There is no urgent need to read these words. They won’t teach you how to build or fix anything. Nor will they inspire you to change your life. No sign of any paranormal zombies making insignificant love will appear between these lines. Neither will I attempt a cute, digital age push toward “liking” a social media site page I just created complete with a tawdry cover-art illustration of a hunk or hunkette’s buff chest across which lies a long-stemmed rose leaking drops of blood to signify a teenaged broken heart that beats inside a post-adolescent body that just barely graduated high school and considers itself an author by virtue of owning a computer and an Internet connection.
As well, heed my warning when I tell you that this is just the first part of a serial poem which will never reach its destination. Nothing I write will ever find Oz. So if it’s a happy ending, or even a satisfying conclusion that you seek, you might want instead to read a tinfoil romance novel or a comic book.
This first verse stars a man named Horowitz, who knew a man named Coburn. Both men knew an early version of me. Horowitz will never disappear. Coburn will reappear to star in the second verse of this poem.
I’ve never been able to finish a tinfoil romance novel. In some ways I wish I could manage the feat. I’ve tried for sake of understanding how to write by the fill-in-the-formula method. But their stories felt at least as thin as their paperback versions felt fat, and their repetitive sentences sounded a semi-literate grope-note for me, a melody similar to the stubborn squawk of a boom box on the beach.
That statement reflects an unfair bias, I know, but I don’t feel guilty about my biases. I’m not sure why we call biases unfair, because they have nothing to do with justice. They are rather opinions expressed without the coward’s use of the phrase, “seems to me.” Only liars claim they own no emphatic opinions; and only tag-along liars pretend to believe such claims.
Many female readers — although far from all — remain divided regarding the value of tinfoil romance novels. The young, naive believers eat them as if they were printed on chocolate paper, and the older versions of the same congregation complain when their own hunk heroes become paunchy and inattentive brutes, preferring a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a televised football game to a huggy-poo walk in the park. And so goes love and hatred.
NOTA BENE: The Comments section below this long chapter is where you throw down your pink penalty flags and cry foul (or fast-pitch your lover’s empty cans toward my hard head). I’m good at the yoga stance known as the Lucky Lotus Ducky.
And comic books? Oh, woe is I. I used to love everything about them. The daring colors of unreality, the square jaws of white man heroes, the inimical grimaces of master villains, even the aroma of their pulp-paper pages forever encouraged me to live inside the story worlds of books. I wanted to be Superman, not because he was strong and just, but because he was white and could part his hair; while I, the boy who consumed his stories, was condemned to own unruly curls, dark skin and an unsure body. Pretending to be The Man of Steel allowed me — for a brief slip of time — the same privileged status shared by all high school quarterbacks in the USA.
But when Superman and his worshipers began to speak about saving the Earth from plastic-bag pollution and defending the inalienable rights of undocumented immigrants, I lost faith and interest in contemporary illustrated fantasies. It’s not that I favor plastic bags over dog poop in my yard, or want to line our nation’s borders with Bradley tanks and neo-Fascist soldiers. It’s just that comic books should be as make-believe, pure and hopeful as a child’s imagination. And they still should cost no more than twelve cents a shot.
By the way, just to prove to you that I’m willing to stretch my elastic mind beyond my skull’s physical limits, I’ll here admit that I recently listened to a romance novelist as she read a scene from her latest tinfoil romance book. I requested that she treat the audience to a hot and juicy excerpt. So she turned to a page somewhere just before the climax (both; no need to get snarky), and read a few paragraphs wherein the main squeeze, hot hunk is lying on “the bed,” nothing on from head to toe, but blankets pulled up high enough to leave just his naked chest revealed.
Meanwhile, the horny hunkette tells the guilt-ridden hunk that she’s tired of waiting for the Hunk and Bunk Umph. To further convince this gentle lion of a man of her lascivious intentions, little Miss Alabaster Hunkette, drops a handful of packaged condoms onto her hairy, heaving, male beast’s pulsating chest, and then — if I remember correctly and without undue bias — the curtains close and the moaning begins. Not sure how many — if any — condoms they used.
So, maybe I’m too old to grow excited about the combination of condoms and hormones and hunks and hunkettes. Or maybe Superman at the border waving a white, plastic bag and breaking the law ain’t so bad after all.
So what have I been reading, if not comic books and chronicles of love gone to lust and back again to paunchy Pabst? This mess of words is — by my own definition — a literary contemplation, so I should sometime soon mention literature.
I’ve of late been reading several versions of the Tao Te Ching, but talking about the Tao defies and denies the possibility of becoming one with her; or him; or the ineffable, androgynous it. Whatever. As far as I understand the nature of the quantified expansion and contraction of a lima bean, the Tao has no need to disguise itself as a green dicotyledon, although perhaps the secret sauce of the salivating Source is woo woo woo.
Say ooooohhhmmm, eat your vegetables, snap your heels together and rub your belly till you grow excited and ready to surrender any notion that you can control a teenaged zombie’s appetite for love or an old man’s sense of disillusion.
Of course, if your tastes run to lima beans and spiritually enhanced texts, just click on any link roundabout and look into the eyes of the first guru you meet along the hyper-fireway to the stars. Your guru commander will be the guy — yes, a guy with a protuberant beer belly and a quarterback’s dumb courage; as of the date of this essay, the bouncer at Heaven’s Gate is still a fat man who will tell you it’s all muscle.
This self-medicated hero will be wearing a white, seamless robe; leaking mascara-infused tears of joy; and sporting a pair of glittery, polyester wings. His last name might be Chopra, or Dyer, or Krishnamurti, or even PaulNewmanSaladDressing; but it sure as hell won’t be anything so slippery and Sicilian as Toscano.
So check out the name badge pinned to the pocket of the angel’s toga before you beg forgiveness for the mortal sins you most enjoyed before you grew too jaded to look forward to crimes of thought word and deed. Mostly deed, because those are the ones that kill us all and force us toward a desperate faith in God or Krishna Newman Chopra Tofu.
I see my life as a scattering of scenes on the cutting room floor. Strips of film marked by dyed bordered frames, sprocket holes lined up straight along the edges, as if to force a soldier’s sense of order onto the convoluted chaos of a human being’s war with death.
Today I own no desire to sort and rearrange these frames in artificial sequence. I now understand that the concept of time I was taught when I was a child is useful only as a tool designed to stave off insanity, and that in the end that tool must fail its function. Call it rage, call it agony, or call it religion. No matter the name; we are all crazy when we die. And please, don’t bother asking me if my mind has defeated the counter force of gravity; because if that question occurs to you, then you’ve invested too much faith in Superman and feared too little that death might disappoint you. Death always disappoints the living. It’s not — in spite of popular, New Age bumper stickers that Boomers whose hair went gray or left their heads composed — all a matter of attitude. It’s rather a matter of deteriorating flesh and bone.
“Oh brother. Stave? Stave off insanity. Are you sure that phrase is grammatically correct? Look, your one faithful reader is standing beside you. He’s plain old Bill Horowitz. Bill Hor o witz. Here I am. I’m a movie theater projectionist. And in this story that owns no form or purpose for existing, you’re a kid of fourteen.
“The manager of this milk-glass-marquee joint with pine-scented urine pooled on its men’s room floor is a tired man who lives with a wife who hates him twice a day, once in the morning when he leaves the house, and once again in the evening when he comes home. Together they endure the company of a snooty child who hates him for being a stepfather and despises her for marrying the one man he was born to hate. This defeated stepfather manager’s name is Coburn. His face is ugly because his mouth remains wide open and his pale cheeks sag with dumbfounded surprise. And because his mouth is open, his saliva collects and coagulates itself into odoriferous white and stretchy strings that hang like obstinate spider-web threads from his parched lips and yellow teeth.
“Coburn is dying of oscillating cancer. Calcified tumors that resemble rubbery doughnuts clog his ear canals. Oftentimes he cups a hand to one of his ears and shakes it in a rapid, violent way that looks and sounds like a cat scratching fleas off its chin. Maybe he thinks he can annihilate the tumors by vibrating them into oblivion.
“Still, in spite of the misery that is the life of Coburn, the man loves you, kid, big oily nose and all. He hired you because you allow him to entertain the fantasy that declares you as the child he’ll meet at home after work each day, free of snootiness and hatred.
“But me? Bill Horowitz doesn’t love anybody anymore. My own wife, she snores and otherwise kvetches all night, so I can’t sleep, And therefore deprived of compassionate rest, much less reprieve, I cannot love or hate or even care about another human being during daylight or nighttime hours. Not even the characters I project onto the silver screen in order to earn a living prompt me to wonder about life and death.
“My face is wrinkled like Popeye’s because I’m old. Over the years I developed this habit of squeezing my eyes shut tight, as if to imply that I’m either thinking deep about the human condition, or suffering a bout with indigestion that I’d rather hold inside than expel and thereby chase company away by polluting the air we’re together forced to breathe. I don’t know why I care. I don’t know why I don’t let go and tell myself to fuck it all, tell the truth and die. Maybe the answer lies somewhere between Popeye and Superman, both men fallen into flames on the cutting-room floor.
“I am sure of nothing, except for the fact that the truth I cannot touch has nothing to do with pent up gas or profound cogitation. The truth is that I squint a lot because I smoke cigars down to their nubby nubs and the smoke makes my eyes burn and water. So you can’t really see too far into my eyes, much less doubt my intelligence or lack thereof. Not with any sense of certainty.
“I like to eat corned beef sandwiches and pretend my dick still gets hard when I wake up in the morning. And you, kid, you keep using words like stave. Please stop that shit now, or I’ll refuse to be a major character in this story; I’ll deny you your one loyal reader. It’s bad enough that I swing around words like profound and cogitation. At least those two words still sound somewhat familiar to the wider world of tinfoil romance novel fans. Stave, though, I tell you, stave sounds like the stick you sink into a vampire’s heart. Are you listening?”
I remember standing beside Bill Horowitz. I was a boy of fourteen. He was an old fart, a grouch, a grump, a recalcitrant recluse. Perhaps it would be better to say that I thought of him as being old during one particular afternoon inside of which I stood and I still stand. Remember that time is not a river. Time is a cruel joke, just as all jokes are at their centers cruel.
Nowadays, when I’m not busy standing inside a past moment that never passed, I myself am an old fart soon to die. So I try to seek wisdom from the aged folk who surround me and force me by way of their conversation to feel the shivered presence of my approaching death. My earnest effort to discover wisdom outside of myself never works the miracle I desire; because so many of us old people are too busy talking about the food we nibble, the sleep patterns we can’t control, the doctors’ bad breath we endure, and the legalized drugs we ingest to extend our weary lives. Still, I keep imaginary company with Ponce de Leon. The persistent habit is a matter of leftover ideals.
On that afternoon we shared inside the movie theater’s cutting room my inexperienced eyes insisted that Bill’s hair should be white. But hints of what once might have been blond pigment left the slicked-back neatness of it all looking like the color of pulp paper pages gone tired and yellow.
“You really think it looks yellow? That’s just the color of the air in this room. The light bulb’s yellow. The walls are yellow. Christ, even the window shade is the yellowed brown hue of Roman Empire era parchment paper. But, kid, I never was a blond. Now that you’re my age tomorrow, today, you should be able to understand how the dark, curly hair of youth goes white when you get old. Except for the new whiskers that sprout inside your ears.
“Dammit all, now you got me sounding a lot like Saul Bellow, what with the dark curly hair of youth metaphor. You thought that maybe I didn’t know what a metaphor is. Right? And don’t ask me about Bellow. The man began his career with some stories of universal application. Read his early books, the few from the forties. The Dangling Man, or The Victim are good if you own an ounce of belief in intellectual pursuit inside your Sicilian heart. Saul was good back then. Matter of fact, he was required reading in my family circle. But just like some dago scribes can’t stop writing about the Cosa Nostra — the literal one, as well as the mythical version — Saul got hooked on all things lox and bagel and lost his taste for any other flavor of humanity. Self-absorbed, repetitive and tiresome.”
I recall each detail of this particular afternoon in August with Bill Horowitz, because as I stood there watching, listening, and breathing slow and shallow, I told myself to remember the entire moment. No, let me put it this way: I commanded the impression to remain at the edges of my brain, inside a pocket that would remain easy to reach and pick much later.
All of it. Every detail of that yellow afternoon. The sights, the sounds the smells, and my interpretations of the thoughts that lay between the words we spoke to each other. Back then — which is still now — I did this kind of talking to myself a lot. I knew with absolute certainty that the magic trick would work. Back then I had no doubt about my power to convince the universe to do my bidding, and so the universe complied.
So I remember this.
I asked, and Bill resisted. I asked again, and Bill hesitated. I asked him why, and he said I shouldn’t have to die with him. I insisted, and Bill relented.
Bill Horowitz became my teacher because I begged to become his student. He showed me how to cut, trim, rearrange and splice together scattered scenes that in different orders told different stories.
I became the squinting sailor who smoked cigars down to their nubs, the tinfoil romance hunk waiting for his shallow succubus , the apolitical superhero, the ugly man with tumors clogging his ears, the counterpoint character to the snooty brat, the slippery Sicilian who smelled Jewish blood running through his veins, and most of all the intellectual storyteller.
Bill Horowitz taught me that creativity is a terminal disease, and then he died.
