Lock-Up & Lock Jaw
It all began last Thursday. As always, I awoke to a jugful of water and a vitamin the size of my ego. Dressed, brushed and signed-out for the slog. Through the door and ‘cross the street to the courthouse square and wait. And wait. And waited some more. Tuesday I'd posted forty minutes in the wet and the cold and no one showed. A call told me I'd be picked-up Wednesday. Wednesday came and so did the same result, sans wet, half again as cold. A message wasn't returned. So when Thursday rolled around to yet another rerun I figured it was time to slog elsewhere.
Bad enough I gotta rouse myself for penury, the least penury could do was show up.
So I pro-acted. Grabbed a Count of Lackawanna Transit System (COLTS) bus up to Dickson City. The Mall at Viewmont, which is not much of a mall, in a very nothing vale, and has no view. No view I could see anyway. Got off in front of Penny's and trudged, through a parking lot, up an off ramp, and on to the inaptly-named Scranton-Carbondale Expressway. I thought expressways were expressively for expressing. This four-lane, stop-light ridden thoroughfare is expressedly no such thing.
But there is traffic. Minions in their cookie-cutter sedans hitting the cake bake strip. Wal-Mart. Target. Home Depot. Circuit City. Toys-R-Us. And all the tell-tale retail parasites that latch on to such chichainery (sic).
Plus, up about a half-mile or so, adjacent to a Tuxedo Junction, lies Manpower. Since I've been reduced to half man and relieved of all my power I figured this'd be the perfect place for me to apply. Perhaps I might re-up. Or at least provoke a more suitable down.
Inside the temp agency's office I am like no other. Silk in a sea of denim. Groom in an ill-wash of unkempt. A hard-boiled egghead among the savage brute. Looking not just for the best way to keep the wolves at bay, but for a way to take over the pack.
Terminal tested, I am Exemplary. Of course. When a test consists of given answers how could anyone be anything but? Okay, speed counts too, and accuracy. And I am all about a speedy keen out to this mess I'm still inexplicably in.
Expect a phone interview tomorrow. Pass that and you will start Monday.
Then Friday morn shows the slog.
You wanna work?
Not that kinda work, but I could use the loot. I wouldn't mind getting' outta the House for a spell. I got a phoner at 2:30 though.
Not a problem.
2:30 rolls around and I phone in to the MDA. That's right, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The folk who handle Jerry's Kids. Seems along with the Telethon they've got another fund-raising racket: The Lock-Up. Yep, The Lock-Up. Where they entice some of Northeast Pennsylvania's most ne’er do bad citizens to go to fake jail. Really. They come in a limo or a de facto paddy wagon, handcuff and drag 'em away. The bail goes to the MDA.
I was lockjawed, too aghast to tell 'em I was intimately familiar with the concept. Prison as a promotional tool for the disabled? Tomfoolery of such a hurtful subject? Had any one of these fund raisers ever spent a single day in real jail they'd never dare such a stunt. Never stick pins in the eyes of the nation’s small country of incarcerates.
But I bit. Told the slog I’d have to beg off Monday. Then I spit it out. Told the slog there’d be no way I’d call and ask people to go to jail. For charity or not. Then I bit again. Philosophically, diametrically opposed, I still might be able to do some good for someone.
Wouldn’t know until I took a little look-see.
Well, today I got a good look-see. On video, the kids are as brave and as bold and as beautiful as you’d expect. Courage I couldn’t in a million years muster. The kick though’s about as corny as it sounds. Intrude on some hapless good citizen and tell ‘em they’re on the Most Wanted List, ask ‘em if they’d like to be locked-up, wear stripes, photo-op behind fake bars, and dine out on a meal of “bread and water.” All for a good cause.
C’mon, it’ll be fun.
I don’t think so. As much as I’d like to be of civic assistance, it doesn’t do good to make a mockery of America’s gulag. Yeah, most cons belong down, the longer the harder, the better. But grinding their faces into the cement in the name of charity isn’t the answer. Good works don’t get better with demean.
So tomorrow, I’ll rouse dark and early, and make my way back across the street to the square. Let’s hope the slog’ll have me back.
The Moosic Noose
It is a stain of a town. Nestled in a hedge of underwhelming hills and trimmed with a frost of sixth growth forest. You'd miss it if it were there, but it isn't so you don't. A splotch of roadkill, sheltered beneath a canopy of pure slate. An island of cloud parked right on its head. God's carport. Leaning awkward and leaking spit and blood in some sedentic trailer park.
To hit the town you must first traverse a highway lacking in even the requisite repetity of fast food amenities. A Mickey D's every, say, 30 miles, rather than 5. A truck stop but once between fathoms. Nothing else. No more. Forget hotels. There are none. Why would there be? There is no reason to stay, overnight or otherwise.
It is that chartless. Not uncharted, mind you. Chartless. People have come here and gone again. Some gave it a moment, others gave it a moment more. None lived past the moment they surrendered. All surely regretted the struck seconds of their lives. The shops and the taverns and the diners are shuttered, those that aren't are filled with ghosts. Drunk with despondence.
The town, if it could be called a town and it can't, is named
Moosic. It is a hundred-plus years old. A hundred thousand tears cold. Its flame-keepers claim to be experiencing some population growth. If so, it is a growth the size of a mite's tumor.
To bring newfound glory to the town I propose the Moosic Noose. Think about it. The place is already known as a place of the dead. Why not make it the place you go to die? Euthanasists. Assisted Suicidals. Kervorkian's kids. All those at the end of their tether could go there for enough rope. Rope, alas, twined into the trademarked, patented Moosic Noose.
It would be a hoot. It would be a holler. And it would be a start to the end of an absent history.
Now, what's the number of the Moosic Chamber of Commerce?
A Song of Laughing and Forgetting
We read ourselves into things. I do anyway. Sometimes I read the wrong things. Sometimes I read the right things for the wrong reasons. Sometimes I just read it all wrong. But for some humdrum reason, it's always me at the core.
Like in Elbow's Forget Myself. A read of a telling tells me I was way off; it's a Friday Night bit of a fright song about a cat making the prowl around Piccadilly. Seems said cat's got a lot to think about, specifically (I think) his kitten. He's a bit desolate, despondent almost, and he cranks a rankled eye-view of the punters as a result.
I got the last part, the think about, and I ran. I felt it, I walked it, I wore it. And I guess I got it all wrong. But oh how right it did feel. Still does. Maybe even more so.
To me Forget Myself is more than just a Friday night fright song about a cat who goes prowling, I take it as a song about laughter and forgetting, or, perhaps, laughing about the idea of forgetting. Beneath the smirk and the smile lies a reveal so close to the soul that I can't help cozying up to it. At the library I Yahooed the video to a constant, then a coincident in Paste allowed the same at the House. Play, play and more play. Till there is no play left in me. Then I play some more. And each and every time I'm struck by a chorus of resound:
No, I know, I won't forget you
But I'd forget myself
If the city would forgive me
Right, bright, and brilliant. And, to this bull’s-eyed soul, rightly, brightly, brilliantly on target. So damn simple it hurts double. I get that sinking feeling a lot, the clear and ever present memory of a face I can't forget, a regret that I'm doomed to remember. Miami, New York, Chicago, London, even Buffalo – I've hurt and burned and crashed and double-crossed 'em all. When you wrong an entire someone you scar; when you wrong an entire city, you've gota go for complete and utter forgetting and forgiveness.
I’ve done both. Of course the wrongings have a face, faces, or, in my case, many, many faces. I won't name names – they've suffered enough at my scarred hands – but I might name instance. Instances. Not so quiet thefts, not so clever lies, borrowings and burdenings and all around baddenings. Twofold. Thricefold. Tenfold. Twenty. There comes a point when counting just doesn't add up.
Elbow’s angle sticks in the crook of my maw. “Look for the plot where I can bury my broken heart” is to me, for me, a tear that still streams. “Are you falling in love with every second song?” is a question I answer with Yes. I’m still looking for the plot of gold, and I’m still falling in love, every second song or so, even if it is from a distance, with a distant. There’s not much laughter, and seldom any forgetting, but I’m getting there. With Elbow’s angling, I’ll be getting there tunefully.
I'm All Logic
If, as the Stoics hypothesized, logic is bones and sinew, and my bones are brittled and ill bore and my sinew is ached and torn, I'm all logic. I gotta be. Why else here?
Again with the Auster. You gotta be here. Fully in a place. In place. Fully in a time. In time. Fully in the moment. Doesn't matter where, so long as you're there. Here. Completely.
But my here is incomplete. Mind wanders, soul shifts, body aches on impulses even it didn't know it had. Half life. In a perpetual half time. The throngs are all at the concession stands feeding their faces while I sit stirred in a locked dressing room, my swagger on a hanger.
I'm ready to resume play, Mr. Demille.
Today again with the rains, not as spitting as it has been, but nonetheless wet. A cloak of nature's tears wrapped around an ingrown cry baby. The slog gets called on account, I get giddy. Thank some lucky stars. Perhaps today will be the day that I get to make my play.
So Paste. A surprisingly splendid offering of smart pop arcana. Yesterday was the first time I've been in a bookstore in almost four years. Not for lack of trying – many are the days that I've tried to bribe and cajole a ride – but for geography. There is no Borders, no Barnes, no little indy in downtown Scranton, and it's a long, long way to Dickson City. Yesterday I made my way, for minutes, minutes enough to find that Paste might just be the place.
It was a stewful few minutes, the wash and the rush of the rash of titles nearly overwhelmed me. Stoked some faraway flame. I wanted to spend hours, days, cracking covers and delving into stacks upon stacks of the written. Even with the occasional mail drop (thanks Craig), I still do so miss the written. I miss its browse, its spur, its contagion.
Yes, there is the public library, that blessed Gothic fortress which has become my defacto office. If not for them there'd be for me recently no Auster, no Berendt, no McCarthy. No On Bullshit. Yet, good and great as it is, the library cannot replicate the thrill of an at once all new.
The rest is lining-it as I can. The quick cyber fixes at the aforementioned Albright Memorial mostly, and, if I'm feeling particularly pocketed, Northern Light, the kinda cool coffee klatchery where two Site Kiosks allow timed email checks and a semblance of surfing.
There is too the some small public access provided at University of Scranton's Weinberg Library, but the three ancient, weathered, Word-free terminals assigned non-students are hidden away in a closet that can only be accessed by passing through battalions of spanking new work stations which of course are off limits to the common folk. Like this half world, you must make it through a maze of can't-have before you get your morsel.
Morsels I've learned to find fulfilling. Tidbits of food, thimbles of drink, slivers of minutes. Pieced and parsed properly, they can almost sate. The Big Almost. It's not quite, not because I like too – I'm nothing if not interested in the quite – but because I'm mandated to. Because it is.
So I let the Bacchanals commence without me, Dionysus dance in another sphere, and I tow the Apollonian line, it is my burden, it is my joy, it is only logical.
Sulking Toward Bethlehem
The rains came Friday – blessed, glorious torrents of team – and with them almost went what little was left of my resolute. I'm talkin' 'bout strength, dig? A little big thing called fortitude. A Stoic's great good grace. The solid in my ever dwindling mass. One minute it was there; the next it was gone. Long gone.
Long done gone.
The Sophist says the capacity to act or be acted upon is the mark of real existence or ‘that which is.' If so, then I ain't. Isn't. Aren't. I am not permitted to act. I am not permitted to be acted upon, unless you count the daily dalliance of humiliatings. Instead I'm held in a place between stages, a stage between places. Linger. Limbo. Lull. Calloused, bruised, exhaust wrung, does not make me real. It only makes me vivid, livid. Vividly, lividly unreal.
A Fool.
So I sit, stirred to a sullen, sulken, silent, the ass-end of another dog day refurbishing a house that I don't own, a house that I won't own, a house I wouldn't own, a home not my own, in a town that can't have me, cursing the vivid lividity of it all. My feckless, reckless plightedness. A steam swamps my soul, a hiss of unreason and ugly, wobble and woe. With all the ire of anger, I am consumed.
The Stoics held that uglies like fear or envy, or, I suppose, bitterness and anger, were false judgements, that the sage would not, could not befall them. Later Stoics took it a good step further, believed the sage to be immune to misfortune. That a right course made for a right soul.
Boy, did I steer sagely wrong.
Perhaps if I could grab hold of my own wheel the road wouldn't elude me. Maybe if I didn’t have to come back to a Houseful of malignant ghetto hillbillies I wouldn't wanna run over things.
Take Little John, the Oompah-Loompah Old Head. A pipsqueak tweak with a crack chip on his bony shoulder, he’s nasty, rude, vindictive and deluded. Weighing in at what must be 175, arising to a whopping 5'3" in his padded bobo's, the creature is all stomach and skull and stupid. Coon-eyes popping from a popped top. Sneak ways slithering from a scaled skin.
He's without idea, stuck in some seventies slow jam of weepy sorrow and monster rock promise, and he's utterly without ally. If I burned bridges, this idiot torched the world. What meager world it was. He must've. I mean, he has one of three sisters and a housing-homed dad and that's it. No friends. No connections. No nothing. This is the guy's hometown and still he's gotta temp it. In fact, he had to temp it twice; the first agency fired him after he feigned a wrist injury, then, when given an office position, spent his days sorting promotional golf tees. Really. He didn't step up, so he was pushed out. Down. Usually the only people who get canned from a temp service are the ones who don't show up at all.
Gimme my hometown and I'll make it mine again. Or else.
But enough patheticry. It is what it is until it isn't and I'm a fool to fond and fret the could'ves, would'ves, should'ves. There is a worse. A much worse. I just came in from a smoke where a man who lost both his parents while away said today he'd be visiting their grave sites. For the first time. He'd been down thirteen years, couldn't attend their funerals, couldn't be by their bedsides while they were ailing. Now he was going to see them and they were dead. Hard as it is to fathom after all the funk and fetters and frustration, but I got it half good.
Wrong Eyes
I found it. Some of it anyway. Or something close. It was pitch as pure white, clean as all mud, crazy and kooky and candid and truly cool. It didn’t come in a box. It didn’t come in glassine. And it didn’t come to me. I had to go get it. Specifically, to the the Scranton Cultural Center, an old Masonic Temple here. ‘Twas a suitable place, for a surprising find.
I found God.
Okay, so I didn't. But I did find myself falling fond of those who believed that they have. I'm talkin' Pentacosts. Strictly Southern charmers (of a sort). The tongue lashers, the shakers, the healers. The closest thing the cracker has to voodoo. The stuff of story. The stuff of legend.
This eve I saw Andrew Douglas'
Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, one of the brightest little road trips I may ever have been taken in on. Sure it was a vicarious in, and sure I was a mite late. But I’m still a ward of the State. Half state, but nonetheless State.
'Twas damn good to get way away for awhile.
Scripted by an inspiring Steve Haisman, tripped by the charismatistic Jim White, and tracked by he and a few of his finer friends, such as Cat Power, The Handsome Family and David Johansen,
Searching is a story about story, a tale about tale, told and sung and spilled from the outside. Spilled because "stories [are] everything and everything [is] stories."
That's Harry Crews talkin' one of the many truths he gets to telling. The quipless quip comes while walking down a desolate clay road and recalling the days when he and his kinfolk made up stories to go with the perfect people in the Sears Robuck catalogue. His kin weren’t perfect. Far from it. They were missing fingers and limbs and eyes. They had lesions and sores and the crazies. In a tale tarnished with character, the tallest teller is the star. Harry Crews is that bright. Grizzled, acute, sinuous, wise. The man knows things, things most of us can't even guess at.
Or get tripped up in the guessing. Flashback 1989. Maybe '90. I can’t be sure. Crews touring to support
Body, another muscular trumping of the spineless competition. What am I saying? Crews has no competition. Never has. Ever. Maybe O’Connor. Maybe Faulkner. But their long gone dead. Anyway, the wisest old codge of the swamp and I were scheduled to meet, in a publisher-appointed suite at The Royalton, all so I could plug him in
Paper.
It was meant to be one of my finer moments.
Of course meant-to-be's rarely are, and this was no exception. On the appointed day I arrived in The Royalton lobby eager early. Zeus knows I didn't wanna be late to meet the master. I also wanted to be braced. And I know more than a slew of the 44 bartenders who’d comp me the bracing. Since Crews was a notorious drunk as well as a formidable mind, I wanted at least a shot up.
So I hit the bar. Two neat Jack's with a black cafecito back. Before noon. It was a brace alright, braced the words right into a near slur. Not good. Another double-o joe later I was ready to meet the man. As ready as I'd ever be.
In his suite we shook hands and the lordly one asked if he could get me anything.
What are you drinking?
Coke. I quit drinkin' liquor four months ago. It was time.
Oh.
And there I stood two drinks to a slur.
But I went on instinct and the tete a tete went down well. Better than expected even. I pitched increasingly faster; Crews came back with increasing economy of speed. He was open, clever, cagey, on. A raconteur from way back, who knew well how to rack a tell.
Then came the printed nightmare. My last question was Would you yourself kill given the chance? He answered: Of course. When the interview ran however the words were flipped and instead read Would you kill yourself given the chance. Not even of the same frame. His Of course not only made all the nonsense in the world, it made him look both cowardly and suicidal. As if he were too scared to take a chance on taking his own damn self. Stupid. And it made me look like an idiot.
I was incensed. Pissed purple and rage red. Still am. To some small degree. It’s not enough to be dwarfed; I gotta be shamed too? Uh-huh. Not this here Hood. Seeing, hearing, feeling Harry Crews again brought it all back. Then the road took it all away. There are so many greater things to concern myself with, so many deeper hurts, so much more to tacit. All it takes is a fevered faith. Like the blind intuits with the wrong eyes. Ya just gotta believe.
