person would fall in love with another person. It was quick and magic but also slow and prosaic, and if I go on about that, universal and tired as it is, I fear I’ll lose you. But it was love. I fell in love with Gerry. Or if it wasn’t love it had just as well might have been. Love. That word is looser than the loosest lips.
It was not a tender relationship. Ha. There was a lot of shame and dissimulation, compensatory hostilities that in hindsight seem like they’d’ve been obvious hurdles to look out for. The sex was rough, just as everybody assumed it must have been—you too, no use pretendin’. The games never ceased, either. They too were always violent, but I couldn’t always figure out how right away. It’s through Gerry that a species of fighting that had already become sex also became philosophy, obviously, Gerry always quoting Nietzsche on this and Heidegger on that, making me as versed in the source texts as he, or at least I was if we take his dead man's word for it. I dug all this, being primed for it, maybe like there’d have to have been an invisible phantom grooming me as a little wad. Every day we’d lift weights, smoke grass, talk over-man and Dasein. Do our Jean Genet. He would get preachy and annoying, which invariably made me scratch at his face like a tigress. If I sensed the arousal of that part of him that hated him or itself, it was like smelling blood and I’d pounce. Remember when we watched Educating Rita?
Was I the bottom? Of course I was. Talker and talked-to, fucker and fucked: I don’t think anybody ever had to spend too much time puzzling out who was what. Who knows how it would have went if I had decisively vanquished him that first liaison, but I hadn’t, and I suppose I’m plenty full of shit. It really was the best thing that ever happened to me. Gerry, sure, but also just maybe the proper expression in realistic terms of my métier, this a matter of getting stoned, lifting weights, talking about Heidegger, and having sex with a very good-looking man.
Trying not to stare. Losing my fists.
We were in Ann Arbor, sleeping on a pull-out, downtown, and fucking all day long. I remember this thing whispered about love: the pistil, the stamen. We would sit in this café; we would train all day—if we weren’t fucking all day. We met Peltier, and then we were up in Canada and we met you.
At Peltier’s old ranch house it was you and the graduate students, heh heh, and all that dope. Whatever local dissidents happened to be handy. You were lovely, he was this ridiculous French Canadian twat, but pretty hilarious, and connected up the wazoo. I can fuckin’ see you now. All those C.I.A. spiels and that greasy shit with the psychoactives and the cold sessions. That Canuck fuckin’ Tim Leary trip. God. “Active transcendental revolutionary praxis.” “Ontological anarchy.” The inward collapse of the social body, pancake house. Planet Prison Break. Heh. Peltier, you, the students. The Saturday gathering; Happy Saturdays, as they came to be known. Technically, Gerry and I only survived that one Happy Saturday, the Decisive Happy Saturday, and I’m starting to think I never did explain myself to you at all well, the whole thing being hilarious and fucked and maximally destabilizing, to be sure, plus all the rest of the subsequent history to send it through the roof a posteriori. I mean, you give us all this grass and acid, you’re blaring this fucking free jazz and you’ve got those lasers going, and, I mean, frankly, I’ve just listened to Peltier give a lecture while I was under the influence of psychedelics and what it is is I am very much not in a good way. How long had I been waiting in the lobby? At least a half hour, but try telling me that—wouldn’t have meant squat. Time? What’s that you say? A good half hour. The acid was coming on strong, I was still waiting to be let in, but I couldn’t have told anybody to where. People are passing around joints. The music is very intense. There’s this moment where everybody hits the floor as though, like, something’s been done with the air pressure or something like that. Everybody is collapsed on the padded floor. We are laying on our backs looking up into this laser ceiling thing—the sounds were all distorted and bowel-churning—and something very heavy is in me—heavy metal in my skin and lead in my loins.
Peltier’s megaphone voice:
FOCUS
ON THE
CENTRE OF
THE HOLE
The fucking hole. Ugh.
FOCUS
AND
FALL
PERMIT
YOURSELF
TO FALL
Right, I am carried. Fuck a duck. I just about puked. And then I discovered that I would not be able to lift my head should I actually, truly have to puke. I could not lift my head. Thoughts of vomiting did not linger, however, because the hole in the roof that was spitting horrible gut music at me was also spitting Gerry. The voice is Peltier—the cave-in of my world is Gerry—
NOW
WE
MERGE
I could not disobey. I remember briefly seeing a kind of grid and Gerry is in the ceiling, his cock is hard—he is leering malevolently. And it’s a fact, he very much was up there doing these things. He is also beside me on the floor, or was. Where, in fact, is Gerry? Is this hell? I think I was supposed to get carried and then to merge, but I accidentally blew the whole thing the fuck up, helpless to stop the dream tide.
THE HOLE
IS
MISSISSIPPI
What? Right? What the fuck? It’s not the Mississippi River nor is it Mississippi the State. It’s Gerry. I can fuckin’ see you, you know, Mr. Large and In Charge. Ha ha. God is a cunt, and into the total gnashing blackness beyond the tunnel’s end, you don’t enter—you just don’t. I’m stumbling around and I finally find you, who I’ve only just recently technically met. You tell me to calm down, you pat my head, and I ask you if you are “the silence.” Bathed in light now, I can see you, right there, just like you’re right there now, which you are and aren't, and I feel the prick of the syringe as you sedate me.
"Here, this ought to help."
I didn’t then know you were going to be my wife. Did I? Nobody knows when they know what they know. What year is all this? Gerry was reading Krishnamurti and filling me in. There’s no way you’ve forgotten that. Eighty-fucking-something, at any rate. I was rattled, you know, for days, and he didn’t really seem to notice, although you better believe I noticed he was being especially cruel in an offhand way that made no sense. Sitting in a wicker chair next to my bed, Gerry asked what I thought about Peltier and I said I thought the fucker was a decade late to the ball, and Gerry, ignoring, said there was this pretty grad student he wanted to fuck.
I never actually figured out if Gerry was talking about you or about some other girl.
The four of us had breakfast. You and Peltier, me and Gerry. You had very good cocaine on your person. Heh. You told me there’s a couple every Saturday as if that was supposed to make me feel like less of a cunt. Peltier and Gerry started talking about Krishnamurti and I became conscious that you and I were quietly flirting. I’m always embarrassed talking about this stuff, but I guess I’m just always embarrassed, period, and it’s a big part why I have such a temper. “It’s about Geist,” you said. With respect to what? It’s about Geist, generally. You reassure me. Hand on knee, the right look, cold comforts. Not the tunnel, not Peltier. Not fuckin’ Gerry. We drank wine together and I talked you into going to see a Paul Newman picture with me, maybe The Verdict. Not fucking Gerry. It’s not many months later Peltier’s got his hand on my shoulder, rapping at me on and around Krishnamurti, whatever fluff-up, you know. Man telling me I best be realizing silence, me thinkin’ you was she the whole while....
Don’t worry about it, there’s a couple every Saturday.
Silence, man, silence; the quieter than quiet. I actually read Krishnamurti and I actually dug the doing of it. It was the piano and the fights and the ecstatic transports of the flesh as a very quiet and pristine and ideal thing. I dug it. There was a window here where Gerry and I weren’t really speaking. We just kept getting drawn back to the same places and the same disputes, perhaps slightly whored-up upon re-display. Our times were spans of time. We kept going back to Michigan and his oldest and stupidest problems, pulling our wearied bodies back to port, serially. At a certain point I’m kind of reading Krishnamurti, and at certain point Krishnamurti says: “We do not know what love is.” This is pretty scary to me and it might be why I propose to you. Does this make sense? Does it have to? Ha ha. What drives us towards things? It’s too general a question. The important truth is that nobody else cares what drives you. And, you know, maybe if they did they’d want to snuff it out, right? What is critical is that we are driven, faster than fast or no, flapping our arms or not flapping them.
Krishnamurti: “Silence is the only means, or instrument, that can penetrate into something that escapes the mind which is so contaminated.”
The grammar isn’t great, but it’s the whole ball game.
I met your sister shortly after you and I moved in. Then I forgot about her, even while you and I were married. Not only could I not have identified her, I could not have identified her as existing. When you and I were living together and then married, mostly we were mean and funny people deemed charming by the not-so scrupulous, Peltier, prof and slimy reprobate, obviously the paragon. Where did everybody live in relation to everybody else? I’m trying to draw a mental map. We lived about two-and-a-half blocks from the café, right? Peltier was at the ranch mostly. It was frequently the case that nobody knew where Gerry was. Not long after your stomach surgery, we got pregnant, and I remember the window in the bathroom looked out over a park with a pond where a lot of children played. That circular window like in a submarine? Watching the kids, evacuating your bowels. Heh heh. He’d been at the wedding, the fucker, but I guess Gerry was feeling it all a bit and would just sort of fuck off and go and pout. I’m thinking he was thinking he and I were supposed to go off on the road together on some bogus schlep. Look, we’d never had a single conversation about monogamy, neither of us either that sad or that stupid, but feelings are feelings, after all, and people predictably little bitches. Men go off on their motorbikes to brood loudly.
You may be thick, like, in the head, just like I am, but you can’t forever avoid having certain things sink in, a fact I’ve come to realize was just as true for Gerry as it was for me. I think the end game started when we went into actual business together and opened that gym. What do you think? Wait, don’t tell me, don’t say anything. Body, mind, spirt. Heh heh. Strength. Conditioning. Do you think the gym was your idea? I know I do.
It was a great idea. Don't get me wrong!
Gerry rigged up the whole bogus shareholder thing and it felt quite a bit like being a very silly criminal, but we were, in the coinage of one of the local trades, “excelling.” We were all probably also accelerating. We started it off with a big soiree and I threw up all over the leg press. Herbs and pharmaceuticals were in dishes. We had one hundred members to start off, but Peltier and I both immediately lost track, the accountants coming and going like touring musicians. Gerry bribed some cocksucker into registering he and I as physiotherapists. You were teaching undergraduates. Phenomenology and brain science. Teaching made you for a brief while into an unusually—or at least uncharacteristically!—pacific personage, rolling your own cigarettes and daydreaming all the time. I loved you and also I guess I still probably loved Gerry. Constantly I was quietly seething, pissed off and pissed off about it—pissed off about that, too, unto infinite regress. I’d come home from the gym and you’d brush me off, so I’d go fuck someone or fight them. I stopped going home after the gym. It’s not long: I’m soon going to Gerry’s apartment after the gym, with Gerry, nightly. That doesn’t go on long, but I guess it goes on long enough. I can see you and I drifting away—or, uh, apart—as this is going on, you full-on pregnant, teaching, a little too pleased about all of it, and at a heinous fuckin’ remove. I don’t know who I’m more mad at: you or me or Gerry. You and I both very much wanted to be parents, I think. You are drinking more daily glasses of wine, I think, than you’re saying, frankly, and I’m all over town positively cuntstruck. I make a decision to stop being extra-work-friendly with Gerry, you understand, but I’m not so great at shaking off a compulsion, am I? After the miscarriage, you and I are now drinking very heavily, really, and it’s starting to show; you’re not tenured, just on track. Peltier invites us over to dinners, supplies you with dope, whatever else.
I was obviously just fuckin’ blotto the night I went out there…to the ranch. Gerry had already killed himself, left his note. I knew about the two of you. There can be no doubt, I don’t think, that I had a pretty good idea who Peltier was and the kind of shit he was capable of, nor is it at all like I have some rose-coloured picture of you—I know what you’re capable of, too. That bad, bad night is after your second stomach surgery and the miscarriage. You were using intravenous morphine, however briefly. The confessional contents of one manila envelope send me careening on a real bad bender, my somehow not having known that you and Gerry were lovers, such that I’m out at Peltier’s with a gun. It’s hilarious, I’ve taken a cab, fully piloted by the silence but, alas, still able to tell you what a taxi cab is—and how they’re dispatched. I didn’t necessarily intend to just go in shooting but pretty much as soon as I was in the foyer that’s basically what I was doing. Peltier was naked with his little bird dick dangling under his sad paunch and I hit him in the chest. The female I was sure was you, but it wasn’t, it was your sister, and there is after all a family resemblance. The really incredible thing is I still sort of forgot that she existed even though Gerry’s suicide note, still pretty fresh for me, produced the tertiary confession that he’d been sleeping with your sister also.
...
Oh, wow, Jesus Christ, baby, yikes, what the fuck? Ha ha. Look, no hard feelings. My goodness! But, like, you know, I think it’s kind of cute—I mean—I mean I think it’s kind of cute you appear to think Gerry was, like, so much better looking than you were. Than you are. You’re still a babe, you know, a total babe, lot of fucking good it does you now. Golly!
It sounds funny to most people, most people don’t read up, but seriously, though: L. Ron Hubbard’s Freddie Mercury version of military science taught me how not to blow. You just can’t not blow. Can’t not blow your top, like a big kid. Man.
The coordinal co-organal, so-to-speak, dig it or not at all dig. Shooting my sister; shooting the messenger, but not even quite that…on point. Jesus, do you remember the fucking—that Gene Tierney line reading in that—it’s a big Technicolor widescreen extravaganza, mid-fifties—it’s called Black Widow, remember? Van Heflin costars alongside her, and Gene Tierney has the delightful line that’s largely delightful because she kind of muffs it slightly—something like: “You may be dumb about some things but you’re not dumb enough to kill someone in your own apartment and then leave uhrt there.” Ha!
Going up—growing up on the prairie—there was a place out there on the prairie, and I guess I grew up in spite of it and in spite of all comers. Always men around, the brother and uncles and the dad, plus that little sister, heh heh, who always had the worst time keeping out of the way. I guess I spent the bulk of my growing up out there as I was taught to do it—or maybe I was just good enough at pretending to. It was a place like and unlike other places. There was a great field of wheat and rye cut in two by a highway. The highway was close to our farm, to me, all the roustabout men. Grandma and grandpa, too. The farm was close to this big traditional agricultural colony of the kind about which I’m sure you’ve, uh, heard. I won’t suggest you ever, you know, read about it. Pffff. Ha ha.
The highway was a special highway, it had four lanes, was very large, though unpaved, overrun by weeds and unfettered clumps of tall, brown grass. The big trucks with their eighteen wheels or however-many—with their large drums of oil and Tennessee whisky—they would race along this highway, which went through Farbridge’s section like a stream. Such crazy velocities, these trucks, and it didn’t make any kind of sense—this was not paved highway. It’s like the trucks couldn’t see the reality in front of them and they thought they were on some major roadway in some whole other thoroughly modern context. One of these trucks at least, every couple of days, would go careening off into Fairbridge’s field and burst into flames, roasting and singing all the surrounding wheat.
Dad would take me and the boys out to that field all the time scavenging parts, you understand, all of us in the same unisex work gear, or me just one of the boys so long as it was convenient. And our colts, Lucky and Doc. We would ride the colts through the wheat. I was favoured. The cumbersome highway, thick grass. It seems every time we went out there we’d see a truck crash or come upon a pretty fresh crash. Inspecting the rubble, rifles drawn, that thick awful smoke in our lungs. We never found a survivor, though. The remains were always so much charcoal, really.
Now, when I was, like, nine or ten, dad and me was building this pen for granny—for grannie’s chickens. Her chickens and her books. We basically made this whole entire pen out of mangled and sooty truck parts. Fairbridge and his wife, Mertle—they gave us the okay and we went to work. Scavenging, modelling, assembling. During this period—like we’re saying, I’m ten—during this period I’m going through this thing that I’m not telling anybody about, okay? It’s real weird. I have, like—a ritual.
Every September or October we would very predictably get that first snowfall and it was always that first snowfall I was waiting on. It would come, and I’d feel it coming on for days—I’d be up before everybody day of—dad, grandma…her off to teach country school, you see, always with the sun. Grandpa wouldn’t even be up yet having his first rye and water. Ha ha. Me, however, I’m up. I would be up and dressed before the sun, having known snow’d fallen without having to look. I would saddle up Doc and I would head out for that highly irregular highway.
For a few years this went on, serially. I am nine or ten the first time.
At the exact same curve in the highway, there I’d be standing, predictably and all but automatically, about halfway across that wheat field, and Doc—Doc would begin to panic, ears erect, nostrils flaring. He would swing that big neck to-and-fro, snorting, displeased, angling to disburden himself of bridle. I look over the snow-crested expanse. There—middle of the highway—my head is aching and my pants slowing soaking through, hooves clomp, there’s a slushy give to everything. There is a decisive moment where Doc bolts and all sense abandons me along with him. I’m on the ground and I’m looking up. I am looking up into snow gently falling, from the standpoint of the ground—of the grounded. I get up and I look down the
highway and the highway doesn’t quite look the same—I’m not sure it’s just the snow, but the snow is part of the thing that the thing is. The eyes make it uncanny or it’s uncanny on its own: the highway. It is very, very beautiful, and also a little terrifying.
Then something miraculous would happen. You understand? Annually. For awhile. I would hear the piercing siren of a train’s whistle, as though augmented, and then there it would be—on the highway—not a truck but a train, an actual one, puffing steam like a Chinese dragon and making with this otherworldly screeching:
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This noise of unfathomable intensity, coming on me faster than you can possibly picture, trust me. I am overcome by the beauty of the snowfall, and I am awed by the train—I do not at this time in my life have any other experience of trains. The arrival of the train coincides coorganally with my fucking organs announcing that they’re subject now to paralysis. I’m not moving and cannot move, the train on t’other hand having no such issue—it is barreling toward me. I do not move. I do not get out of the way. The train just goes right through me—ghosts me—fades me out. Now it’s behind, making just as much noise and steam, and I’m undamaged, somehow, materially assembled and accounted for, but I hear still the piercing wail and the steam remains very real in my lungs, as I breathe, in and of a vexing continuance.
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Like I’m saying, the first time this happens, I have not even previously seen any train in my damn life. What the fuck, right? The first time, I wanted to run back to the farm and tell everybody, naturally. Problem is, you see, I still have a tremendous heap of trouble just moving, physically. I was mysteriously down, then I was up, and eventually I’m back on the ground and can’t move my legs, but the train’s gone, and the steam, effectively, dissipated.
You begin to wonder what happens if you’re stuck in the field for good. Would I ever be found? Would I lose my cool? Heh heh. Would I starve or freeze to death first?
Then I would hear the sound—the sound of a diesel—an engine—
A truck door opens and closes, footsteps approach. Now there is a man standing above me, and he is staring down with these highly intense blue-green eyes. He’s wearing a gold lamé Nudie suit and he’s got fancy leather city shoes on his feet. He’s chawing on something and looking for all the world cursed in the extreme.
He’s asking me what’s the matter, and I’m telling him not much at all, mostly trying to just, like, move my arm. I’m trying to mime zipping my lip shut so he understands I can’t speak, but not even this can I manage.
Nonsense, whippersnapper, says he, reading my thoughts. Try.
I try to get up and do so without difficulty.
Wow, mister, thanks a bushel!
That’s alright, little lamb, he says, now what in tarnation you doing out here?
I can talk! I’d exclaim, the man in the gold lamé suit calmly remarking in return that this would indeed appear to be so.
We’d get to talking, but what it was always really about was this moment where the man in the gold lamé suit would lean in real close, smelling like an apothecary’s, and he’d make clear in plain English that I weren’t never to tell a single living soul I ever even once seen that goddamn train.
This here ain’t nothin’ but a couple of cheap and ridiculous gravel lanes, kid, and look at all these weeds and pebbles. A train cannot travel on this stuff! A train needs tracks if it’s gonna move, kid, and there ain’t no tracks here at all out on this highway, you see it plain as I do. Folks are not gonna believe you and they’ll start calling you liar to your face.
I would hem and haw, but the man in gold stood firm and meant business, I could tell that. What it came down to was we were negotiating our respective ways out of a curious bind neither of us really understood, I don’t think, and I, desperate to talk train, was trading not talking for both Doc back and what I was being made to understand was the safety of my grandmother, who might otherwise come to harm. The deal would end up being ceiled—and this I do mean, as ceil the deal it surely did—with candy cigarettes. What are you gonna do? Kids are kids.
Are you ready for the big dish? Do you know who this mysterious train conspirator man was? It took the first two years to figure out for sure, but doubt did not remain thereafter. The man in the gold lamé Nudie suit, driving that old Studebaker behind that train out in the Fairbridge section, was the Greenwich Village folk singer Phil Ochs, a man who later came to believe he was the C.I.A. agent John Train hired to track and exterminate Phil Ochs, clearly stuck in some grim purgatory where he is or was forced for however interminable an interval to do hopeless promotional rounds for the 1970 album Greatest Hits, which is not actually a 'greatest hits' album.
I never once before today spilled the damn beans. Now, how you like them apples? Don’t worry about it. Shut your mouth.
Extinguish your shit wherever.
I’m-a tell you one last thing Phil Ochs told me, and that’s because this—this is literally the last thing he told me. He finally did confess that he knew I knew we both knew the train was real, which was I guess a relief of sorts. He told me he had to lie those four or five years or whatever, because it really was just, like, an extremely important top secret kind of a train and there really would have been incredibly unpleasant trouble if the wrong people were to find out. He told me that I’d done a really good job and he was grateful—we chawed candy. Phil Ochs told me I don’t need to worry. Phil Ochs said: you’re a good little snot.
So, like, now—like, tonight—what the fuck am I talking about? Right. Now—tonight—first snowfall of the season incoming, I know it—my baby asleep beside me, my little bundle of joy, as beautiful as the day the doe was born, the rheumatism flaring in my hand, a heaviness enters this space and loosens it from it moorings—basically, I think, it’s a moon that jiggles—my tongue and extremities are soon to cease coordinating—co-organing—sacks inside of bricks inside of sacks inside of bricks—the whole feeling of the snow is grandpa’s rye and water for me now, in this, in hospice—out on the porch picking my mandolin—the snow swirls in the light and everything is shimmer and white wheat, everything is new again—ghosts that dance are the vital dust itself—from when I was a girl to when I was a drink—for a moment a home’s impersonal impersonation—and John Train is somewhere watching—it’s reassuring, I guess—to know—
There is a poem by Bertolt Brecht. I’m confident you don’t know this poem, a fine one, in which Brecht acknowledges that there may be cause for calling the branch that falls off the tree rotten, but councils us to maybe consider the possibility that there was also snow on the branch, further burdening it. This is a very German idea for a poem!
But what about what Nietzsche says? You know? Of course, you know, you recall—or will recall. Ha. Fuck-o: I’m recalling you. Nietzsche says something like the snow is the crow from Poe, you know. Heh heh. Wherefore!? In Vain! Nada! Here Nothing Whatever Can Any Longer Prosper!
Hooray!
That's what the snow say.
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