LISTEN
D.J. Pass
In memory of Mars Walker
D.J. Pass
In memory of Mars Walker
WEDNESDAY
This winter I'm living in a big house on Prince Avenue, Athens, Georgia 30601, USA. Jim who owns the house lives here with his girlfriend Sandy and rents out the extra rooms, big high ceiling rooms, big windows. The cosy yellow-lit living room at the bottom of the stairs is littered with somebody's collection of European beer bottles and stacks of books everywhere, more books arriving every day. They're all ripped off from publishers along with hundreds of magazines subscribed to under phony names and then re-subscribed to after a few issues, that old dodge. We get magazines and threatening letters all the time for people like Phyllis Stein and Phil Harmonic, it's that kind of house, larcenous in a collegiate kind of way.
....Communal kitchen at the back of the house and the sad dining room where I sit at dinner every winter night eating little, saying little, staring at the once ornate moulding around the ceiling that has been painted and painted by generations of paint-crazed householders until now the detail of the carving has started to blur and even out on its way to extinction. The paint when knocked loose by indoor Frisbee throwing falls in little brown turds....strata of paint all shades of brown....apt, these are brown times....And the others look surreptitiously at me (I imagine?) thinking what? Pity? Disgust? Amusement?--the others: Jim and Sandy, the other couple, my fellow singles....I came here as a couple in the fall, in the autumnal dying days of a relationship that was built on nothing except the desperate need for somebody--anybody--to share the emptiness. Those were autumnal days indeed as my lover and I reacted to our subtle tropisms that knew before we did that it was time for our love--and I use the word loosely--to turn brown and shrivel....but the metaphor is all wrong. We hit on a better one when we lay in the dunes in that evil year 1972 and tried to sort out things and explain ourselves to ourselves and each other: we were rocks in a riverbed letting our rough edges be worn away so that the water/the world would flow past us more easily. As it should because we weren't part of it. A better metaphor. Ours was never Elizabethan vegetable love, it was a stone construct that couldn't grow, only erode. I came into some money, we moved here and for lack of anything else to do I went to the university. But things were never right after we came to this house. We should never have let those edges wear off, there was nothing to hold onto any more.
It's March in the Year of Our Bicentennial, mid-March after the false spring and now there's only the cold endless rain that Athens is known for....Sandy and Susan go downtown to the Little Memorial Library, they know there will be no peace tonight for their finals studying. The rest of us are finished for the quarter and feel like getting good and fucked up. This is no special occasion for me, every night after finishing my duties the discipline collapses and I smoke myself to a standstill as the myths of American life flit across the screen in the living room, myths that sometimes I see and sometimes I don't. Jim sits with me a lot, he's not a student and his discipline is over at five o'clock. We laugh at the absurdity of the tv and smoke some more until we've smoked the laughter away and we see the truth behind the absurdity and it scares us. Something has to be done so when the news comes on Jim jumps up and moons Gerald Ford and that breaks the spell we can laugh again. "On July Fourth let liberty ring out over the land, at noon we'll shake our dingdongs for Gerald Ford!" Jim says and the image shatters us, a hundred million men all over America shaking their cocks in the summer sun and yelling "Ding dong! Ding dong for Gerald Ford!" And would it be all right to stare or would I look away? Jim's by far the most intelligent in the house, but he's an ex-hippie manual worker and feels compelled to be crude to hide his intelligence and his damaged hippie dreams, he jumps out of corners and moons Sandy and his brother Thomas whenever he can catch them off guard and now Jim's ass is a symbol of our commune. He never moons me, they all treat me like something delicate, they just don't know how I'll take things; and he doesn't moon William any more. William who was thrown out of Bob Jones University for going to the bathroom after lights out to study in one of the stalls, they probably thought he was doing something disgusting in there. Jim mooned him once and William could hardly speak for a week after, he'd probably never seen an ass before....what he's doing here I don't know, he doesn't fit. I watch them all go about their lives, seeing them interact while at the same time their phantom selves act out pantomime lives in another universe, another plane of existence, but one anybody can see if they take the time to watch.
So after dinner Jim and I sit on the sofa and toke up while the others do their turn in the kitchen, and Thomas yells at Jim from the landing above and we look up and see him hanging over the rail baring his ass at us or at Jim and I marvel that it is so pale, like the winter moon itself.
"You need to get under the sunlamp," Jim says nonplussed.
"Ah fuck you, let's go get drunk."
"Let's go to the Scene of the Disaster down on the river."
"Fuck no, it's full of preppies and it's too far, let's go to Normaltown so we don't have to drive. I want to get so fucking drunk I have to crawl home."
So Thomas and Jim, Sammy who lives with Susan, Jennifer the sorority girl manqué with the bleached teeth--they all bustle around counting their money and looking for their coats.
"Shake your buns, J.," Jim tells me.
"Well, I don't think so, I haven't been in a bar in a long time, I don't know."
"Ah bullshit, you need to get out."
And Jennifer takes me by the arm like an overbearing aunt and they bundle me up.
"No, really, I don't have any money."
"I got money," Thomas says.
"Come on, we need you to lead us home," Jim says. "And you need the emotional laxative."
And I see that Jim feels big brother-like toward me (though I'm several years older) and think that maybe I love him as much as anyone for all the time he's spent with me since my lover left, it wasn't just he wanted somebody to smoke with....
The bar is only a few blocks away. It's shabby and unpretentious--maybe the last of its kind in Athens--with artless semi-mural scenes of minarets and camels and travel posters for the Bahamas, for Florida, for Reno (a blackjack dealer’s face looking down benevolently on a bright-lit strip of casinos, the same face that had been looking down at drinkers for uncountable years, now browned and streaked by the smoke and greasy air.) This place never changes, but the clientele does. It has gone from students--with a short run as a gay bar--to not-quite-redneck working class, a place where older students like to hang out.
Thomas swallows his first mug of beer non-stop, the ice from the deliciously frosted mug sliding down into his beard. He slams the mug down and bellows for more. The others order pitchers and settle at a table, we're lucky to get one during this citywide blow-out, the four times a year post-finals communal drunk that is our Christmas, our Mardi Gras, especially we the older students who are hip enough to understand that university is only treading shit. (Sardonic not quite smiles exchanged in class when self-serious twenty-year-olds preen themselves before the professors and each other; we are the kind of people who have to have a beer or two after classes to create that carefully controlled numbness of the soul that substitutes for taking education seriously....) But the quarter is already forgotten. I think of tomorrow until the cold wet glass touches my lips (Cold and wet like my lover's lips. I have these flashes and realise that I miss the little familiarities and sensations, and that I will miss them even when Terry's face is forgotten.) The freezing beer at once dry and wet delights my throat and I wish I could drink it all down like Thomas, but it feels good and is instant relaxation. I come up for air smiling and things look a little cleaner as the snits and suspicious of the last few months are washed away by the beer. We are all friends here now, Jim forgets Sammy's late rent, Jennifer forgives Thomas for coming in drunk and trying to get into her bed. We want to forget everything.
We're only a few beers into the evening when someone at the bar tries to chug a pitcher and pukes a great flood of foam on a stranger. The stranger hits him in the face with the empty pitcher and as the fight breaks out everyone is grabbing a mug or a pitcher and retreating into the corners. It is the first time I've seen a fight in this bar or any bar, and I am impressed that the primary aim of everyone is to make sure their beer is safe. Better to spill blood than beer--it's free. And I do actually see a splash of blood fly slow motion from a face, turn end over end like a little dumbbell in the air until I lose it against the brown background....
It's a mismatch, one guy throws the other out the door and then the bartender kicks him out...in seconds the cops are there working over both with skilful verbal blackjacks, they cart the two away but more cops come, they force everybody off the sidewalk. They come in as everyone is venturing out of the corners trying to find their tables and they give us the evil eye....behind me somebody oinks, but not loud. Times have changed.
Too much noise, too many people. The pinball bells and the smoke and stale beer smell become intolerable. I leave as I usually do, without saying anything, out of the brownness of the bar into the mist outside. The rain stopped hours ago but the gutters are full of water and bits of cellophane flashing secret diamonds like some kind of bait in the muck of rain and litter and rotted leaves, flashing in the purpleness of the mercury street lights. I start to walk.
Our house is only a few blocks away. I can almost see it from the bar, but I take another route through dark side streets I once feared to walk but what's to fear now? Fears realised would be welcome at this point, some new sensation provided I can feel it. Out of the brown, out of the purple into the black streets of big old houses now by mitosis only piles of rented rooms and tiny flats but cheerful still, cluttered cosy student rooms, they think they've become adults by reading Sartre. They'll never guess what lies ahead of them and if they did....but maybe not; they live in another age, another universe from the old one I live in. Maybe they have no illusions to lose. I kick down the sidewalk through sodden turds of last fall's sycamore and oak leaves, yes that autumnal death image again--maybe not, maybe I will be composted someday under a bed of purple iris, justification enough for my life. Cheer up for Christ's sake you're only being grim because you're lonely.
--I hate to see people kissing and putting their hands on each other in the street, don't you?
--Well yes, but only because it reminds me so painfully that I have no one to kiss and put my hands on.
Yeah, you're jealous is all because you're out here alone on the rainy cold sidewalk and you know that in the warm yellow glows behind the Venetian blinds people are having joys like you've never known before, they're laughing, they're sweating, they're fucking like rats on speed (Yes, and I turn my x-ray vision to one lighted window and I see the cartoon inside of the wall, there's the matchbox bed and the thread spool furniture and here's Ed Rat taking his wife from the back, rat style. He's got her on all fours on the floor holding her tail up with one white gloved four-fingered hand, he's wearing a vest and a derby or maybe if he's feeling real romantic only the derby and he's smoking a big cheap cigar with a big band on it....yeah it would go something like that.) OK, laugh at yourself, I say. Laugh and see if I care. You use that laugh so often now like a safety switch and it never sounds real. You better not laugh like that where anybody can hear you. Now go on home and get some sleep.
This winter I'm living in a big house on Prince Avenue, Athens, Georgia 30601, USA. Jim who owns the house lives here with his girlfriend Sandy and rents out the extra rooms, big high ceiling rooms, big windows. The cosy yellow-lit living room at the bottom of the stairs is littered with somebody's collection of European beer bottles and stacks of books everywhere, more books arriving every day. They're all ripped off from publishers along with hundreds of magazines subscribed to under phony names and then re-subscribed to after a few issues, that old dodge. We get magazines and threatening letters all the time for people like Phyllis Stein and Phil Harmonic, it's that kind of house, larcenous in a collegiate kind of way.
....Communal kitchen at the back of the house and the sad dining room where I sit at dinner every winter night eating little, saying little, staring at the once ornate moulding around the ceiling that has been painted and painted by generations of paint-crazed householders until now the detail of the carving has started to blur and even out on its way to extinction. The paint when knocked loose by indoor Frisbee throwing falls in little brown turds....strata of paint all shades of brown....apt, these are brown times....And the others look surreptitiously at me (I imagine?) thinking what? Pity? Disgust? Amusement?--the others: Jim and Sandy, the other couple, my fellow singles....I came here as a couple in the fall, in the autumnal dying days of a relationship that was built on nothing except the desperate need for somebody--anybody--to share the emptiness. Those were autumnal days indeed as my lover and I reacted to our subtle tropisms that knew before we did that it was time for our love--and I use the word loosely--to turn brown and shrivel....but the metaphor is all wrong. We hit on a better one when we lay in the dunes in that evil year 1972 and tried to sort out things and explain ourselves to ourselves and each other: we were rocks in a riverbed letting our rough edges be worn away so that the water/the world would flow past us more easily. As it should because we weren't part of it. A better metaphor. Ours was never Elizabethan vegetable love, it was a stone construct that couldn't grow, only erode. I came into some money, we moved here and for lack of anything else to do I went to the university. But things were never right after we came to this house. We should never have let those edges wear off, there was nothing to hold onto any more.
It's March in the Year of Our Bicentennial, mid-March after the false spring and now there's only the cold endless rain that Athens is known for....Sandy and Susan go downtown to the Little Memorial Library, they know there will be no peace tonight for their finals studying. The rest of us are finished for the quarter and feel like getting good and fucked up. This is no special occasion for me, every night after finishing my duties the discipline collapses and I smoke myself to a standstill as the myths of American life flit across the screen in the living room, myths that sometimes I see and sometimes I don't. Jim sits with me a lot, he's not a student and his discipline is over at five o'clock. We laugh at the absurdity of the tv and smoke some more until we've smoked the laughter away and we see the truth behind the absurdity and it scares us. Something has to be done so when the news comes on Jim jumps up and moons Gerald Ford and that breaks the spell we can laugh again. "On July Fourth let liberty ring out over the land, at noon we'll shake our dingdongs for Gerald Ford!" Jim says and the image shatters us, a hundred million men all over America shaking their cocks in the summer sun and yelling "Ding dong! Ding dong for Gerald Ford!" And would it be all right to stare or would I look away? Jim's by far the most intelligent in the house, but he's an ex-hippie manual worker and feels compelled to be crude to hide his intelligence and his damaged hippie dreams, he jumps out of corners and moons Sandy and his brother Thomas whenever he can catch them off guard and now Jim's ass is a symbol of our commune. He never moons me, they all treat me like something delicate, they just don't know how I'll take things; and he doesn't moon William any more. William who was thrown out of Bob Jones University for going to the bathroom after lights out to study in one of the stalls, they probably thought he was doing something disgusting in there. Jim mooned him once and William could hardly speak for a week after, he'd probably never seen an ass before....what he's doing here I don't know, he doesn't fit. I watch them all go about their lives, seeing them interact while at the same time their phantom selves act out pantomime lives in another universe, another plane of existence, but one anybody can see if they take the time to watch.
So after dinner Jim and I sit on the sofa and toke up while the others do their turn in the kitchen, and Thomas yells at Jim from the landing above and we look up and see him hanging over the rail baring his ass at us or at Jim and I marvel that it is so pale, like the winter moon itself.
"You need to get under the sunlamp," Jim says nonplussed.
"Ah fuck you, let's go get drunk."
"Let's go to the Scene of the Disaster down on the river."
"Fuck no, it's full of preppies and it's too far, let's go to Normaltown so we don't have to drive. I want to get so fucking drunk I have to crawl home."
So Thomas and Jim, Sammy who lives with Susan, Jennifer the sorority girl manqué with the bleached teeth--they all bustle around counting their money and looking for their coats.
"Shake your buns, J.," Jim tells me.
"Well, I don't think so, I haven't been in a bar in a long time, I don't know."
"Ah bullshit, you need to get out."
And Jennifer takes me by the arm like an overbearing aunt and they bundle me up.
"No, really, I don't have any money."
"I got money," Thomas says.
"Come on, we need you to lead us home," Jim says. "And you need the emotional laxative."
And I see that Jim feels big brother-like toward me (though I'm several years older) and think that maybe I love him as much as anyone for all the time he's spent with me since my lover left, it wasn't just he wanted somebody to smoke with....
The bar is only a few blocks away. It's shabby and unpretentious--maybe the last of its kind in Athens--with artless semi-mural scenes of minarets and camels and travel posters for the Bahamas, for Florida, for Reno (a blackjack dealer’s face looking down benevolently on a bright-lit strip of casinos, the same face that had been looking down at drinkers for uncountable years, now browned and streaked by the smoke and greasy air.) This place never changes, but the clientele does. It has gone from students--with a short run as a gay bar--to not-quite-redneck working class, a place where older students like to hang out.
Thomas swallows his first mug of beer non-stop, the ice from the deliciously frosted mug sliding down into his beard. He slams the mug down and bellows for more. The others order pitchers and settle at a table, we're lucky to get one during this citywide blow-out, the four times a year post-finals communal drunk that is our Christmas, our Mardi Gras, especially we the older students who are hip enough to understand that university is only treading shit. (Sardonic not quite smiles exchanged in class when self-serious twenty-year-olds preen themselves before the professors and each other; we are the kind of people who have to have a beer or two after classes to create that carefully controlled numbness of the soul that substitutes for taking education seriously....) But the quarter is already forgotten. I think of tomorrow until the cold wet glass touches my lips (Cold and wet like my lover's lips. I have these flashes and realise that I miss the little familiarities and sensations, and that I will miss them even when Terry's face is forgotten.) The freezing beer at once dry and wet delights my throat and I wish I could drink it all down like Thomas, but it feels good and is instant relaxation. I come up for air smiling and things look a little cleaner as the snits and suspicious of the last few months are washed away by the beer. We are all friends here now, Jim forgets Sammy's late rent, Jennifer forgives Thomas for coming in drunk and trying to get into her bed. We want to forget everything.
We're only a few beers into the evening when someone at the bar tries to chug a pitcher and pukes a great flood of foam on a stranger. The stranger hits him in the face with the empty pitcher and as the fight breaks out everyone is grabbing a mug or a pitcher and retreating into the corners. It is the first time I've seen a fight in this bar or any bar, and I am impressed that the primary aim of everyone is to make sure their beer is safe. Better to spill blood than beer--it's free. And I do actually see a splash of blood fly slow motion from a face, turn end over end like a little dumbbell in the air until I lose it against the brown background....
It's a mismatch, one guy throws the other out the door and then the bartender kicks him out...in seconds the cops are there working over both with skilful verbal blackjacks, they cart the two away but more cops come, they force everybody off the sidewalk. They come in as everyone is venturing out of the corners trying to find their tables and they give us the evil eye....behind me somebody oinks, but not loud. Times have changed.
Too much noise, too many people. The pinball bells and the smoke and stale beer smell become intolerable. I leave as I usually do, without saying anything, out of the brownness of the bar into the mist outside. The rain stopped hours ago but the gutters are full of water and bits of cellophane flashing secret diamonds like some kind of bait in the muck of rain and litter and rotted leaves, flashing in the purpleness of the mercury street lights. I start to walk.
Our house is only a few blocks away. I can almost see it from the bar, but I take another route through dark side streets I once feared to walk but what's to fear now? Fears realised would be welcome at this point, some new sensation provided I can feel it. Out of the brown, out of the purple into the black streets of big old houses now by mitosis only piles of rented rooms and tiny flats but cheerful still, cluttered cosy student rooms, they think they've become adults by reading Sartre. They'll never guess what lies ahead of them and if they did....but maybe not; they live in another age, another universe from the old one I live in. Maybe they have no illusions to lose. I kick down the sidewalk through sodden turds of last fall's sycamore and oak leaves, yes that autumnal death image again--maybe not, maybe I will be composted someday under a bed of purple iris, justification enough for my life. Cheer up for Christ's sake you're only being grim because you're lonely.
--I hate to see people kissing and putting their hands on each other in the street, don't you?
--Well yes, but only because it reminds me so painfully that I have no one to kiss and put my hands on.
Yeah, you're jealous is all because you're out here alone on the rainy cold sidewalk and you know that in the warm yellow glows behind the Venetian blinds people are having joys like you've never known before, they're laughing, they're sweating, they're fucking like rats on speed (Yes, and I turn my x-ray vision to one lighted window and I see the cartoon inside of the wall, there's the matchbox bed and the thread spool furniture and here's Ed Rat taking his wife from the back, rat style. He's got her on all fours on the floor holding her tail up with one white gloved four-fingered hand, he's wearing a vest and a derby or maybe if he's feeling real romantic only the derby and he's smoking a big cheap cigar with a big band on it....yeah it would go something like that.) OK, laugh at yourself, I say. Laugh and see if I care. You use that laugh so often now like a safety switch and it never sounds real. You better not laugh like that where anybody can hear you. Now go on home and get some sleep.