Handwritten headnote: (working
title. Will be a narrative
Many narratives.
in sequences where
they happen according
to some plan drawn
directly from events in my
life, but not autobiography,
inventing or not, as it pleases me
to amuse myself writing about
the past in a way that allows
me to simply make it up,
not like history, where one
really should [ahem] try to
stick to the facts.)
March 7, 1978
Dawn out in the atlantic
but the city below still
covered in darkness as the
727 landed at JFK.
By the time we got out of the terminal
it was cold, it was light,
it was partially covered
in snow from the days before
our arrival.
The sky a deep blue winter
sky without a cloud
but with a sun
that sucked out heat.
Items:
- $188.00 (U.S. currency, Thomas Cooke Travelers’ Cheques (I think)
- $3.46 (U.S. currency, cash)
- 2 packs of cigarettes
- a light “mountain climber’s” backpack (don’t even ask what that means)
- a portable typewriter (Underwood, I believe)
- several books. Probably more than several. The only ones I’m sure of are Pound’s Cantos,
Wilhelm’s I-Ching, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies
- 2 blue jeans
- 3 work shirts
- 5 days of underwear and socks
- a denim jacket and a light wool jacket (Pendelton?)
- several eye patches
- a couple of hats, mainly a pork pie hat
- a cheap guitar — Yamaha (cheapest model? maybe.) In a black hard cardboard case.
The Windup:
Everyone I talk to, with the exception of this magnificent middle aged middle class woman I fell in love with on sight (she had a different opinion from the rest, gushing to me about how wonderful New York City is in a way that made me feel rather flattered — it seemed she was gushing a bit more at me than at NYC, but I was unable to overcome the extreme prejudice I had toward myself):
Be careful when you get to New York, they said,
They’ll see you coming and rob you.
If you walk down the street with money
in your pocket they point a gun at you
and take it away
So, just to be safe,
I left everything in my room
and went for a walk down Broadway
from the hotel in which I stayed for
forty dollars a night, pre-paid,
at check-in, for two nights.
The Setup:
Arriving in New York “as is” (vide “Items” above)
not a single known person, so far as I knew,
not just on the island of Manhattan but the
five borroughs, Jersey City, Hoboken, Montclair,
in all of these places there was not a single known
person as far as I knew.
Should I have the choice of being hanged
or going back to where I came from
(Thousand Oaks, California)
I would have chosen being hanged.
I was not going to turn around and go back
to lie in my 1961 Valiant and focus on the
rhythms of the rain and trying to hear
patterns in the dropping then to take that
sound and bend it around my own ear so that
it fit the Greater Aesclepiad
Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely we thought, with you?
Or the sounds that were coming to me instead of to Swinburne:
Morning, multiplex loam blooming in round billows awash through space;
Phæton tiding in cool dawn; as his wave broadens its surge, its deep
Basin widens, whose id waters the earth; foaming, its parts dispersed,
Colloid, geysering heat, jetting a blue tint through the black of night
Deepens color with birth, labors in gloom, brightness. Decays the cold.
Because I could never quite get it
just coldn’t seem to get the rain to
sound like
DA da DA da da DA DA da da DA DA da da DA da DA
and never would have had I not left the former life
and invaded New York City with all my pomp and power
in the use of words, look out for me, I’m a badassmotherfucker.
Yeah. That’s how it was. Strong, weren’t you?
You could move a piano by your self or
heft up your half of a fully loaded player piano
or thrust step by step up 14 flights of steps on
the bottom rung of a sled with a 7′ Yahama
concert grand piano for someone to pound on.
Ha! Yeah, some tough guy.
Nor would I call anybody that knew me
for help, including my mother and father,
but would die in the gutter first.
I shit you not.
Whatever the fuck happened,
I was NOT GOING TO LEAVE.
Getting here was hard enough. I had to choose.
Chicago? New Orleans? New York?
Well, I had to admit the possibility that there
might be somewhere I’d prefer to go than
New York, but there wasn’t.
Once I had chosen New York City, there was
no other choice. I had to acquire a ticket. I had
to say goodbye to everything I knew and my
plan only went to the end of the money
in my pocket, but there was no way in
the concrete, steel, ice, soot, cold, crowded,
agressive, unyielding streets that I was going to
turn around and leave.
Yes, I was frightened
to even go into a Deli and order: the very presence
of people who had mastered living in such
a place overwhelmed me and I almost had
the fortune to see them as gods. But not gods
as the Greeks saw gods. No, these were gods as
the Tibetans see gods: LhaDre: god/demon
included in a single word, a non-dual concept,
an embodiment without judgment
of positive or negative, it being merely a dual
aspect of power. But these masters, who looked
at home in this world, who were so powerful that
they seemed effortlessly able to inhabit it,
I was afraid of. Yes, very afraid of them.
Note: Don't fracture your skull and then go
traveling much by yourself. Things
can go wrong.
But the walk was exciting. My grandfather
had brought me here when I was seven
and I remembered the feeling of a vast
crowd of living beings emitting power and
energy and streets clogged with machines
under gigantic buildings and the snow.
Decided to go back to the room, get some money
and go buy myself something to eat. It
was going to take courage, but I was going to
do it.
A thorough search
of the room
and of all of my posessions
revealed the relative truth:
my money was gone.
I had two days left
at the hotel and
$3.36 (I’d bought
a cup of coffee)
in my pocket.
It stunned me a fair bit.
I had no idea what to do
next.
I threw the I-Ching:
#13: T’ung Jen / Fellowship with Men : 6 in the 2nd Place
(End of 1st section, this being the first installment and so forth and so on kai to loipa.)
finis
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