Maybe I'm taking my research and writing a little too seriously. Each day is a constant struggle for progress and depth and I, who have never time travelled, find myself searching ancient texts for meaning, reading them alloud in my apartment and mining them for metaphors. And then my entire interaction with the outside world is ordering take out:
"...it's actually the bottom buzzer. Oh, and can I get an iced cafe con leche?"
(White girl on the phone. I know. Weird.) "Yes, but you know that the entire point of a cafe con leche is that the milk is hot, right?"
(Longish pause from me) "...Is that really the whole point?"
Every adaptation of Romeo & Juliet leaves out the beginning lines. Shakespeare gave us this amazing story, which begins in the middle of a conversation, and the goddam assholes who produce these things make it sooooo gay.* Here's the story of hubris, life, slavery, antiquity, mythology and the metaphor of the entire play. People looking for stature shit on the people above and below them to attain what they never will:
Enter SAMPSOn and GBEOOBT, armed with Swords and Kucklen.'- SAM. Gregory, o' my word,7 we'll not carry coals. GRG. No, for then we should be colliers. SAM. I mean, and we be in choler, we'll draw. GRG: Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of the collar. SAM. I strike quickly, being moved. GRE. But thou art not quickly moved to strike. GRE. To move, is — to stir; and to be valiant, is —to stand to it: therefore, if thon art mov'd, thou runn'st away. SAM. A dog of the house of Montague moves me. GRE. That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall. The quarrel is between our masters, and us their men. SAM. A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall SAM. 'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant. GRE. Draw thy tool:1 here comes two of the house of the Montagues.
Even the most assiduous versions skip this stanza of honesty and setup. Everyone includes, for some reason, the chorus' "Two households both alike in dignity" spoiler bullshit. A dog in the house of bullshit adaptation moves me to write this novel. And yes, every representation is misrepresentation.
*I got a degree in Women's Studies so that I could say "gay" whenever applicable in any definition.
Pete to Brendan in college: "You're DJ'ing alot of hip hop these days. What is that, musical jungle fever? P.S. What do you call it when you're into British girls? Lymie disease?"
I can't even really introduce this section properly, but this is the final paragraph I can type today. It is Mercutio explaining the provenence of the Prince, Friar Laurence, and Dante's Inferno. I want my Mercutio to be a difficult character to love, one given to truth to an unhealthy level until--like too much of a good thing--it becomes a poison. I remind myself of this today because last night, for no apparent reason, Conrad threw a "guy" I DJ with out of our bar and now none of us are allowed to work for him. That is a large part of my career gone, but somehow I like Conrad more for it.
You may forgive my cousin for acting like the first king in history. You may also envy him for doing so. Imagine if you, at twenty years old, had taken over the crown of a sparkling megapolis. He had a troublesome youth and fought constantly with his father, Albert, who had little to no expectations of his ten year old son at the time of his death. I mean, it is less than kingly to go around naming your offspring “Dog.” Prince Albert confirmed Can into knighthood when the puppy was only three. His father had an amazingly prolific fecundity which, like the pollen of our great beech trees, had a way of spreading throughout the land or, more precisely--like its infirm sequel--the allergies which may turn into the summer cold and strike an entire household. I say this because in addition to Can’s two brothers, his father also sired himself a spare bootblack with the tire-maid and a coal-carrier from the cook. A third seed, Giuseppe Laurence--rather ugly and misshapen from birth--later became the abbot of St. Zeno from his father’s appointment and prevented all of Verona from ever sinning again lest they have to confess to his obscenely ugly face. Prince Albert ruled in peace with the occasion of a brief skirmish in a tiny town that most still cannot point out on a map. And, okay, yes he did burn over one hundred of the Sirmione Paterani sect in the arena, lining them up in a forest of equidistant, concentric stakes that radiated from their burning ruler at the center. What a boost it must have been to his governmental coffers to charge a steep ticket price for the gawkers of Verona to crowd into the multi-tiered arena and stare, wide-eyed at such a holocaust in the twighlight of a late summer night. No, I have never wondered how Dante came up with the Inferno.
Our carriage just tumbled past St. Zeno’s church, beneath the circular stained glass which pious Christians call a rose window and which learned pagans know is a wheel of Fortune. It’s twelve petals surround a central axel and it sits just above the tympanum of the door. Remind yourself of Fortuna’s helm, gentle Veronists, as you watch my glorious carriage and its corresponding twelve-spokes and keep that last word in mind. Although I do not entirely wish to return to Verona today I can do nothing more to stop it and I would do far, far more damage to myself in doing so. Imagine what could happen to me if I, gentle Mercutio, tried to stop this great machine by grabbing the wheel to pull it over. The steerage of our course depends on one so much better appointed than I. Call her God, Fortuna, Parcae; call her an insatiable cunt if you wish because the spokes will keep spinning and if they did not they would be unemployed. Indifferent to you, except when as punishment she needs to swat your hand away and she will keep spinning long after you are gone, the axel spins. My fatalistic mother was wrong before in her depressing prognosis of life. We all die in the middle and the show goes on without us. Yes, diligent pupils with your hands waving in the air, let me save my lecture until our next class and remind me to begin there: "Fate" from the Latin noun fatum “that which is spoken.”
Pete sent this to me. I feel like until today I had stopped listening to new music. Thanks. This probably hits me just right today because I'm struggling with the fact that some of my favorite things are woefully un-tainted by intellect. I fancy myself a cheerful person, but nothing makes me as happy as the promise of dystopic destruction.
Dan le Sac- Thou Shalt Always KillThou shalt not steal if there is direct victim. Thou shalt not worship pop idols or follow lost prophets. Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Decker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barrett in vain. Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a pedophile - Some people are just nice. Thou shalt not read NME. Thou shalt not stop likin' a band just 'cause they’ve 'come popular. Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry. Thou shalt not judge a book by its cover. Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover. Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products, thou shalt not buy Nestle products. Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend’s best friend, take drugs and cheat on him. Thou shalt not fall in love so easily. Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants - use it to get into their heads. Thou shalt not watch Hollyoaks. Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you done your shitty little poem or song, you self-righteous prick. Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out, just ’cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied but you’re never gonna fucking talk to.
Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were. The Beatles - Were just a band. Led Zepplin - Just a band. The Beach Boys - Just a band. The Sex Pistols - Just a band. The Clash - Just a band. Crass - Just a band. Minor Threat - Just a band. The Cure - Were just a band. The Smiths - Just a band. Nirvana - Just a band. The Pixies - Just a band. Oasis - Just a band. Radiohead - They're just a band. Bloc Party - Just a band. The Arctic Monkeys - Just a band. The Next Big Thing - Just a band!
Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries. Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be. Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music. Thou shalt not pimp my ride. Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster. Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness. Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit. When I say “Hey” thou shalt not say “Ho.” When I say “Hip” thou shalt not say “Hop.” When I say, he say, she say, we say, make some noise - kill me.
[Ah, forgot where I was, hang on]
Thou shalt not quote Me Happy. Thou shalt not shake it like a Polaroid picture. Thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Thou shalt spell the word “Phoenix” P-H-E-O-N-I-X, not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you. Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Brad at club last night by saying “Is it.” Thou shalt think for yourselves.
Lately I've realized that in real life I could totally never be Dante's friend. He's such a sad bastard who was exiled from his home city, left his wife behind (gladly, some say) and spent the rest of his life freeloading on Princes and writing love Poems to a woman he never dated and hadn't seen in 30 years (Beatrice). I'm sure Florence was fantastic during his happy times there, but the invading government that took power would ruined that for him. His Florence was not the same Florence anymore. It might look the same but it would never feel the same again. He left his wife and children behind and sat around hoping that things would magically go back to the way they were, to the necrophiliac point of writing himself into Heaven where Beatrice is his guide. I try to keep this in mind when Nikki tells me she is growing her hair back out, which for some reason makes me think we'll magically be as happy as we once were in photos. I could totally never be my friend either.
On the owner's birthday I wanted to do something extra special for him so I spent all day making a cake for my gogo dancer* to pop out of so she could sing "Happy Birthday Mr. President." Sometimes when you spend alot of time on something for drunk people it fails to pan out. [At the fake wedding we were supposed to have a girl run into the room at "I now pronounce you..." and scream, "No! Wait! Stop! I can't let this go on." ("You can't do this to me here!" I scream back.) "No, Brendan everyone needs to know the truth. I love--this woman!" But she was outside smoking and missed the whole thing.]
She could not have done a better job. The owner looked perplexed at the cake as everyone gathered around. When the music started she broke through the paper top and stretched only one dainty hand out to him. He grabbed it as though she were a genie and stared in just as much wonderment.
For me this is the day where it became official that the lastnightsparty.com kids became finally too jaded to enjoy themselves without getting paid from a liquor company. So where we should have an amazing picture to hang on the wall, he instead turned around and took a picture of the amatuer papparazzi.
The dancer is actually a really good friend of ours who may be the sweetest girl south of 14th. She's also an obscenely talented musician (Lady Gaga) who just played Lallopalooza but when she came back she played a free show for my sunday night party just to be awesome. Her voice is so beautiful that one time I held a flashlight down her throat to see her vocal chords.
Her stuff is up here and here and she even has a song called "Paparazzi." This is starting to sound like Lisa Simpson talking to her mother about boys.
*I can't help feeling like an asshole when I say it this way, as though at the end of the night she folds into my record bag.
On a warm summer's eve On a train bound for nowhere I met up with the gambler We were both too tired to sleep So we took turns a-starin' Out the window at the darkness The boredom overtook us, he began to speak
He said, "Son, I've made a life Out of readin' people's faces Knowin' what the cards were By the way they held their eyes So if you don't mind my sayin' I can see you're out of aces For a taste of your whiskey I'll give you some advice"
So I handed him my bottle And he drank down my last swallow Then he bummed a cigarette And asked me for a light And the night got deathly quiet And his faced lost all expression He said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy You gotta learn to play it right
You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away Know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table There'll be time enough for countin' When the dealin's done
Every gambler knows That the secret to survivin' Is knowin' what to throw away And knowin' what to keep 'Cause every hand's a winner And every hand's a loser And the best that you can hope for Is to die in your sleep"
And when he finished speakin' He turned back toward the window Crushed out his cigarette And faded off to sleep And somewhere in the darkness The gambler he broke even And in his final words I found an ace that I could keep
You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table There'll be time enough for countin' When the dealin's done
Among the other things I am exploring in my new novel of misadventured piteous overthrows is the nature of story telling. It means that I have to be very honest with myself. Lately I've been asking, was I a good boyfriend? Why did Nikki and I break up? And, more importantly, how would she answer these questions?
Last night I ended up visiting almost every bar I've worked in, including a franchise of one I worked in on Division St. in Chicago. A girl at one of the bars stopped me, "Brendan? Do you remember me?"
I pull this same trick on alcoholics all the time. It never gets old. You have a friend who says they'll be at the bar with "Alison," whom you don't know, and when you get there you go, "Hey, what's up Conrad--ohmygod! Alison?? Remember me? Brendan?" You can strike fear and Planned Parenthood visits in the eyes of total strangers.
She had much different hair and I had never seen her forehead, but I did recognize her. It was a girl Nikki used to work with. At Nikki's show she and I sat in back (the models didn't touch the free sandwiches!) while they dressed the girls. Everyone likes breasts. I do, however, have a reputation for forgetting names, which she knew. Most people assume it means I don't care or like them. If you were to tell the story from another perspective, mine, I would say that meeting people is overwhelming especially when they are all girls wearing the same uniform in a bar. Alcohol doesn't help.
I said, "Hey! I heard you work with George now?"
"Do you even remember me?" And even though I thought I did, then I worried that I didn't. I meet hundreds of people everyweek from behind DJ booths and bars. They all look the same and it is often impossible to remember if they were the girl who one time ordered one drink from you or a friend's friend whom you were spuriously introduced to last week. Sometimes I ask questions to help me out. What are you up to tonight? You working tomorrow? Usually I get a clue or they namedrop the person we both know. This is exactly why "George" is in the conversation. "Who's George?"
Fuck.
"You don't remember me at all, do you?"
"I...yes. You're (under my breath), Nikki's friend and she told me you were working with George now?"
"Right. Who's--oh George! Yes, I do work with George!" I like this girl very much, but it then occurred to me that she didn't really like me very much. It seems weird, but I think this is a common thing in such a big city. If I ran into my ex's ex in a bar I'd probably stop and say hi, even though I have dreams where his head explodes.
We talked for quite a long time about this George person and I offered my own personal insight. Some girl started throwing up directly on the bar next to us. My barback (tattoos, "little Brendan wants to be held") cleaned it up and asked if any fell on the floor and I (gucci pants, italian shirt, Patrizia sport coat, thanks for asking) grabbed his bleach rag, wiped the floor, washed my hands, and went back to the conversation. I told her that her hair looked cute like that.
"I'm channelling 'Nikki' with my outfit tonight. Like the tattoos?" I then noticed her several fake tattoos including one of a heart on her chest. It was strange that fake blondes makie me miss Nikki but fake tats only vaguely relate.
I did like the outfit and I told her that it made me miss Nikki, which seemed to perplex her. "Why do you think you broke up with her, then?"
"It's like in whaling times when a man could get pulled overbo--what? No, she broke up with me."
This girl looked at me like I was maybe crazy. She decided to skip it. "Let me ask you something, do you think you were a very good boyfriend to her?"
"Did I invent you just so I'd have something to blog about tomorrow?"
"No. I'm standing right here and you actually did run into me," she said. "But I clearly seem to think that you were not a good boyfriend and that you broke up with her."
Right then Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown stopped and put his hand on my shoulder, whispering, "(Be careful. Girls get brutal in small herds. Take it from me, she's just trying to egg you on so that she can text your ex later and tell her that you were out and that you were probably meeting girls. I hope you're not drunk, because that will work its way into the conversation.)"
"(Really?)"
"(Yes. And you're probably going to get shit for your outfit. Were you on a date before or something? It doesn't matter. Just be polite. She's trying to score points for her friend. Imagine if you saw your ex's ex here. Wouldn't you say hi just so that you could talk shit about him later? Wouldn't you almost hope he didn't remember meeting you and that he would be drunk and rude?"
"(Ohmygod, that's exactly what I'd do!)"
"(Don't ever let anyone else make you into an asshole. You do that for yourself.)"
"Sorry," I said to the friend. "He's a drunk. Anyway, so I was reading about this church in a whaling port--"
A friend of hers tugged at her arm. "Brendan, I've got to take my friend out of here. She's gagging from the puke smell."
I never did get to get this mysterious perspective. And I'll probably never get the full story or even understand it at all. But I also realized that the story she had in mind was so immutable that I'd have to have a Perry Mason briefcase of evidence to prove her otherwise. I have to keep this in mind for the Mercutio story because no one will ever believe that Tybalt went after Romeo for party crashing unless I can prove it with the evidence that is already there.
My career has taken off since the owner of one of my bars got sent to rehab.* I could have helped him, it seems to me now, but at the time I just figured that he had trouble getting to the pharmacy. Even though he could have died (18 Tylenol PM to come down from something else) I prefer that he decided on his own terms to clean up. He later told his assistant that he was "still chasing that first high."
It got me thinking. Not about how much I drink (less than usual, come to think about it) but about Nikki. We met in a seemingly magical time in our lives. She was starting her own lingerie company and I was writing my second novel. Both of us were convinced (and convinced each other) that our talent and artistic integrity would bravely take us through the summer, where we could relax together and inspire each other's next season.
That did not happen. My agent responded to my novel in such a way that I wondered if I had accidentally sent her Ikea diagrams; the fashion world loves Nikki's brilliant designs which only cause more trouble and frustration because money isn't free.
(Sidenote: Jesus Christ. Imagine for a moment that you had dated the worlds most talented designer of bellybutton holes (stay with me here). Think how long it would take you before you could be with another person and get to the point where you might see someone else's bellybutton hole and not be taken away for a moment, reminded of your lost designer, wondering who designed this one? I am actually talking about underpants.)
My writing style changed dramatically this year and Nikki's business approach sharpened. She cut her flowing hair down to a straight no nonsense bob. She cut off her pink rat tail and had her colorist work out the yellow and opted for a uniform platinum blonde.
To be completely honest I, a Humbert Humbert in a different way, have caught myself in recent months talking to girls simply because they have Nikki's old haircut. I stopped dating blonde girls in college--after three in a row, if you include the one at the National Organization for Women conference in Philadelphia where blonde #2 wasn't taking my calls and I was supposed to stay with her and instead I had to ingratiate myself to a NOW intern simply because she had a room in the conference hotel**. I am chasing that first high.
The Nikki I fell in love with does not exist anymore. Her hair is my psyche's metaphor for how her personality, her life, and her schedule have changed. My unconscious is better than I am at using synecdoche, but it seems to think that if her hair grew back everything would work out.
The first time I ever posted about Nikki was just after our first date. We went to a bar that also doesn't exist anymore. She seemed amazing and wonderful but I knew I was in for trouble. I said:
Right now I'm reading a book that is supposed to be about whales. They keep referring to whaling ships as "she" and whales as "he." But lately I've been confusing the two and learn some important lesson too..
Razor Back--Of this [girl] little is known but her name. I have seen [her] at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a returing nature,[she] eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, [she] has never yet shown any part but her back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let [her] go. I know little more about [her], nor does anybody else.
This is even more advice that I am incapable of taking, even though I administered it to myself during that "first high" stage. It is the self same advice you'd give to Ahab, and even the whalemen on the boat thought him a murderer because his refusal to give up the hunt would inevitably kill his men.
Yesterday at work, eating at the desk that rehab vacated no less, I was reading another book about whaling where it talked of a church in a whaleport where the walls are lined with murals to fallen harpooneers. As an example it told of a man who widowed his wife because he held on to the rope and was pulled underwater by the giant whale. It occured to me then why he really died: because he couldn't let her go. The church engraved the following King James bible verse which, in addition to being translated during Shakepeare's life, is the version I grew up reading although I now worship satan and myself:
Be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.
I don't know if this will makes sense when you read it but I somehow had a profoundly non-religious experience right there. I started crying at work, right in front of everyone and pretended it was my allergies. It instilled an unnerving calm and only so because of the Elizabethan syntax which made me assume it a metaphor. I believe the truest things in life are contradictions. Be ready, because you never will be. I did not know if this meant the world would end soon enough and I could give up or if Jesus was actually going to be in my apartment when I got back, transubstatiating my bread and drinking wine from the Brita.
Incidentally, not only has no one ever caught a Razorback whale, but they don't actually exist.
*There will be no jokes about Amy Winehouse in this post, fyi.
** I really hope I get to this story someday.
***A part of something that symbolizes the whole. Thanks, AP English.
1) In Kentucky, discussing dating and relationships Amanda and I discovered that although we have barrels of advice to give we are actually terrible at it. A friend with trouble last week asked me how she could get a guy to stop ignoring her. I said, "Be the candle, not the moth." It worked very well for her but I just can't tell myself to do that with Nikki.
I call her for no reason. Now that we're not dating I do things like meet her for dinner and drop by her place just for a visit. All the boyfriend shit I never did before.
2) In an ex's apartment, discussing the downfall. Me: "Whatever, this relationship has just become another one of those things that you get frustrated with and push out of your mind when your over-active cognitive dissonance takes over," from my seat I glanced at her bookshelves. "Christ, you've owned Lolita for three years and you never got past the first part. You didn't even finish Reading Lolita in Tehran!"
There are times, young authors of the world, where character study and scholarship are not the most important thing. Hard to believe I know. The girl countered that she was busy and she already knew how the story ended.
"It's not the story. Of course you know the story. The ending's on the FIRST PAGE. It's about reading an amazing book and enjoying it throughout. Don't make me turn this into a metaphor!"
She countered that she did not have time to read and that she hadn't even had a chance to start the new Harry Potter and it's the only one she hasn't read.
I was about to ask if our relationship would have worked out if it could have been surrounded by goblins and ferries of the mythopoeic tradition, but I had said enough asshole things already that day.
3) Once I dated a very wonderful girl who did not read. At all. She said "It gives me a headache." She went to high school on her Indian reservation and never once thought about going to school for anything other than getting her make up artist certification.
I found it thrilling at first. Nothing bothered this creature. She could sit for hours, staring off into the world. She was very happy in general and I have to believe that was because she did not spend all her life reading about the inner tortures of others.
It'd be great if they could auto-delete everything on the internet from before 2003. That way when I'm doing lazy reseach I don't have to comb through every 7th grader's Shakespeare paper with the black backround, pink text and animiated gifs. Googlebooks has everything out of print for free. Books that cost hundreds of dollars are scanned and you can even read what Harvard students in 1894 scrawled in the margins.
Doing something very different for my new novel. The following is a scene from the fourth section where young Mercutio, ten years before his co-starring roll in Shakespeare, waits up all night at the bottom of the stairs for a secret tryst with his mother's chambermaid (MATELDA) who never arrives. When he goes to investigate early in the morning he finds his cousin (LEO) guiltily exiting Matelda's bedroom after stealing his tryst. There are probably a hundred things missing here and many references link back to earlier notes. But here it is: Shakespeare, cuckholdery, Greek Medicine, dick jokes, a nut-hit, and an amatuer exorcism
I chased down the stairs to find Matelda’s outer door barred by two crossed broomsticks and when I went to see about her back door I found it shut, but locked from within. I did not wish to wake the mangy, irritable dog, whose dim and ornery nature would need papal intervention in order to save the reputation of St. Bernard himself. At the bottom step I became like the ass of two consequences. Either I go back upstairs and miss this chance for God’s adulterous loophole or I get caught in reaching for it and still not acquire it. I searched my mind for an analogue in history that I might look to, but it seemed like never before had a human being suffered so much for so little. I felt the pain and loneliness of Prometheus, the immortal who stole fire and knowledge from the Gods and brought it down to us mortals on earth. As punishment he spent his immortality chained to Mt. Caucasus where to this day he remains forgotten, unworshipped while eagles eat away at his regenerative liver and we unappreciative mortals build lanterns and libraries. But this too would not do. I thought of Aesop’s precocious and rational fox who deemed the grapes out of reach not only beneath his effort, but most likely sour. I then busied myself with a Greek exercise in trying to remember if omphakes eisin in Greek technically means “sour” or something more like “unripe.” But the mental exercise did nothing to abate the physical exhaustion my body had undergone, and indeed I became a mechanistic reduction of metaphysical discourse: through great pain of both mind and body, continuous inaction had soured my grapes.
I then heard a noise coming from Matelda’s room. I sprang awake and started towards her door for a better look, and heard the near silent creek of her ancient wooden door opening to me. None could have reasoned me away from my sweet loophole. Although wholly behind schedule and in danger of the household awakening, I knew that in my current state it would not take very long to ripen my fruits. Red light off the morning’s mist shone through the cautiously opened door. My heart raced by body there. Suddenly I became a logical contradiction of metaphysics and my mind trailed behind my body as a shadow. I felt nothing like Mercutio at this moment, and instead looked helpless, love struck as poor Nacissus as he stood shaking on the docks, passed by gondoliers and staring helplessly into the water, feeling not unlike his rippled reflection as a single tear of hopeless joy purled the waters below.
Plato teaches that love is as blinding as other passions, and out of respect of the great teacher I committed myself to becoming his perfect example for further lectures. With soul and mind trailing like a long early-morning shadow my lobotomized corpse entered the room without any caution. I ran smack into the smirking, freckled face of my cousin Leo as he deflowered the doorway and entered into the hall.
He caught me with such surprise that his silencing hand over my mouth served no purpose. Leo’s face carried about it the anger of a dog whose supper had been curtailed by an intruding postman. In one swift movement—or what felt like one as my body and soul became two properties of an increasingly equivalent Venn diagram—he covered my mouth, closed the door and drove his knee into my already swollen grapes with an intensity I once thought only possible from the revered, but troublesome Hymenaeus.
“Shhhhh!” he placed one cautionary finger over his parted lips and let me melt into the ground.
Blessed be you fair women and castratos of the world! May you never curl up so injured and terrified as you are for that eternity of five seconds when all Hades strikes you in the fruit of the vine, and you can only dream of which circle of pain might arrive to you at the end of waiting. How much you wish in that moment that your foe had struck stabbed you in some vital, visible wound with a dagger or that your mother had you aborted! Such agony cannot come soon enough, for like a great a long lecture or a forest fire it must start before it can finish. ... I awoke an hour later in a confused daze and exhausted still from the night before. All about the house I heard the commotion of my returning mother and Paul, both of whom I’d nearly forgotten about since their absence. In my stupor I could barely recall what exactly had taken them away and when I reached them downstairs (still fully dressed from the night before, not that anyone seemed to care) I found the household in a terror. Matelda was dying.
I flew down the stairs, terrified that she might die before I had a chance to kill her. I peeked in her door and saw my entire household engaged in pinning the poor girl down to a table in the parlor by use of several inverted leather belts. Seeing my own tortuous work done for me, my brain filled instead with the marvelous things a man could do with a belt once he relieved himself of his pants and its duty to hold them up.
Leo’s mother pinned her maid to the dining table with the poor septegenerian’s own ear. Leo’s mother always possessed a rather cool disposition, but her mother hen instinct forced her to enter the underground world of female cock fighting. Her pretty face became erect with discoloring veins and the sweat drew great rivers of makeup to her dresses. “You vile sorceress! How dare you infect such a plague on my house? Who sent you? Was it your master in hell or your master in another house in Verona? Tell me at once, for you know the punishment of witchcraft in this unforgiving city. I know it was you! How dare you set your evil sights on infecting my household and my little boy!”
I had not been aware that possession by demons had been deemed a Venereal Disease, although my understanding of medicine at that time still bordered safely on the side of amateur. Normally the affairs of servants go as unnoticed as the deeds of our silverware. We seem to notice them only when missing. My overprotective aunt, however, seemed a bit brighter than I or rather (ah, Professor Plato—right again!) not so blinded by the bright snow-white purity of a first love.
“It is that jealous Lord Montague!” proclaimed the baggy-eyed Paul. “He is jealous of our household and wishes to overtake the prince through me!” I cannot begin to tell how many things are wrong with that sentence.
“Madam,” the maid’s voice trembled. “You’ll find no such treachery from me! My poor charge is merely suffering from a bought of the hysteria that girls her age are given too.”
Although Doc Hippocrates had developed a honey and water test for future Virgin Marys who could test in wonderment if they had conceived, I doubt even the most cutting edge apothecary in Verona has a serum for Matelda needs. A Hysterical Pregnancy Test.
“Is this true?” Leo’s mother nearly rendered the old hag’s ear deaf to her furious inquiry. “You wicked creature have become a mercenary of our beloved prince? Why did you not uncross the broomsticks in order to get in from the courtyard side?” I delighted in the moment, but felt bad for the aged creature who was no more operable than her dried, withered breasts.
She meekly protested. “I don’t understand your question.”
“What did she say?” demanded the action-filled Paul.
“This beast could not enter courtyard side, for the make-shift St. Andrew’s cross I erected of broomstick repelled her!”
Her ancient voice, tiny and dim as though coming from beneath the lid of a pre-mortem coffin fitting, cried out “What kind of cross is that?”
“Don’t play dumb with me! Where did you sleep last night?”
“At my nieces who just had a baby.”
“Liar!”
15.
I took this moment of distraction where the entire household looked upon the parlor table as a team of Rabbi’s inspecting a Kosher slaughterhouse—and snuck into Matelda’s room. There upon the peasant bed that my mind had set far more than a thousand and one Mercutian nights I saw, as in all of such tales, her dress crumpled on the floor. By sheer curiosity I discovered a note in her pocket, written in the cursed filthy handwriting of my bumbling cousin Leo. With everyone away tonight, there is not need for you to leave your door open after midnight like the other times. I’ll just come right down before sunset.
Although I am the type to draw his sword when I hear that another has already done so, I felt a strange calm over my body. A stasis of my humors overtook me and when the great ship of my consciousness receded and the weights on my soul shifted such a ballast, I found myself floating through the cool waters of joy. I daresay a smile colonized my face and enslaved my melancholy disposition.
Good Christians should know that my newfound temperament did not come from my absolute forgiveness of both. Greater Christians should know that I found myself forgiving my Cousin Leo as another creature enslaved by the humours, and cursing the sodden and seeded Matelda as one deserving my scorn.
16.
I slipped this note into my pocket and when I went out into the room I found Paul had gone down the street to a monastery and awoken a Capuchin monk in the middle of his two-hour’s prayer. The filthy beggar belonged to the most extreme order, which denied themselves anything more than they needed and who thought it a sin even to beg food that they could not eat within a few days. From the stench of him I could infer that this nasty order also forbade the waste of soap and water from either laundry or bathing. His discalced feet left muddy prints on the floor where his bare toes tracked in the filth of Verona’s streets. He had a long grey beard that fell like misplaced symbolism from his sallow cheeks and a face more like our current incarnations of blessed Saint Bernard. Although as close to de-frocked as a sitting priest could get, he had the manner and disposition of someone who thought himself much grander than his mendicant order. He swaggered into the room with a holy luster all of his own imagination and spoke in contrast to his threadbare and feculent uniform as if in a protestant production of The Emperor Lends the Pope His New Clothes.
Frugal in life and stingy in manner, the monk wasted no time in getting to the root of Matelda’s problems. My household Eve fomented his priestly aid by laughing, maniacally and to the point of re-Grecianizing the word hysterically.
“You stay away from me you filthy disgusting creature! You are not a monk, but a beggar who stole the robes off the priest you robbed!” The household agreed that indeed a devil had parked inside her, for why else would a little girl speak so ill of a humble monk? Matelda wrestled against her leather restraints. “Leave this house at once before you are discovered.”
The yellow drained from the monk’s face and his aged eyes inflated in anger, which, forgive me, Hypocratus, is the opposite of what humour theory commands. Although perhaps his yellow and choleric nature preconditioned him to fury and only the onset of the sanguineous non-venous blood humor calmed him and prevented him from killing Matelda. I may be projecting.
The Capuchin informed his intimate congregation that he would employ an honored neo-Franciscan technique of exorcism and began beating Matelda with a crucifix. “Get behind me, Satan!”
The charming florist of my own deflowering shouted, “You wish! I heard you like it from behind!”
The Friar’s cheeks ripened entirely at this allusion to Greco-Roman tradition. He then invoked a very serious exorcization, which called upon her evil tenant to say his name.
“Matelda.”
“I myself baptized Matelda many years ago and the devil inside you is not named for such a girl.”
“Why must the devil always keep a man’s name? A devil’s an angel and angels don’t have genitals. Tell me but two truths and you can beat me again with the crucifix.”
“Fine. Any truths in particular?”
“Yes. Do you think you’re smarter than I?”
“No, but I do think that my holy education makes me well suited for the task at hand.”
“If you find yourself so suited, why can you not prevent me from telling the truth about you? You are vain and comb your beard ten times a day. You lost your sense of smell from an opium addiction, which is why you are ignorant to your own stench!”
All baptized eyes leered at the Bordeaux face priest who pulled a guilty hand away from stroking his beard. “The devil lies twice! I shall punish him twice as much!” He again raised the crucifix as a threat.
“I fucken dare you!”
My intrinsic delight as audience to such a comedy invigorated my soul and the gleeful biles of my stomach grew gaseous and escaped through my mouth in great hoots of laughter. “Out of here, you!” the filthy varlet shouted at young Mercutio. “Not even the lord Jesus Christ can work in the presence of non-believers!”
17.
Although I remember it all now somewhat fondly and delight in retelling this story to enraptured dinner party guests, I feel I have made it so for my own good. I have retold it enough times that I have heard rumors of others passing it off as their own. Once upon a piazza I saw a beggar’s puppet show from a makeshift stage of accoutred fists, which told a story so similar that only now do I wonder which one of us appropriated the tale? Surely all authors are thieves and cannibals, just as Euripedes and Homer both told the story of the Cyclops. There is a story (probably also bullshit) which Vitruvius tells us about the young Aristophanes who voted in the extreme minority—against both audience and the other judges—in a poetry competition. He said, and wisely so, that the poet who least pleased the audience had put forth the most original work and also the greatest and that the others had merely plagiarized the works of others. (What kind of effete creatures were these Greeks that a poetry reading had that much at stake? Would my lion-slaying ancestors have given a thought to that gladiator who saved his own life from plagiarizing another's sword technique?) Would the concept of plagiarism bother us so much if my Latin ancestors had not taken (!) the word itself from their verb for “kidnap?” I prefer to allow my own mind its spells of cryptomnesia in fear that I might discover what it might hide behind that. I remind myself that Dante put Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan altogether in limbo, perhaps so that they could reconcile this matter together and discuss membership issues with Christ before proceeding.
I recall my eleventh year in such curious detail, to a degree that I do not recall so much more of my life as my mind begins to rigor mortis. It also helps that most nights I cannot recall exactly, for example, how I did or did not get my shoes off before I passed out in bed. The dinner parties and the days become something of a blur and it is perhaps that something in this cavern of my mind prevents me from possessing any moment at the time. It seems that by refusing to deal with certain horrors of my youth, I have gotten behind in my work, or so it seems. Driven to distraction at all times I find I can only silence the echoes in the cavern of my mind with a few drinks and the intoxicating company of women. Kindly tell my charming strangers not to take it personally when I forget their names, for my soul merely threw it out by accident with the rubbish. The memories I recall once having clear out of my mind faster than your carnival guests when the last cork pops. It leaves me lonely, trapped inside my vacuous self with no one to talk to. And yet I look back on my miserable youth with a lightness and smile that immediately brings back the smell of Mother’s perfume and Matelda’s peasant hair, both scents unmatched in all of Italy, Paris and the parts of Constantinople that have been kind enough to lend me a courtesan.
Because what happened next would take them from me and me from them forever.
My barback on Sundays is thirty-six although he considers himself free from adult responsibility so long as his Mooootorhead cover band still rehearses and before he fills in the final missing spaces on his full sleeve tattoos (left, right bicep). He's a former bouncer, former heroin addict, former alcoholic and sober for the last fifteen years. He met his gorgeous twenty-one year old girlfriend on myspace based on a picture he saw of her Motorhead merchandise shrine.
They moved in together just last week, and it was a decision they came to just as Nikki and I were discussing a similar venture. I told him I would try and not turn my envy into a jealous rage.
He stopped air guitaring to the Thin Lizzy song, looked me straight in the eye and said, "Your anger is just little Brendan, crying out from inside: because he wants to be held."
The whole concept of authorship is so mislain. Far too often I read a great work of literature and I have to plod through the introduction and skip several boring pages about who was the real Homer and which Duke actually contributed to the works of Shakespeare. Isn't the whole point of Homer that we learn about a godliness that we may never attain, but which we behove ourselves to attempt?
The gayest thing about me is not that I DJ like an uncle at a 3rd grade sock hop or own eye makeup or sometimes dress like gay Elvis--but that I actually have a rival DJ who does the same. The rivalry is the gay part.
I believe it began as a joke among our mutual friends concerning the fact that when we're both in glasses, drunk people have confused us for each other. The rivalry was cemented from the second he said, "A rivalry? Like I have time for that?"
The depth and scope of this unbelievably catty relationship have been savored and recorded in my notebooks, since I am doing research on a completely different rivalry. I noticed at first that I needed to be honest with myself that I allowed it to continue because not only do we probably have a similar schtick, but because I would not mind DJ'ing events as large as his [ego]. It occured to me then that there are in fact no true rivalries.
The implication in every dichotomy is not that a contentious relationship exists in equal force but that one overpowers the other. Men/women, slave/master, Montague/Capulet. I like to think of it like a number sentence. Men over women, slave over master.
In my notebooks I then decided that Capulet--from marrying off his daughter at 14 to the prince's cousin and having no sons of his own--has a desperation that comes from being the underdog. He generously throws parties, entreating all his guests to take advantage of his hospitality, as if that his social standing would increase with the attendence of his gathering. It seems to me that he was more than a little flattered that young Romeo would deem his party worthy of crashing.
Rival and I tend to "accidentally" drop in on each other when DJ'ing. Since I consider this catfight between us a part of my research, I let it go way out of proportion whenever possible. It doesn't help that we've dated an obscenely high number of the same girls and still pretend not to know each other. (Once I tried to break the silence and with a cigarette dangling from my left and my right hand proffered in friendship he said, "Actually we've met, like, three times," and left me hanging--hand falling slowly like he disbelieving cigarette ash.)
One of our young, be-banged overlaps tearfully related to me how he grabbed her by the wrist and pressed her against the wall because she got tired of his bullshit and threatened to leave. As she struggled he twisted tighter and screamed, through the unstopable throb of the crowd, that she couldn't dare to that to him. She cried as she told me about running over to where I was DJ'ing and sobbed in the owner's arms. I couldn't have been more thrilled.
The gayest thing about him, however, is that he DJ's at the Diesel store two blocks from Beauty Bar. An old love of mine (not an overlap, but one whom he percieves to be his nonetheless) ran into him there and mentioned to him that we were both the guest DJ's for Laia's birthday party on saturday. That's the sound of Diesel shoppers reacting to the scratch of his needle drag--"That guy? Eww, he looks like he's, like, over-thirty."
The prince of R&J, in my mind, is the biggest culprit for letting the fights go on so long because if the families combined their wealth it would threaten--rival if not topple--his power. (Incidentally this gets flipped with the servants of the households, who both like to fancy them hated by the other because through the fight they prove their worth.) Nabokov hated Freud, Freud didn't give a shit about Nabakov. Freudians, however, hate Nabokov.
And yet a bigger DJ than either of us crammed us into the same booth saturday and, obscenely, it didn't matter to anyone at all. To the people of Verona the familes are merely the rich and wealthy. To students Freud and Nabokov are merely strange Euro latent homosexuals that they remember kind of reading once. Anyway, it was assigned.
He showed me around the booth and mentioned that no matter what I switch around or where I plug in my computer or the turntable, leave the CD players alone because that's all the bigger DJ uses and he's "kind of a luddite." I realized that I had taken him all wrong. Maybe he does take himself too seriously and maybe he does always purse his lips in photos in a way that his thin boarding school lips just never will be able to, maybe he does talk shit about me, or maybe I'm just so starved for intelligent conversation that I'll allow someone's gmail word-of-the-day to pass as an olive branch. I might be late for my train.
This isn't a very good story, I must admit. Just as the neophyte hopes that Juliet will wake up one second earlier, Rival and I ended up being the first people there and we decided to drop it. Because once we're working together, we just look like two queers who can't remember if the other already played Joy Division.
Amidst the other unecessary drama of my life, the barber that my father--and my brother and everyone who lived on our street since before the cold war went to--died today. He was terrible with haircuts. Even in junior high we all felt like he had lost his sense of symetry. At one point in my difficult childhood my brother had an interview at what have may been a boarding/miliary school called "The Gunnery" and Ray the barber met him early that morning and gave my brother his first Mohawk.
Ray, such a figure in my mind, later became a character in my second novel who helped the main character become at peace with his life and his return home.
What follows is true and something I've already posted, but which is plagurized from everyone's childhood in my hometown.
Chapter 4.
True story:
Martin Luther King Jr. came to Simsbury, Connecticut as a boy on an exchange program from his home church. He spent his summer working beneath the hot nets of our then still thriving tobacco farms. Culbro Tobacco. Just a child then. With a mind full of girls and prayers and duffle bag full of clothes that wouldn’t fit at the end of the summer. A growing man. He worked the fields just a few miles from Dad’s house, back when this neighborhood was the only game around. Where a Barbershop on the edge of the world marked the end of civilization as they knew it, and saw the beginning of cornfields, tobacco fields, and a series of deep wood forests where the latest in bomb technology went to pieces. Martin Luther King Jr. awoke before dawn to ride into town with the other boys on Sundays and pray inside a big white church while the big white eyes in town finally saw them blackfolks they keep reading about. Martin Luther King Jr. liked Simsbury, Ct. He liked working the fields and singing with his friends from home. He liked getting his hair cut at Ray’s Barber shop. He liked the smiles they got on the way through town. He even liked the way white people sing in church. The program took Martin Luther King to Hartford, where he ate wherever he wanted and sat in any seat at any restaurant in the city.
The story I got always said exchange program, but I wonder which bomb factory boys elected to leave the hot summer in Connecticut and work in someone else’s field down in Alabama.
That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. says, that summer was a dream. He returned home, but something inside of him never let go of the tobacco nets. Every time he passed a restaurant or a church he remembered the time and the town where ten o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t the most segregated hour in the country.
The Barbershop still sits there. About a half-mile from the coffeeshop.
Growing up we had our hair treated by the half blind owner/operator of Ray’s Barbershop, itself once the only game in town. The ghosts of Ray’s old war buddies squinted into the sunlight from the old, super-sepia photos on the walls. The one story barbershop that time and The Archie and Jughead comic subscription forgot. You could go there before school and wait in line, reading up on what Jughead and the gang did thirty years ago, while the next old man in line tallied up the bodies on the wall for the old man in the chair. “That one there, number 27. He’s dead. So’s he. And he. The umpire never made it through the season.” Ray the Barber, always Ray. Stuck in that neighborhood like Barbershop itself, no matter how many public schools and swimming pools they put in. Ray The Barber—the fullest name God could give him or us teetered in there at six every morning from his house a block and a half down. First by foot, but by the time I stopped using the booster seat, by moped. The last I heard he still came in at six, parked his pickup in the closest spot and closed for a long lunch. A lunch that might just last until the morning.
In the eighties—when the picture quality of televisions increased and the quality pictures decreased, Ray would brush your neck with powder, wrap a paper bib around you and cinch the apron around it. In the middle of asking you about how many girlfriends you have and how many homeruns you’ve hammered out—same answer, whether the truth or the lie—Ray would glance at the jittery, color-separated images of the world tearing itself apart. The guns and the drugs and the ketchup-as-vegetable in school lunches; those angry young men with the pink hair and those angry young men who should be in chain a gang, not in gold chains and gangs. Ray could cut your hair blindfolded, and he might as well because even with the TV off he couldn’t get it even. But with the TV on Ray watched the walls come down and the others go up. He watched as these funny little men in funny little hats fought each other in deserts for funny little reasons. (“Maybe you could cool off them A-rabs with Ray’s shave. Looks too hot in the desert for them thick beards. Think the Navy might call you up, Ray? Get you back in action?”) The wars. Ah, the wars we had back then. Cold Wars, gang wars, media wars, drug wars, cola wars. Not a single Simsbury bomb went off. Not a bunker-buster, nor a Patriot. With the end of mining, and no more major highways to blast on through with, the hypothetical wars kept the industries going on TV and in the factory. The war had come home now as the refugees from the cities huddled inside of giant, three story houses and waited for the news to come in on the TV as the popcorn came out of the microwave. The news of muggings and car jackings and that, that disease (“…nothing gay about it.”). Ray would look at you in the mirror and clink-dry his straight razor and shears and comb, clinking them free of the blue, debugging power of Barbasol. Typical Navy man, that Ray. With the instant cure for crabs, and only the thinnest hope that it might kill whatever else you picked up.
“It all started right here,” he would say to all of us and none of us. “It coulda ended here too. All I had to say was, Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” Before I even knew what he meant, Ray would sidle up to his ancient cash register and squint at the buttons as if they tended to move around on him. Poor Ray, with his touch tone phone and his press-button cash register. Why did they have to flip the numbers on these damn things? Hard enough as it is. Ray would punch in the numbers—with the timid caution that anyone of his Archie readers might use when putting a needle to a record— take your four dollars and send you home with a dried, hardened piece of Bazooka Joe.
It took me long enough to get over this. Long enough to learn the difference between old-people jigaboo-style racism and actual, honest, hate-you-and-your grandchildren kind. There is no line between fear and hate. They exist right alongside eachother, like Ray the Barber and the kid from Alabama who was in charge of his local youth group. I have nothing against Ray. Not even the most precise haircut could have offset my awkward, seven-year, on-again-off-again bought with puberty. But you know what he meant. One day in your life you go against your better judgment and it turns out that was the one day that counted.
If only Dad could be at peace with this. You can’t control what happens around you, and you can’t even control your own memory. If you only knew Martin Luther King Jr. from the artifacts of the last ten years you would see a man remembered with a three-day-weekend where you can’t get to the beach, the namesake of two-dozen boarded up main streets and on inspiration posters for white collar professionals to follow their dreams while photocopying.
It has lately occurred to me that you would only be into my stories if you grew up in Los Angeles--or maybe Dublin--and always wondered what life was like before the turn of the century in post-rural New England. I have a stone in my hand as we speak to cast at anyone, anyone, who writes a novel about my own experiences because like most readers I want to identify with--not compare with obscene parellelisms--atrocities of my own life. Auden says that the reason we like Romeo & Juliet is because we have all been crazy, we have all been in love. But we have not been that crazy and in love.
This is the reason that I kicked the girl who wanted to write a novel about the Brooklyn loft party scene out of the writer's group.
Ray, I'll never forget you or what you taught me in the forteen years you cut our hair.
In 1960 Fleming was commissioned by the Kuwait Oil Company to write a book on the country and its oil industry. The typescript is titled State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait but was never published due to Kuwait government disapproval. According to Fleming: "The Oil Company expressed approval of the book but felt it their duty to submit the typescript to members of the Kuwait Government for their approval. The Sheikhs concerned found unpalatable certain mild comments and criticisms and particularly the passages referring to the adventurous past of the country which now wishes to be 'civilised' in every respect and forget its romantic origins."
