One of the things that also went down in the discussion was an argument about getting food, which I guess was really what started the whole thing, and this other part just came up; but my mind follows funny tracks.
It had to do with the differences (and similarities) between the girls who were scorpions and the girls who just hung around with us. With reference to the guys who were members and the guys who just hung. It was a good discussion to have and a dull one to reconstruct. And I guess it was mainly for Mike’s benefit anyway (Mike is one of said guys who hangs, a long-haired friend of Devastation’s; sleeps here most of the time but also doesn’t want to join) and I guess/think/suspect one difference between members and non-members anyway is that members know the difference already and don’t have to talk about them (that politeness again) though from some of the things Tarzan says, I wonder.
an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and the twenty-second, bless. Grain, blabbed on slip-time, told its troubles to the tree (all runny in the oozy gyre’s incarnadine). She won’t run Thursdays. The underside of the little hand is tarnished; why is muk-amuk canonized so easy? Truck-tracks crow-foot creators drooling half-and half. She didn’t remember how or when, last time. Pavement sausages split; the cabbage remembers. Lions with prehensile eyes pick up their paws, apocopate, and go to town. Get with-it, mauve-peanut! Make it, thing-a-ma-boob! You won’t catch me slipping my sticktoitiveness under your smorgasborg. Fondle my nodule, love my dog. Lilting is all is easy. Knitting needles receed around the vision, baring his curviture, clearing her underwear. So that’s not what it’s for. French fried pickelilly and deep-dish-apple death won’t get you through that wake up in the morning alive. Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won’t move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphor if I ever heard one. Timed methods run out: coo, morning bird. I could stop before breathing marble basonets. Salvage a disjuncture, it’s all you Middle of the ring around the Harley Davidson bush, blooming, blooming, shame, socks, dearth and passion pudding, flowers, or Ms. Crystaline Pristine. Her backwoods mystification is citified in the face. Pentacle pie and hunger city, oh my oh too much, my meat and mashed potatoes pansy, my in the middle of it biche.
Hart’s blood is good fly-catching bait. So’s fresh sheep-shit. Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn’t your running the mill broad loom, sword, or side. She’s right on the guache circuit where a principle’s a principle with all hell lined up to get paid. Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanley, Horripilation, Factotum, Susquahanna, Summer-fine day. It’s all the same in the bitch’s kitchen. You look for the dice this time. Maybe you can wind up a winner. Summary, Mopery, Titular, Wisdom, Thaumaturgy, Fictive, Samoa and five hands over. When I grow up I’m going to get a vasectomy all my own. (A dendrite in the glans is worthy of the bush.) Why does he insist on winter all the time? You can stutter in the water but that’s not the way to think. Not thinking but the way thinking feels. Not knowledge but knowledge’s form. If there’s enough raisins, splay feet, and guilded hornet-heads, you can wish, dream, lie like a Saxon though you only prevaricate like a Virginia ham. George! the ingenuity I’ve expended to fill five missing days.
Conversation with furry Forest at Teddy’s:
“What are you writing now?”
“I’m not writing anything,” I said. “I haven’t been writing anything and I’m not going to write anything.”
He frowned, and I hoped a lot the lie had at least the structure of truth. But how can it? Which is why I haven’t been able to write anything but this journal in so long. And thank the blinded stars, I feel the energies for that going.
What other days from my life have gone? After a week, I can’t remember five. After a year, how many days in it will you never think of again?
But Faust was walking ahead between the shadowed presses. “Here,” he said. “This is what you want to see, isn’t it?”
I stepped up to the work table. Battleship linoleum glittered with lead shavings.
“There.” He pointed at a full-page tray of type with a yellow index nail.
Raised grey-on-grey proclaimed:
“But…?”
“That’s you, ain’t it?” His cackle echoed among the ceiling pipes.
“But I haven’t given Calkins the second collection! He doesn’t even know there is one!”
“Maybe he’s just making a good guess.”
“But I don’t want him to—”
“They’re supposed to got obituaries too, prepared on all the famous people around here who might die.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You keep askin’ me to show you where they printed the thing…”
I started away from the desk. “But I don’t see any rolls of paper around. The presses aren’t going. You mean a thirty-six-page newspaper comes out of here every day?”
But Faust was already walking away, still chuckling, his white hair—sides, beard, and back—covering the bright choker.
“Joaquim?” I called. “Joaquim, when do they actually print it? I mean this doesn’t look like anybody’s been in here since before the
going out along Broadway. The smoke was as bad as I’ve ever seen it—rolling from side-alleys, gauzing the streets in loose layers. Down one block, the face on an eight-(I counted)-story building was curtained with it, leaking out broken windows, to waterfall to the street, mounded and shifting.
One section of pavement had been replaced by metal plates (some incomplete repair) clanging when I crossed. After another half hour the buildings were taller and the street was wider and the sky grey and streaked like weathered canvas, like silvered velvet.
On the wide steps to a black and glass office building was a fountain. I went up to examine: Wet patches of color on the dusty mosaic at the bottom; rust around the pentangle of nozzles on the cement ball; I climbed over the lip to look in what I guessed had held plants: dried stem stumps poked from ashy earth; beer and soda-can tabs. I stepped once on a wet patch of green and yellow mosaic tiles with my bare foot; took my foot away and left a chalky print.
The bus came around the corner. It didn’t scare me this time. I vaulted the fountain edge and sprinted down the steps.
He feels the experience whose detritus is interleaved in the Orchids’ pages/petals has left him a perfect voice with which he can say nothing; he can imagine nothing duller. (For that sentence to make sense, it must be ugly as possible. And it isn’t—quite. So it fails.
The doors flap-clapped open even before it stopped.
“Hey,” I called. “How far up Broadway do you go?”
Do you know the expression on somebody’s face when you wake them out of a sound sleep with something serious, like a fire or a death? (Small, bald, oyster-eyed black man, obsessed and trundling his bus from here to there.) “How far you going?”
I told him: “Pretty far.”
While he considered how far that was, I got on. Then we both thought about the last time I was on his bus; I don’t know if the little movement of his head back into the khaki collar acknowledged that or not. But I’m sure that’s what we were thinking. I also thought: There are no other passengers.
He closed the doors.
I sat behind him, looking at the broad front window as we shook on up the street.
A sound made me look back.
All the advertising cards had been filled with posters, or sections from posters, of George. From over the window his face looked down there; here were his knees. The long one over the back door showed his left leg, horizontal, foot to mid-thigh. A third of them were crotch-shots.