Stop Me If You've Already Heard This One

So ain’t we all inanimate, George?

—Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

I saw you spinning that greeting card rack at the truck stop. I saw the look in your eyes. You eventually moved to the next rack and bought a cheap pair of sunglasses instead. You’re tempted, aren’t you, always tempted to add some helpless contribution –more plea than invitation– to the scarred metal in the bathroom stall? Remember the pawn shop, the old woman who said, “I’m not here to listen to stories, son. They don’t pay me enough.”

Your old man was William Burroughs if William Burroughs had to stand on his feet boning hogs all day for a living. You’d watch him stir Metamucil into a glass of tonic water, chase a shot of whiskey with a long pull on a jug of Mylanta. His philosophy boiled down to little but this: Always throw the first punch. And: This world ain’t in the business of making sense.

The first time you walked out that door all those years ago there wasn’t a doubt in your heart that you were going absolutely nowhere. No problem, you thought. Where else was there to go?

Somehow, though, you got saved, and now Albert Ayler takes you across catwalks, down fire escapes, and right out into the night, into the mewling city; through empty streets, past other half-dreaming houses lit by insomnia, the blue wobble of TV screens in dark windows; along the lapping harbor humming with idling industry and the great under-throb of the city at three a.m., sprawling shadows, litter and moonlight and longing and the great hold-out behind and beneath every heartbreak, the always losing silence and compromised darkness; the way light sneaks around even while a city sleeps, all the creeping, sleepless things, that saxophone a prayer rising somewhere in the night, a wish at least, a promise, an apology, a stirring monologue, a beautiful loose thing traveling like a breathing kite from a small puddle of light cradling a park bench.

Am I to blame if hallucinations and visions are alive and have names and permanent residences?

—Karl Kraus, from Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths

There is another kind of sleep,

We are talking in it now.

As children we walked in it, a mile to school,

And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed.

—James Galvin, “Hematite Lake”