Category: Blog Post

I was sitting in this hotel bar in Sacramento one night a few months ago. It was early in the evening and the place was empty. Some friends of mine were out on a golf course somewhere and I was bored out of my mind and wished like hell I’d never agreed to come along on what was supposed to be a little weekend getaway for a bunch of old buddies who’d all gone to chiropractic school together. I never went to chiropractic school, and I don’t play golf, but a guy I knew from work had put this package trip together and had a late cancellation so he’d talked me into tagging along.

I thought I’d gotten a good deal, but it wasn’t looking like such a good deal after all. The night before we’d had tickets to see Abe Vigoda and Marion Ross in “Gin Game” at some cheesy dinner theater.

At any rate, I was sitting there in this bar and I haven’t had a drink in years, so I was just nursing an iced tea and watching college basketball on the TV. The bartender was this wired little character who was behaving almost like an imposter. He was pacing back and forth behind the bar and aggressively snapping a towel, and then he started lighting matches and flinging them in the air.

Finally he comes over to refill my iced tea and says, shaking his head, “I’ll tell you what, you hear some interesting stories in this line of work.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said.

“Just this morning I had this guy come in here and sit right down at the bar and commence to telling me about an exerience he had recently in Thailand. You ever been there?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Beautiful country,” he said. “Nice looking ladies. I’ve spent some time there myself. Anyway, it seems this fella was doing some hiking in Khao Wang, which is some sort of national park, and he stumbled across a bunch of workers who were castrating tranquilized monkeys on picnic tables. He said there were dozens of these poor insensate monkeys piled about, and these characters had them splayed right there on the picnic tables and they were sawing the little nuts right off the damn things, one right after the other. The guy said they had a big boombox and were blasting a Van Halen CD. Up to their elbows in blood and gore and monkey testicles, and there they were, he said, laughing and smoking and listening to Van Halen like they were having themselves a party.”

“I can’t imagine it,” I said, and I was telling the God’s honest truth.

The bartender claimed there was someplace on the Internet where a guy could see all the footage he wanted of monkeys being castrated.

I told him I didn’t doubt it for a minute.

“That’s where I get all my prescription drugs and fishing gear,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“The Internet,” he said, and slapped the surface of the bar with an almost frightening burst of enthusiasm. “Damn straight, mister. We’re living in an incredible age. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

He asked Emilie to leave the curtains by this window undrawn at night, in order that, when people were asleep, the fish might look at the moon.

—Isak Dinesen, “The Dreaming Child”

What is the theme? he shouted at me.

I’m sorry? I said.

Your point! he bellowed. What is your point?

Things are slippery? I offered.

Ah, yes, he said, nodding his head, calming down. Meaning is elusive. Meanings. Answers.

I mean things, literally, I said, stammering, starting to wave my arms around like I always did. I mean objects. I try to pick things up and they fall right through my hands. I lose my footing; all the surfaces seem so slick and shiny.

He sat nodding his head and stroking his beard. That might at least make a decent enough metaphoric entry to your theme, he said. Please go on.

But that’s all there is, I told him. It’s not a theme; it’s the way things are.

I left the inquisitor’s office and wandered the streets for hours. I was puzzled by the way the world looked, and had to admit that I sort of liked it that way. I liked losing my way, enjoyed the feeling of being wholly lost in a big city, stunned by an odd angle or a furtive, impressionistic detail in the ceaseless shadow tide of the peripheries, noticing the things that never moved absorbing the things that did. Also, big things, slowly, almost imperceptibly, absorbing the darkness, just as in the morning the light would rise in all of them again.

The faces of the people I passed were slack with preoccupation; they’d pulled down their shadows around themselves, and looked right through me in a sort of empirical blackout. I didn’t mind feeling invisible. It made it easier to stare into things.

I didn’t want anyone to give anything away, to show me the way into a single idea. Poets, writers, artists, musicians: I liked them best when they were at their most mysterious, when they drove me deep into the unexplored scrub country of my skull. The really great ones would kick all sorts of stuff loose in my head –images, luminous dust, sparks, bursts of static electricity, a fragment by which a story, a secret, even an entire lost civilization might be inferred. Words would suddenly explode from dark pockets in my head like startled birds fleeing a bush.

I’d ultimately fall down flight after flight of stairs, a bass line beating in my head like hail on a tin roof, or, a moment later, quieter, like rain at the windows.

Just open the door a crack, that’s all I ask, or allow me a brief glimpse of the whole howling universe in the sliver of moonlight where the curtains flutter momentarily free of the window frame.

Put it in my reach, not in my lap, as someone –I think Wendell Berry– once said.

Let me imagine my own world, my own poem, my own story, inside yours.

Just let me imagine.

That’s all I’m asking.

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”

My heart of silk

is filled with lights,

with lost bells,

with lilies and bees.

I will go very far,

farther than those hills,

farther than the seas,

to beg Christ the Lord

to give me back the soul I had

when I was a child,

ripened with legends,

with a feathered cap

and a wooden sword.

—Frederico Garcia Lorca, from “Ballad of the Little Square.” Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili

The ranting of the old crone had been assaulting the King’s ears for weeks. By now, he figured, the madwoman’s words were drilling in his brain like an army of moist and destructive organisms, the kind of things he’d seen writhing under a microscope on the Discovery channel.

A sneeze carried to him from a distant chamber; the Queen had a cold. A moment later he heard clapping, and then a snippet of a cheerful tune from some insipid third-rate musical. The odd bird he had married would dance and shake her pom-poms (improvised from shredded newspapers) and sing alone to her heart’s content. Bodies stacked like cordwood outside the walls, and his daft Queen remained the picture of happy oblivion.

The woman never seemed to sleep. The King heard her solitary revels long into the night. She was getting wine from somewhere, he was sure of that.

He had a headache. The smoke from the pyres had fouled his lungs. There was nothing to do around the damned place but walk the dark, endless, piss-reeking halls. He’d had it with horses. All of his old chess partners were either dead or in exile. What a dreadful life, he thought. So boring, even with all the commotion and the dying. His lunatic son served no one but God, and had burned every book in the castle. Not that any of them had been worth a damn.

God Almighty, how the King hated writers.

If he could keep any of his enemies straight, if he could just pinpoint which of the scoundrels had planted so many crazy ideas in his wife’s head, he’d have the guilty party flayed and strung up from a dying tree. At the risk of offending God he had already banished his lunatic son. He’d been hearing stories for weeks that the wrong-headed fool was wandering in a sackcloth and living in the surrounding woods.

By God, the King felt pinched and set upon from all sides. He was thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca-Cola, and there wasn’t a damn thing left to eat in the place but rancid roast meat, stale bread, and Frito chips.

His only daughter had run off to Brussels with a rock and roll musician who favored impossibly snug trousers.

The King didn’t have a single hobby that could sustain him. He’d been an obsessive counter for years, but he was even tired of counting. He’d saddle a horse and ride right out from under his miserable life if he wasn’t such a poor horseman and so damnably overweight; what a mess he was. He wouldn’t doubt he was carrying 20 stone on his tortured frame.

Listen to that: now the foolish woman was laughing herself sick. He went to the door of his chamber and listened. Oh, something was entertaining enough, by God, in this baleful world. Not another sound beyond the lunatic raving of his wife, her ruckus cruelly amplified by all that emptiness and stone. If he could find anyone left to do the job he intended to have the Queen’s head cut off first thing in the morning and her body dragged deep into the dark woods by oxen. He would have her buried; it was the one concession he would make: he would not have her body flung upon the reeking piles of the common dead.

The King made his way to the North tower and gazed out at the wreckage time had made of his kingdom. He could see the bobbing torches borne by the roving bands of marauders, the lot of them tearing around on those destructive motor buggies he’d seen all over the television. A stinking, sickening cloud hung low over the wretched scene. The loud guitars and absurdly booming bass of loosed anarchy blasted from the portable stereos in the impromptu trailer encampments that were now scattered throughout the dark woods, each of them, it seemed, more squalid and libertine than the next.

The King was weary beyond words. There was no end to his misery. His campaigns of freedom and righteous vengeance had bequeathed him a kingdom of resentful refugees and imbeciles. He needed a new line of work.

There was no one left to talk to, no one he could trust. Even the ghosts had stopped talking to him; they now avoided the area around his chambers altogether, having apparently grown tired of his labored breathing, his ceaseless monologues, and the sorry spectacle of his naked rambles in the wee hours.

He wished like hell he had joined his old friend Ruckert, who had bought himself a Winnebago and was now armed to the teeth and living in the high desert somewhere. While the King sat there in his dark and drafty castle, surrounded by death and lawless disorder on all sides, Ruckert was probably drinking a cold Budweiser and watching his beloved Wolfhounds gambol in the sand. Oh, you could always be certain of that: Ruckert was indisputably the brainy one of the bunch. The rest of the old gang had either hung or gone to the chopping block.

The King lit a candle and took a piss from the small window next to his bed. He could hear his feeble offering rattling in the leaves far below. The fires were still blazing in the woods, and the music was raging louder than ever. The fleeing servants, he imagined, had already stripped the place of everything of value, and he imagined that the marauders would come for him soon enough, their murderous rage now driven by little but habitual stupor, inebriation, and boredom.

They were welcome to what was left of him. He would content himself with the knowledge that he had been King, and that for damn sure still counted for something in this world.