“Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc.” – Leonard Cohen
Intro Note: The Reader does not need to know anything beforehand about the historical personages discussed in this text. Everything the Reader needs to know (for the purposes of this) is explained within the text.
When I die, if I ever do, I would like it to be, somewhat at least, in the manner of Susy Clemens and Jack Donne. I shall explain who I mean and what I mean in a moment.
First I want to say, for the record, that perhaps I would rather go more like Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German hermit philosopher, at least as I imagine it (based on the facts).
He sat down for breakfast in his mid-70s, which back then would’ve been like late 80s, at least, today. When his housekeeper came back in with his coffee (he lived alone, except for his housekeeper and poodle) s/he saw the great philosopher sitting there calmly in his chair, at the breakfast table, eyes closed, a smile upon his lips. The philosopher loved his coffee and the aroma of it always perked him up. The caretaker knew that the lonely, solitary and proud Schopenhauer had passed on when he didn’t reach for his coffee. “They” now call him the most pessimistic philosopher who ever lived. In truth, despite all his solitude and struggles, or because of them, the man had at some point turned into one of the happiest people who ever walked the planet, even though he was blatantly rejected by his own mother in front of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe himself. Schopenhauer could even compete with Buddha and Lao Tzu in that way. You can tell it from his late writings.
Suzy Clemens was Mark Twain’s oldest daughter. She was the one “most like him,” and the one he consequently fought with the most. She wrote a biography of her father when she was in her teens. She inspired some of his most memorable literary creations, if not some of his best work, such as his novel about Joan of Arc. He often compared Suzy to Joan and he almost felt like she was Joan reincarnated, and sometimes he even believed that literally (almost) she really was Joan, reincarnated. And she acted as a literary critic and editor for her father’s and for other’s works. She also wanted to be, and studied to be, an opera singer, which was like wanting to be a rock, pop, or rap singer today. She was often highly competitive with her father, believing that he could be (and often was) a windbag who took up too much air and too much space in the room. While everyone else was in awe of his overwhelming presence, she thought he was acting like a jackass at least half the time.
When the family left for Europe in 1896 (dad was big-time broke again and needed to make $ on a lecture tour), Suzy-Joan stayed behind, at the age of twenty-four. She contracted spinal meningitis. She spent her last days in a literal writing fever, creating a 46-page prose poem by hand that is terrifying, brilliant, and prophetic, by turns, and, with its stream-of-consciousness form, sometimes sounds like an early version of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which wouldn’t even be written for another two decades. She wrote so hard and so fiercely during her final days here on Planet Earth that her caretaker (even lots of poor people had “caretakers” back then) did not think Suzy was even aware of how sick she was. She wandered around the rooms of her parents’ mansion and she hung out in their gigantic bed, the bed posts of which were angels. She remembered playing in this bed with her younger siblings when they were kids. She wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more, until her feverish fingers were worn out, the disease she was suffering from literally driving her on. She was possessed, driven, totally focused, a laser beam of the heightened writing mind, lost in her own written world. Eventually, after a few days, she collapsed into a stupor, then into a coma. She passed out of this mortal coil while sleeping. She was gone before her family was able to return to her across the Atlantic. Mark Twain had many good times from then on until he himself passed away in 1910. But he was never the same. No: he was never the same.
It was often said at the time (and has often been said in the centuries since) that there were two John Donnes. The first one was Jack Donne, the young rebel, satirist, lover, partier, drinker, soldier, practical joker, scholar, wanderer, sometimes ragged “man-about-town,” and poet. The second was Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a center of London, great metropolis, largest city in the world at that time. Jack Donne did not want to become Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s. But back then, when the King wanted you to do something, you did not say no. You could resist, if the King was fond of you, as this King was fond of John Donne. But in the end, you gave in to the wishes of the King or you had your head on a pike eventually instead. Donne was a survivalist, and he gave in to the King’s wishes eventually (after plenty of resistance). He didn’t want to end up like Sir Walter Raleigh or Christopher Marlowe, i.e. head removed or stabbed in the brain through the eye.
Later Donne realized that the King had been right about himself, and he himself had been wrong (about himself). Sometimes other people know us better than we know ourselves, even the King in some cases. Because Dr. Donne became famous in his own day as one of the greatest preachers not just England but all of Europe had ever produced. His sermons were hours-long, dramatic, driven, riveting affairs. Many men and some women gave hours-long, dramatic, driven sermons back then, but few were riveting like Donne’s were. He had attended the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays on a regular basis when Shakespeare still lived. Let me repeat that: Donne regularly attended the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays (such info as that requires pausing and brooding and marveling over, not glancing at it once, nodding the head, and back to scrolling the phone). Donne had learned the value and the techniques of the dramatic monologue and the now-famous soliloquy. His sermons became modern-day religious soliloquys that grappled with God as if God were not in the next room, but right there in front of him and everyone.
And everyone could tell, and knew, that Dr. Donne was dying as he climbed into the pulpit for the last time to deliver his final sermon. The fact that he was paler than a ghost, emaciated, and with hands trembling were just a few things that gave it away. This was also a man who’d recently posed for his own effigy, a statue that later disappeared into the basement of St. Paul’s before being returned to its pride of place a couple of centuries later. That is a cautionary tale about the reputations of great writers.
His last sermon was called “Death’s Duel.” In it, he ultimately extolled the figure of Jesus Christ, and said that if Christ could show us how to die, then the least we could do was die like he did, which meant (for Donne) bravely, fearlessly, or staring down the fear, conquering it. In certain gnostic texts, Jesus says, “It wasn’t ‘the real me myself’ who was crucified.” By this, he meant that there was something more in his spirit that rose above the mere body, far, far above the body. Socrates and Plato also believed the same thing.
Suzy Clemens and Dr. Donne both believed their illnesses were visitations from the Supreme Creator. Neither of them wanted to die, and they both struggled against it until their last breaths.
But also, for them, to them, and within them (this was what they believed), HE had finally arrived to take them home.
HER POEM: Suzy Clemens’ final, long, modernistic (before modernism existed) prose poem was partly addressed to a famous Spanish opera singer of the day, Maria Malibran, a figure who was very much akin to Lady Gaga, the best of Taylor Swift, and/or Amy Winehouse in our own day.
Here are seven sentences from Suzy’s (quite literally) death poem, a death poem that is riveting and even liberating, but not depressing. She wrote herself straight into the next life (or the eternal silence, whichever one prefers), literally; the lethal illness had been like an inspiriting drug:
“Greatness has no need of shunning.”
“She must give ear to these things not reluctantly but gladly.”
“They will inherit the greater darkness to come for this is retribution not vengeance.”
“She is a queen of God’s light but I am a queen of his darkness.”
The following poem was composed by an old-man mystic with long white hair and a long white beard just before he disappeared into the mountains, for good:
“When the Tao prevails in the land /
The horses leisurely graze and fertilize the ground. /
When the Tao is lacking in the land /
War horses are bred outside the city. /
Natural disasters are not as bad as not knowing what is enough. /
Loss is not as bad as wanting more. //
Therefore the sufficiency that comes from knowing /
What is enough is an eternal sufficiency.”
This poem (#46 from the Tao Te Ching, see End Note re: the translator) was written 2,400 years or so ago, and it is as urgent and relevant now as the crumbling, fumbling, brutal, half-assed empire we see all around us right now in late June, 2026, when it will soon be the 250th b-day of the good ol’ United States of America. For the record, over two million people are currently incarcerated in the USA right now, the largest prison population of any nation on the Planet.
I reside in the middle of the country, which is to say the center of the nation, in more ways than one and to say I have an ambivalent relationship with Uncle Sam (personally) is the understatement of the century so far.
When it comes to the dreaded subject of politics these days, in many ways I follow one of my lifelong idols and heroes, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who railed against figures like Tricky Dick, Ronnie Rayguns, and the lethally boring George Bush/es from his well-known hide-out in the mountains of Colorado.
Anything but “politically correct,” Dr. Thompson was also anything but a Republican and he often saw the white man as the pure demon that is depicted in Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, and The Great Gatsby, among other books penned by white men who were not afraid to critique and even attack (in writing) their so-called own kind.
My own hide-out is in an urban adjunct of Chicago on the second floor so I can see them coming. I don’t have a gun in here but I do have a large, wolf-like dog who knows karate and his two best friends. You will have to take all four of us out at once if you’re gonna get us.
Our current president is Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the George Bush Squad all mushed together and inflated to legendary proportions and with generous helpings of Nero and Mussolini thrown in. He is all that and more and he is even bigger than that in many ways, in truth. America has built him all on its own and he is utterly gigantic, like a hulking skyscraper, or like the Incredible Hulk who has somehow turned inexplicably orange instead of green (it can’t only be the make-up). You can also visit (no joke) the (online) Trump Store, which has made many, many millions of dollars during his presidencies selling things like gold sneakers, fake Bibles, three-thousand-dollar watches that were made for three bucks in China, and other wonderful items, like a guitar with bald eagles on it – also made in China. Many presidents have been lying pieces of shit, but never before have we had the privilege of having an actual snake oil salesman in the White House, until now.
You get what you deserve, that is, what you vote for. Profound ignorance rules the day as well as a certain FUCK-THIS (and fuck-you) attitude that comes from being treated like shit for so many years. (I admire his energy even as I am made nauseous by his motives and motivations.)
All I can say right now is that giving Donnie, aka the Fat Don, all the attention is everything of what he wants and nothing of what he deserves.
That goes for those who hate his guts as well as all those who love him to pieces.
END NOTE: Thank you to Charles Muller for his wonderful translation of the Tao Te Ching, 2005.
They say Sappho may have been a kind of prostitute, at least some of the time. They say the same thing about Mary Magdalen. I can believe it, although I can’t say that I know it. If they were prostitutes, I know they did it with the same flair for originality with which they did everything else. ’Nuff said on that topic.
Because I don’t know if Sappho was a prostitute; but I do know that she said this:
“It is the Muses //
Who have caused me /
to be honored: they /
taught me their craft.”
Survival is the first art. You can’t create art when you’re dead, at least not here. Many artists have not created any real art because they have died inside. They have let the world kill them; or they have handed the world the sword it needed to do the deed. Survival is the first art, the hardest art, the longest art, and the last art of all. Without it, you simply cannot get anything done.
Learning the craft is the second art. Reading and writing must be mixed with equal parts real experience or it ain’t worth (and it won’t ever be worth) shit.
The third art is doing it. You find out that you thought you were doing it all along but you were not doing it all along, and far from it. You were doing what can be called “getting ready to do it.” Which is just as crucial, because you can’t do it eventually without the proper preparation.
Staying alive; learning how to; and doing it right when the right time arrives.
Never question The Muses, even in those moments when you know (somehow) they’re full of it. They are holy, and that’s all you need to know to keep you going, even if you enter the phase of “afterglow,” which is the fourth phase (if it ever comes) in which you can’t exactly do it any more but now you can bask in it. Many who think they are “going” are really just stuck down in the herd muck; running very successfully on the hamster wheel, as it were and is. It takes balance to stay on the hamster wheel, but it isn’t going anywhere. And that is nothing against hamsters; it is only to point out that they aren’t lionesses and lions. And it is absurd to pretend that they are. Even in a fake mane – he’s still a hamster. Even at the highest rungs. Even in the White House (or anywhere else they tell you is important, like the end of the hall where your boss resides).
END NOTE: Endless thank you/s to Mary Barnard (1909 – 2001), who made the translation of Sappho used in this commentary. Her translations possess an Emily Dickinson-like intimacy and idiosyncrasy which must also be contained, in a different way, in the fragments of Sappho.
The MOVEMENT in all sections of the poem is always to something new, from something that is fully defined. Progression, development, fulfillment, all in eighteen words.
The “dance” can be likened to what Nietzsche said about his hero Zarathustra, that his walk was a dance, that his walk was so lively that it recalled a dance and could be likened to a dance and that he danced that dance and walked that walk whether he was in town or out of it, once he had become himself, that is.
“Gentle Gaiety, Revelry, Radiance,” recalls Charles Baudelaire’s command to “Always be drunk! On wine, poetry, virtue, or what you will, but be drunk!” The wine itself isn’t important; the drunkenness is, an injunction which has inspired many august souls from Rimbaud to Dylan Thomas to William S. Burroughs and Bob Dylan. The wine itself (or the drugs, or the love) is never more than a means to an end.
And the end is THE MUSES, who are the ones with lovely hair.
Sappho and her cohorts all believed in the literal existence of “The Muses,” that is, they believed them to be gods, i.e. transcendent forces worthy of worship, eminently and ultimately worthy of worship, and therefore worthy of dying for, too, if that’s what it took.
They were only humans like us but because of what they believed and how they lived it, they may have been (among) the best of us.
END NOTE: Endless thank you/s to Mary Barnard (1909 – 2001), who made the translation of Sappho used in this commentary. Her translations possess an Emily Dickinson-like intimacy and idiosyncrasy which must also be contained, in a different way, in the fragments of Sappho.
(Note: Whether he be DWB, Dale Williams Barrigar, Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar or never seen at the same time as the Drifter, we are pleased to show work by Dale Barrigar!)
Hello! The Tao Te Ching says this:
“Greatness entails transcendence. /
Transcendence entails going-far. /
Going-far entails return.”
“Greatness” here is a you-choose type of situation.
Whether it be in dispensing the milk of human kindness, creating art that will outlive your own time, becoming the most passionate football or Taylor Swift fan who ever looked out over fields or stage, or any other area of endeavor, greatness is up to the one who wishes to become great, entirely. When the definition of “great” is in the right ballpark, then the wishing-to-become-great becomes already-in-itself an aspect of greatness. Not all of us, and probably not even most of us, will truly be able to reach our so-called goal/s here in this life. That is as it has been, as it should be, and as it ever shall be, too.
The important thing is to have a goal that is NOT an end-point destination. The important thing is to want greatness, and to live like it. And to not let them tell you otherwise. Or if they do tell you otherwise (and they will), not to believe them. Giving someone a silent stare and then turning around and walking away is the greatest rebuff I can ever imagine.
“Transcendence” here means to rise above your worst self here in this world (and all that entails). If you’re looking to get to heaven in the afterlife, it should console you to know that all the major religions say (in one way or another) that the way to get to heaven in the afterlife is to transcend your worst self here, in this life. It’s akin to what the great psychologist Carl Jung meant in a mostly secular sense when he talked about confronting, and mastering, your own dark side. And for Jung, such behavior also led to modern spiritual enlightenment.
“Going-far” can be seen in the phrase “going the distance,” which means finishing the fight, finishing the journey, NOT BEING A QUITTER. No Quitters Allowed. And there is nothing to quit from when you realize that your goal is the way you live your life every day, NOT a specific destination like winning a prize, making a million bucks, becoming “famous,” or any of the other ephemeral and illusory trappings that are pushed so hard by our Consumer/ist Society, where the Almighty Dollar is the one and only real religion. It simply isn’t true, at all, that only the rich and famous are worth anything.
What it means to “return” is up to you to decide. And the decision, once made, should never be final.
The word entail = that it has to be there, that it cannot not be there, and that if it is not there, the whole thing falls apart. And at that point, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world – your world, that is. Your own private world, which is where it all begins, and ends, now, yesterday, tomorrow, and forever. Never let The Algorithm tell you otherwise!
END NOTE: Thank you to Charles Muller for his wonderful translation of the Tao Te Ching (2005).
“So shall I live, supposing thou art true…” – William Shakespeare
Himself (or he) and a few of his drunken writer friends left the bars and ventured out in the daytime, over to the sprawling apartment complex on the edge of town known as The Woodpile.
It was known as The Woodpile because it looked like a gigantic, sprawling, castle-sized, small-medieval-city-sized pile of wood with corridors, stairs, doorways, windows, alleyways everywhere and it housed a wide assortment of souls, from the folks who used to be known as Welfare Mothers to poor struggling students from the university to Welfare Mothers who were poor struggling students at the university to shady guys who sold many kinds of drugs, including ganja, aka weed, which was the reason himself and his few drunken writer friends had decided to venture over there and visit The Woodpile. Later they would branch out into more hardcore pharmaceuticals which is also part of this story but at this point they limited themselves to marijuana and the ever-present cigarettes and alcohol, which were always and forever the main attraction. The drugs were always a side avenue, a mode of further exploration, but never the center of the rodeo, at least back then. None of it was ever about escaping, and all of it was always about seeking; or, it was only about escaping if the escape entailed seeking. If you were only going to leave him a single thing out on the trail it would’ve been the cigarettes he would’ve chosen (and coffee) because of the way he believed they affected the writing mind, that is, enhanced it. Eventually he would quit because he didn’t want to go out gasping for breath if he could help it and he got sick and tired of emptying ashtrays and chasing down the supply – but that day would be a long time in coming and nothing in this world is ever permanent.
The Woodpile also had a pool and she was there at the pool and one of his friends knew her because she was the girlfriend of another friend. They found themselves then at the pool and she laid there all calm in her chair in her bikini with her sunglasses on, her toenails and fingernails painted bright red, and looked up at all four of the men.
The other three were standing there trying to talk to her but it was him, the only one of the group who was ignoring her, that she focused on. He could tell she was staring at him from behind her sunglasses. At one point, she silenced the rest of them with a wave of her hand with the cigarette in her fingers and her drink in the other hand, and said, “What, doesn’t he have anything to say?”
He didn’t, and they got their weed and left The Woodpile and he didn’t see her again until a few weeks later at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was the same group of drunken-writer-friend people with a few new folks thrown in and she was there with her boyfriend, sitting right beside her boyfriend at the large table, and ignoring her boyfriend and focusing on him (the main character of this story) again. This time, she was also wearing her sunglasses, even though they were inside the low-light restaurant. And she wore her sunglasses throughout the entire meal which also included (of course, of course) a ton of drinking, unto the point of sloppiness, spillage, and even someone/s falling down.
And then the third time he saw her was a few weeks later on the steps of the university library. Once again she had the sunglasses on, but this time it was just the two of them.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself now?” she asked him.
He didn’t but he gave her a look that told her he was interested in who she was and right after he gave her that confirming look he realized she already knew he was interested, and then he realized that he’d already known she knew it a long time ago.
He was a graduate student in the creative writing program, twenty-seven years old, but he didn’t really see himself as an official student in the program (even though he was one); instead he saw himself more as someone who was there to overturn, and/or upset, everyone’s apple cart (if he could). (And because he didn’t know where else to go perhaps.)
She was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in psychology who would later tell him that her main goal was to sell out, write a book, and make it onto the Oprah show. And he never knew whether she’d been joking about that or whether she’d been serious. Probably both, which is why I don’t ask her, it often occurred to him, although he was never sure about that as he was never sure about many, many myriads of things with her.
The year was 1997 which means, among other things, that it was a time when people still went to bars to talk to each other and swap stories, not just scroll on the phone and stare at generic, advertising-laden, too-colorful, corporate sports being loudly broadcast on massive screens covering every single wall in the place.
He was at that point in his young marriage where he knew it was over and his wife knew it was over and it was SO over that he wasn’t even sure his wife wasn’t cheating on him, and some of him didn’t even care too much. In the not-so-distant future he would discover that she was indeed cheating on him but by that time it didn’t matter quite so much either since he, by that time, was now cheating on her as well.
The fourth time he “ran into” the girl in the sunglasses (he always thought of her as a girl somehow, even though he knew very well she was a woman too) was at the bar called Harry’s Uptown which was a place where university drunks hung out, along with other assorted riffraff and ne’er-do-wells of the I-love-the-booze-too-much-and-I-love-it-more-than-a-comfortable-homelife-with-the-wife-and-kids-or-husband-and-kids variety.
He had become restless lately, very restless, and he spent most of his time at night driving around shady areas of the town and out into the Great Plains that surrounded the town drinking and driving.
He did most of his drinking in that fashion lately, and it was rare for him to go into a bar in the last few weeks, very rare. Then he walked into the dark bar and she was sitting there at the bar, by herself, wearing the sunglasses.
As he walked in, she looked up at him and stared straight at him with the sunglasses on, even though it was past ten o’clock at night, and even though the bar was a dark one.
Despite himself, he was terrified, which is not to say freaked out, and his impulse was to turn around, walk out, run for his car and get the hell away.
But his stronger impulse was not to leave and he walked in, went around to the opposite side of the bar, sat down, ordered a beer and a shot, and lit up a cig’, pulling the ashtray over toward himself.
She was sitting directly across from him on the other side of the bar, a half-empty beer and an all-the-way empty shot glass in front of her, a burning cigarette between her fingers. And she was wearing the sunglasses and she was staring at him.
Then she gathered her things together, and with a burning cigarette and a half-full beer bottle in one hand and her purse and some other items in her other hand, she came around the side of the bar and sat down right next to him.
She smelled so good he almost fell off his bar stool. The combination of whatever it was that made her smell so good swept over him like something only a powerful goddess could conjure. And he thought of her as some sort of powerful goddess starting right then.
That was the exact moment when she took off the sunglasses.
Her eyes amazed him even more than her powerful, positive odor like a wind from across foreign seas.
Deeply dark and brown, and almost black, with long lashes, and myriad lights and shades in them, he suddenly saw that she was a seer, she was a seer who could read the souls of humans in the sense that it would be very hard to pull the wool over her eyes in any kind of meaningful way, at least for most people, that is.
Her hair was long, dark brown, sometimes black.
Her skin was an odd combination of olive-colored and exceedingly pale. It was like her skin color was two colors at once, light olive-colored and pale, deeply pale, so pale that you wondered why it was so pale while also feeling as if it bowled you over in its smooth, perfect olive paleness.
She had a way of holding the burning cigarette between her fingers that was unlike the way he’d ever seen anyone else do it. And she never stopped smoking, not even while in the shower. There was an ashtray on the bathroom sink next to the shower.
Looking at her eyes from behind the shades for the first time, there was an utterly uncanny Already-Know-You feeling that he’d never felt with anyone before, although he would feel it a few times again with other people in the future he didn’t know about yet.
Before very long, it became necessary for them to hide from the world, for a very wide assortment of reasons.
One of them was his wife, whose boyfriend was also looking for them so he could tell his girlfriend (the main character’s wife) that he’d seen them together.
Another reason was her boyfriend, who she wanted to cut it off with and had mostly done so except she hadn’t quite been able to bring him the news yet in a way that was fully convincing for him and so we better avoid it at all costs.
Another reason was a famous writer who was a visiting lecturer at the university this semester and who’d seen the two of them together, and also gotten drunk together with the two of them and several other writers more than once. This famous writer was a slime ball con artist who wanted her and he (the main character of this story) did not trust him one iota and was able to imagine all kinds of horrible things he might do.
A fourth reason was the girlfriend of one of the drunken-writer friends who knew he (the main character) was married and who also had a crush on him. In a drunken phone call one night when his wife was out again and with Bob Dylan’s Desire on the tape deck in the background, she threatened to tell his wife the whole story (and his wife did not know the whole story, at least not yet and, it would turn out in the long run, ever. The main character remains as wily as Huck Finn – because he has had to).
Another reason was the entire Psychology Department and the entire English Department at the university. It was a big small town or a small big town and a lot of people knew people who knew other people who knew people who said things about things that had absolutely nothing to do with them at all. Both of them, meaning him and her, were paranoid to begin with and this situation that had gotten completely out of control made both of them super-uneasy. It had gotten out of control because they’d fallen in love, genuinely, deeply, and for real.
And so it became necessary to hide out in a shady motel on the edge of town much of the time.
The year, as stated previously, was 1997 so shady motels were affordable, as were diner restaurants, cigarettes, and alcohol, four key, and indeed essential (at the time) items.
The shadiness of hiding out in a shady motel somehow led directly to other forms of shadiness, the shadiest of all being Sigmund Freud’s favorite drug of all time (except nicotine): COCAINE. (At one point SF almost believed it could almost be a cure-all for everything; and he took it for many years as a cure-all for all of his own things.)
One of their all-time favorite pastimes together in the shady motel was to read the works of Sigmund Freud out loud to each other and then discuss (while smoking and drinking, of course). Later they graduated to Carl Jung. And sometimes threw in philosophers like Nietzsche (Zarathustra) and Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling). And sometimes pulled out the Gideon Bible from the nightstand. They did not consider cocaine and the Bible to be mutually exclusive. Rather they were seen as sublime enhancers of one another. The coke made the book glow and the book gave everything a reason. And this synchronicity matched their exalted relationship.
She knew a guy and so it was always her who went and got the coke. Also, that was the way things often got done in his world, he told himself. He was a helpless passive observer and it took other people of more competence and perspicuity to do the things he couldn’t manage on his own. He barely knew what a bank account was and he didn’t remember where the coke dealer lived. He handed her a handful of money, took a hit of his cig’ and she took care of it while taking a hit off her own.
So she was the coke-getting person. But one night, after she went out to get more, she didn’t come back.
He’d saved a few snorts wrapped in a little piece of paper and he had the typed pages of a story he was working on to hang out with so he wasn’t jonesing much but after an hour had passed and she still hadn’t returned, he started to get nervous, folded up the pages of the story, and put them away. He always had a pen in his pocket, shirt or pants.
The year was 1997 and so, of course, ordinary people did not carry phones upon their persons at all times.
Back then, when someone disappeared, they disappeared plain and simple, and then they either resurfaced of their own accord (the usual mode) or they did not.
And after two hours now, she had not.
He walked out into the parking lot of the motel and then across a vast ditch in the night. The smell of the night air was so fresh all it did was remind him of her. The motel was literally on the edge of the town and he walked up a rise in the dark night and over a small hill and then he stopped on top of another hill and looked out over the utterly vast, oceanic spaces of the Great Plains in one direction and the Flint Hills in the other as they plunged on under the black sun forever or as long as the Planet lasts. At one point this place was a gigantic sea with sharks as large as whales chilling their bones. Now there were antelope, deer, hawks, golden eagles, rattlesnakes, coyotes, cattle out there in abundance and he felt almost as if he could feel the spirits of the animals everywhere flowing through him. The town only existed in the robust form it did because of Boeing Aircraft and oil and Wyatt Earp had once been the sheriff here, before he switched sides and became a gangster again. If she didn’t come back soon he didn’t know what he would do but he was starting to feel very, very, very, very, very desperate, and uneasy, now. He had continued to wear his wedding ring through this whole thing and while she never said a word about it, he sometimes caught her glaring in that direction.
She came back about an hour later. She was so wasted, so high and drunk, and wearing the sunglasses, that he was at a total loss, especially when it turned out she didn’t have the drugs, either, and couldn’t exactly explain why, despite all her trying. She was literally mumbling-incoherent now and before too long her babbling about nothing turned into less than nothing and she passed out in the motel bed, so crashed out that he kept checking her breathing just to make sure. She was breathing all right. And he could also smell it on her. If she hadn’t had sex with someone else while she was gone, he wasn’t standing in a motel room with her right now staring down at her sleeping while chugging another beer and opening his fourth pack of Marlboro Lights for that day (they always bought them by the carton on the Indian reservation before they hit the motel).
But in the morning with her smiling at him, he wasn’t so sure about the sex-and-cheating thing. And he kept telling himself that it wasn’t really cheating when you weren’t even officially together anyway. And he kept rehearsing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old ideas about Free Love within his own mind. Even if she’d been with someone else, what did he really care? But he did care. He didn’t want to care, but despite himself, or his self, he very much did care. Yet: don’t be such a square, he lectured himself, borrowing the worn-out terminology.
Seven or so years later he met up with their old drunken-writer friend Von Achenbach on Halsted Street in Greektown, Chicago in order to catch up, swap tales, relive old times, drink beers (and whisky) and chain down cigarettes.
Von had always known her pretty well and he now claimed with confidence that he had known the coke dealer too.
And he said that he had inside information. Which he was only imparting because he cared about the truth.
Because, Von said, she had been having an affair, or “a thing,” with the coke dealer both before and during, and also after, the thing she and he (the main character of this story) had had between them.
By that time he (the main character of this story) lived in Chicago and she (the girl in the dark glasses) lived in Miami. He was a poverty-stricken, “unknown” writer struggling to get by and she was already the acting director of the psych department at a well-known hospital down there, even though she herself was at least half crazy much of the time, like anyone in this civilization who is sane. And we must know that these few sane ones are few but do endure among us, even if we never see them.
He never asked her what the truth was and he never decided whether he really did or did not want to know the truth.
Clinching dirty white handlebar tape. Hot magnolia breeze in my teeth. Peddling the yellow ten-speed, pumping, swerving, up a hill. Freewheeling down the other-side—the buzzing click-click-click—everything left behind for a while.
CHRIS ANANIAS
Do they even make ten-speeds now? I should have a little black transistor radio gray-taped to the handlebars with “Three Dog Night,” singing “Shambala” serenading the curious cows with their long eyelashes blinking over soft eyes, asking, “What is this life?”
CHRIS ANANIAS
The silver ripples in the distance. The undulating road swells, stretching in the summer fumes. I race toward the mirage, popping tar, but I can never catch it. What is this silver blur? Is this Shangrila?
I stop where the mirage was at the same distance it is now up ahead. For no reason I swerve right—right off the rocky berm. The fast whip of tall weeds cut into my bare ankles. Too much speed—a header. The flash of a creek. The yellow Schwinn lies on its side, yawning, getting off its rubber dogs for a minute.
CHRIS ANANIAS
The stench of slick gray mud sucks at my ragged Dockers. I step, unbeknownst, through a spider web—frantic swipes—it’s in my hair! Then I see under the bridge.
“They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark…”
– Bob Dylan
…When they met for the first time in a bar in Chicago she pulled out a switchblade knife, flicked it open, and rammed the tip of the blade down into the wooden table between them, right down between his fingers that were resting on the table, just like they do in the movies.
He stared into her eyes and she stared into his eyes and he realized at that moment that she hadn’t completely missed with the knife as he looked down and saw the bright red blood puddling on the wood before he felt the liquid warmth oozing around his drunk fingers.
But that was okay, he was just recently turned thirty years old and she was twenty-three, and such things would never have stopped either of them back in those days. Stopped them from drinking and staying out all night, that is. He grabbed a bunch of tissue from the bathroom and wrapped it around the nicked finger and they kept on drinking and talking in the bars until the bars shut down and then they went to the lakeshore where they huddled in their coats under a tree on a bench sharing a pint of Jack and another pack of cigarettes and watching the sun come up over the gigantic, steaming water. I didn’t know (and I also knew) I was looking for her and now I’ve gone and found my soul mate, he thought. Things will never be the same.
She looked like Morticia Addams (from the television show) at twenty-three. Her long, black, dark, smooth, silky, wavy, beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, amazing, curling, sweet-smelling, living, breathing, shining, flowing, glowing hair fell well below her shoulders and down her back and her big, bright, wild, long-lashed, unusual green eyes were so big and green they almost looked unnatural somehow, like some ancient visionary witch who could see through walls and around corners and into the innards of the workings of trees and people and so forth. Her green eyes made him feel like life itself is simply supernatural. She was a goth girl in 1999, pierced and tattooed (and shaved, he would later find out) in all the right places but not too much, either. Not too much, and not too little.
She spent most of that first night telling him about all the crimes she’d been involved in. Date rapes and gang rapes (most of those had happened to her, but not all), thefts, drug deals, assaults on authority, insults to authority, pranks and law-breaking practical jokes of all sorts. Whether she was displaying herself as the victim or showing herself to be the creator of victims (who deserved it, she said), the tales she told him about herself that first night were both totally outlandish and utterly convincing. He knew instinctively that there was something fishy going on with all of this but it was only a few months later that he would suddenly realize that 99% of this stuff was what Hemingway called “total bullshit.” She knew that he was more than a bit of a criminal at heart himself and she knew that he’d feel sorry for her about the gang rapes and the date rapes, so it never occurred to her that she should stop herself and confine herself to the straight facts, he later realized. She was busy creating a character for him, that first night; she might as well have been on stage (but a very intimate stage, like the most intense closet drama ever invented, where much of the talking was done in inimitable whispers in the hidden corners of dark bars, just the two of us), and just like an audience member is highly unlikely to jump up onto the stage and interrupt the performance of an actress, no matter how convincing or unconvincing her performance is, he was unlikely to call any of her wild tales into question that first night. Although he did say things like, “No shit?” and “You’re kidding me,” and “That is hard to believe” over and over again.
When he showed a little bit of doubt, all it did was spur her on to fresh versions of new crazy tales meant to convince him that she was not the person she really was, or rather that she was a person who enjoyed breaking the rules much more than she had ever actually enjoyed breaking the rules or would in the future.
And so they fell in love and spent every single minute together (almost, or it felt like it) for about three weeks in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 1999.
The end came, or rather the end of the first stage in their relationship came, one night a few days before Christmas when they were in an Irish Bar in Lincoln Park right across from the park and the lake. Snow was falling outside and when he came back from the bathroom she was sitting right next to (too close to, much too close to) a gigantic goon who she’d earlier told him was a former boyfriend. The guy was probably twenty-five years old, built like a heavyweight boxer and with a very mean look in his eye whenever anyone else got near her. The alcohol took over for everyone and the three of them started drinking together, knocking back shots of Jack one after another as if it were some sort of contest, and even though she was much smaller physically than both of the men, she kept up with them for a while until she suddenly disappeared, into the bathroom it turned out. When she returned, she was pale, very pale, even paler than usual, as in ghostly white, and even deathly white, and she had a small, apologetic smile on her lips (and almost like she already knew what was going to happen soon). Then it was his turn to disappear into the bathroom although he wasn’t throwing up because he almost never did no matter how much he drank. When he turned around, there was a guy he’d never seen before standing there holding her switchblade knife out at him, the exact same knife or at least the same kind of knife with the blade pointed right at his lower stomach about three or four feet away from him.
This stranger then informed him that she was with the other guy again now, that they had gotten back together now and the best thing for him (the main character in this story) to do now would be to get the hell out of here as fast as he could before six or seven of them ganged up on him, dragged him into the back alley, and all used their switchblades on him at once.
The main character of this story went back out into the bar looking for her but she was gone and he soon realized that the guy with the knife in the bathroom hadn’t been joking, or not much. There were at least three or four other gang members ranged around the bar and they were all quietly drinking and waiting for the signal to do the deed, and the deed was this: drag him into the alley and go to work on him with their knives, four or five against one, just like he’d been warned was the case. He could tell, he could very much feel, by their presence who these people were and that none of this was a joke, at all; they were gang members in a gang town that had been a gang town since day one and still was. (See the End Note at the end of this very true story.) If he didn’t leave, and leave now, he would get himself killed or at the very least sent straight to the hospital, left for dead or half-dead in a Lincoln Park alley near the dumpsters behind a dive bar.
Later that night, or earlier that day, anyway it was around six in the morning, as he was lying in his tiny apartment on the futon finally about to drift off to sleep after a very tormented and drunken few hours lying there thinking about her, his telephone rang. It was in the days of the fabled answering machine. He refused to answer the phone; but he did listen to what she said into the answering machine.
She accused him of abandoning her and she informed him that she had become the victim of an unwanted act of sodomy which had been perpetrated upon her in her apartment by the ex-boyfriend who she’d disappeared with and taken back to her apartment. There was something about the way she said it all that told him that this time she wasn’t lying about any of it. And she told him it was his fault and he realized that she was right, as absurd as it all sounded, she was definitely correct: it was his fault. It was his fault! It was all his fault. And this was like The Wall of Pink Floyd.
She said, “It’s all your fault because…because…because you disappointed me.”
End Note: Of Chicago’s 200-plus neighborhoods, 100 of them (or more) are run by gangs; the rest are run gang-style by people who wear conventional business suits and parade around as if they aren’t in a gang. Because there are many ways to stab someone in the back, and not all of them involve knives. Someone is doing it to you this very second, you can be sure (if you are good) (one way or another).
The Drifter and All Images by The Drifter
And…
Hail to the Drifter
Last year, during the run of normal conversation about the upcoming opening of this site, it was decided that the Drifter should hold court every Sunday. He has quickly become a tradition to the degree that I was gobsmacked catatonic to learn that he has been shaking the dust off his boots for an entire year.
In the world of writing, getting creative things done in an orderly manner is as likely as the Wildebeest outwitting the Lionesses. Some things cannot happen because they run contrary to the governing Will of the universe. In the U.S.A. this was compared to the likelihood of the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series, but when that happened ten years ago, those who turned to St. Jude for succor gained an extra kick in their steps and shone less sadness in their smiles. But since it has been ten years, some of the old lachrymose expressions have slowly returned to faces that look more natural that way. But such a fate will never befall the Drifter (said to be of or near Chicago), who, frankly, tells it like it is and does not need a well pitched game or left handed hitting to get himself across.
Hail to the Drifter, may he find solace on the long and dusty road as another year begins.
“The prettiest girl / in all the world / is in a little Spanish town / but I left her / for a Bonnie lass / and I told her / I’d see her around / but that Bonnie lass / and her heart of glass / could not hold a candle / to bumming around…”
– Tom Waits
…His eyes popped open and his brain popped awake and he realized she wasn’t in the bed beside him which was the reason his eyes had popped open. He knew what time it was even though he didn’t know how he knew that but when he looked at the digital clock on her bedside table he saw he was correct: 4:37 AM. And we went to bed past 1:30 AM. His impulse now was to gather his things together as quickly as possible and leave as fast as possible, out the window if necessary.
But he hauled himself out of bed and walked around the corner into the small kitchen of her studio apartment where he knew she was. He looked out the window at the brown rooftops of Chicago where they spread outward to the blue lake stretching away into the distance in the growing light and then he noticed that she had Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio beside her on the table. She’d already told him more than once the book was disturbing to her and now here she was reading it again.
When he asked her what was wrong, she said, “I can’t stop thinking about those things you told me.”
He knew what things she meant, but he also knew the things he’d said had now been completely twisted around in her mind so that they no longer bore any resemblance to the things he’d actually told her.
The tension in the room was now so high he felt like the ice he was walking on might break through at any second and he was just trying to keep his balance as best he could so the ice wouldn’t break.
As he walked back into the other room she followed him and asked him what he thought about it all.
He was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, most of it muscle. In the worst of circumstances, Mike Tyson himself would not have scared him at all (think about David and Goliath) and he knew his own hands were lethal weapons if he wasn’t careful, which was one reason he was always watching himself.
She was five feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ten pounds. But she had a right hook on her that could take down a heavyweight prize fighter when aimed right, and especially when it was a sucker punch like the one she reached up and gave him right now.
He realized she’d hit him in the ear when the lights popped on again with his ear ringing like a dinner bell and he found himself staring down at her who then reached up again and grabbed him by the long brown hair on both sides of his head.
She then yanked back with all her might and sent both of them flying across the small room toward the couch, her flying beneath him while yanking his hair and him flying above her trying to not fall down on top of her but somehow they made it to the couch via flying through the air, she fell into the cushions and pulled him down on top of her by the hair like she wanted him to kiss her, which she did. Instead, she spit in his face, but not full on, only more like a gesture.
And in that moment her face was as beautiful, fresh, youthful (they were both forty-six but right now she looked sixteen) and lively as he’d ever seen it before (except one time) and even though her eyes were also truly murderous right now and he knew that she would really have killed him in that instant if she’d somehow been able to. He sometimes wondered whether she’d ever actually murdered anyone back in the dark depths of her mysterious past and he was never absolutely sure that the answer was no. It would be like her to do it and to get away with it, too.
He wanted to throttle her, that is, choke her to death – but only for an instant.
Before he knew what hit him he had his clothes on and he was down in the street heading on two feet for his automobile at high speed with the key in his hand like the pacifist he was. She was hanging out the window shouting at him, “And don’t come back this time either you son of a bitch!”
When he turned around and looked at her hanging half-way out of the window with her beautiful long red hair dangling down like a grown-up Rapunzel confined to her tower, she looked at him, their eyes met, she relented, and then she smiled at him sadly, then waved goodbye at him sadly before she turned away inside (heartbreakingly) and closed the window.
“If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”
– Walt Whitman
“I am the man. I suffered. I was there.” – Walt Whitman
“A splendid old soul.” – Mark Twain on Walt Whitman
“Whitman is my daddy…Opulence is the end.” – Lana Del Rey
These are the words of Walt’s that first chilled my bones (when I was seventeen years old) (from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”):
“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you – I laid in my stores in advance, / I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”
And these are some of the words I read aloud from the pulpit at my mother’s funeral twenty-seven years later (from “Song of Myself”):
“This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, / Darker than the colorless beards of old men, / Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. /
“O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. /
“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, / And the offspring taken soon out of their laps. / What do you think has become of the young and old men? / And what do you think has become of the women and children? /
“They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. /
“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”
….
PERSONAL DECLARATION:
Today on this day that is the day that is one day before the 207th birthday of Walt Whitman, I hereby formally declare myself to be a BLOOMIAN critic, which means I follow Harold Bloom, although not in all things, which would have made perfect sense to Harold, who, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, never wanted anyone to follow him in all things. Bloom has done more to boost Walt Whitman’s reputation than any other critic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, by far.
The title of Walt Whitman’s book was/is so great that it matches Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE: LEAVES OF GRASS. His book itself is so great that it too matches Tolstoy, although in a different mode, the mode of poetry. (There is also a reason why they both had long white hair and long white beards.)
The other day I was observing my Siberian Husky mix, Boo, and I realized that he was individually sniffing every single blade of grass in the area in which he was standing in a field in northern Illinois outside Chicago. Let me repeat that: individually sniffing every single blade of grass. It was like Horton discovering a WHO! inside a clover, it was that mind-blowing.
Walt Whitman used to watch Abraham Lincoln walking around Washington during the Civil War. Lincoln knew who Walt was, and would nod to him, although they never spoke. But Whitman was studying Lincoln. Whitman was working, for free, as a volunteer nurse for both Northern and Southern soldiers in the hospitals of D.C. He saw the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the horrors of war (many, many times), and did things like write letters home for the incapacitated soldiers, hold them while they died, and write to their families (beautifully) after they expired. During this time, he was also working as a humble and lowly government clerk. He had numerous nervous breakdowns during this time, small and then large, and eventually a stroke at the age of 54.
Walt Whitman was very concerned with the way his beloved America would turn out. He lost much of his faith in the USA during the Gilded Age (named by Mark Twain). But he never lost all of his faith.
So let me say this:
There are many, and I mean many millions, of physically living human beings walking around among us now who have zero, and I mean zero (no), human emotion/s at all. They feel nothing but nothing (unless it’s a smoldering rage), and the occasional sneer (or a chuckle at someone else’s pain) is all they can muster. (See the President of the United States as well for this, as well as all of his henchmen and henchwomen.) (No wonder zombie and vampire movies are so popular.)
WATCH OUT!
There are also people walking around among us now who act like (or are) angels.
Saragun Springs 