The American poet Ted Berrigan (1934 – 1983) said (wrote), “I don’t feel / a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean / all the grown-ups in this world, they’re just playing house, all / poets know that.”
Among other questions this beautifully plain-spoken quotation raises, it raises the question of what, or who, a (real) poet is.
A guy who (sometimes) calls himself “The Drifter” (because he synthesized Samuel Johnson’s “The Rambler” and “The Idler”) came up with an answer for this.
He broke it down into three simple parts (or things) – or requirements.
One: a modern poet cannot be, cannot be, CANNOT BE, a cheerleader for The System, not matter what system you mean.
The modern poet MUST BE, must be, must be, an outsider; in one form or another.
Wallace Stevens was a married insurance executive with a kid (and a house) and he still managed to live as one of the most profound lone wolves North America has ever seen. And when it comes to lone wolves, America is second to none.
Secondly, the poet must have an original vision. Many poets have been literally blind, starting with the very first known and named modern poet (in the West) of all, Homer.
Their inner visions were so intense and so original that they lost their outer sight.
That is what the Homeric myth of outer blindness and inner seeing really means.
Next, the poet must be able to say what they see.
Not to a billion-plus people all at once. Once it gets to that level (or even a million) poetry has turned into propaganda. Donald Trump used to be able to give some wickedly effective “poetry” readings about immigrants being snakes. But these readings were propaganda in the form of (simplistic) poetry; they were not “real” poetry.
The poet must be able to say what they see that no one else sees.
BEING A POET HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH USING FANCY WORDS OR “PRETTY” VOCABULARY (although almost all good poets have a wickedly large vocabulary).
Real poetry is about ELEVATED LANGUAGE and the circumstances that rightfully call for elevated language; and that does not mean elevated language is pretty.
Elevated Language is often harsh; very plainspoken; savagely angry; obscene; heartbreaking; hilarious; haunting.
Elevated Language is always intense, but very-much oftentimes, intensity comes in a whisper.
Much or most of the best poetry is AWKWARD, at least until you get used to it. (Awkward, NOT “pretty.”)
And its intensity is often calm, quiet, whispering, mumbling, clipped, pungent, brief, startling, something on the wind over the waters: memorable.
Marlon Brando mumbling on screen in some of his best roles is kind of like poetry. He can do it so well you don’t even know he’s faking it: maybe because he wasn’t (quite) faking it (he was bringing it up from a real place inside himself).
An outsider with an original vision who can communicate that vision to at least one other person in words because the right words make you think and feel more deeply, privately (not publicly): that’s what a real poet is and what real poetry (and who a real poet) is.
My psychiatrist (who is employed at a very well-known and well-respected hospital and medical establishment in the city of Chicago) calls the time we are living in right now The Psychedelic Renaissance.
He calls this time that name because of all the research that is currently being done on what are known as “Magic Mushrooms” on the street. Magic Mushies, or psilocybin, are being researched right now as an effective treatment for a wide array of modern issues, including, but not limited to: treatment-resistant depression; Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; adult ADHD; and Substance Use Disorder.
To those not in the know, it may sound ironic, and even ridiculous, to give someone who has been addicted to alcohol or opioids Magic Mushrooms instead; but, trust me, the difference between these substances is profound, and one important name for this kind of treatment is: “HARM REDUCTION.” I.e., taking a few Magic Mushes now and then might be beneficial, and is not deadly in the way a full-blown addiction to alcohol and/or opioids is deadly.
HOWEVER: lest anyone think that Magic Mushrooms are perfectly harmless and you can take as much as you want whenever you want, I offer a few examples (taken straight from life, and experience) to make you think again.
If you take too many Magic Mushes all at once, accidentally or on purpose, you can really, really get yourself into some big trouble. Number one, it raises your heart rate and can trigger strokes or heart attacks.
Number two: it can make you paranoid. It can make you very, very, very, very paranoid. It can make you so paranoid, if the dose is large enough, that you become, temporarily, psychotic, which means, totally out of touch with reality.
Taken every day in large doses over, say, a two- or three- or four-week period, a person can slowly, steadily start to become separated from “reality” in a very, very serious way, as in believing you are being watched by the police when you are not being watched by the police, or thinking that your neighbor is out to get ya.
(I am not saying I know these things from personal experience; but I know these things from personal experience.)
Magic Mushrooms have their street terminology, like all drugs. One term is: “hero dose.” It means taking a massive dose and going on a long, strange journey, or trip. Another term is: “micro dose.” It means taking a small, controlled dose, kind of like having a single cup of coffee instead of nine or ten cups of coffee, or a few puffs on a cigarette instead of the whole pack. A third term is really beautiful: “afterglow.” This is what happens when the hero dose or the micro dose starts wearing off, but is still “there.” This phase of the experience is, very often, the very best phase of all. And sometimes it lasts for days (on and off). Literally.
I have seen a grown man sitting on a couch weeping like a little baby and asking the people around him to call his mother because he “wanted his mommy,” even though mommy had been dead for twenty years. This man was not me (I only witnessed this) but damn and wow, did it make an impression.
I have also seen a teenager hiding her head in a bucket for over six hours while believing that “THEY” were at the front door and about to “get her,” because she took a massive “hero dose” accidentally and then freaked out so bad she literally went insane for a while.
Again, it wasn’t me that happened to but I witnessed it, up close and personal, and damn and wow, did it make an impression.
Magic Mushrooms are A DRUG. They are a much safer drug than ALCOHOL, the most dangerous drug of all, along with crystal meth, fentanyl, cocaine, etc. etc. They are a much safer drug than “the hard stuff.”
But if you think you can take as much as you want without losing your shit, you are wrong.
END NOTE/s: They also affect your balance and coordination and can make you fall down.
Never drive on these things unless you are Paul Newman!
The Editors of Saragun Springs (L and D, Seattle and Chicago, USA) share a mutual passion for William Shakespeare. We revere him for the same reason/s that almost everyone who likes him likes him: he’s the greatest single writer in the English language and everything that has been written in English since him has been massively influenced BY HIM, even if that particular writer is not familiar at all (on a personal level) with his work/s.
I could go on and on about Good Will, but I can’t say it any better than Ralph Waldo Emerson did almost two hundred years ago. The following 305-word quote (at the end of this little essay) is NOT a cut-and-paste. This quotation was typed out by hand, from memory, by me; and I checked the text afterward because I knew there would be a few mistakes (there were quite a few mistakes, which I have since corrected).
Anyone who reads, rereads, and studies, this quotation will have their mind stretched in the right kind of way, even if they’ve never heard of Shakespeare.
I was not able to type this thing from memory because I have a photographic memory. I have it memorized because of two things: repetition and concentration (I’ve read it a lot and I always concentrate deeply when I do: it is a form of meditation, and prayer).
Shakespeare cannot compete with the world’s best-selling and most well-known book (BY FAR), the Bible, when it comes to characters: and not even close; and he himself knew this very well.
Adam and Eve, The Serpent (Satan), Yahweh, Cain and Abel, Moses, Noah, David and Goliath, Solomon, Samson, Job, Jonah, Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Judas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are now and will always be more well-known, globally, than any of Shakespeare’s characters.
(The Bible is the world’s greatest story collection, and I am speaking here of The Bible as literature. I also believe, personally, that the individual authors of the Bible were divinely inspired, very much so, each in their own very individual, very particular, very different ways.)
Some of Shakespeare’s most famous personages are: Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet (he did not actually invent any of them, which is also true of most of the Bible’s main characters and their authors, just as it is true of Rabelais and Gargantua, Goethe and Faust, Lord Byron and Don Juan, etc. etc. etc….).
I once heard two little kids running around on the sidewalk talking about Romeo and Juliet in Arabic.
I believe R and J are WS’s two most famous characters.
But even they cannot even come close to competing with Jesus and Mary (as characters; I also happen to believe, personally, that each of these were also holy; but my definition of “holy” does not match “the world’s” definition of holy, unless it is the Russian definition of such).
But Shakespeare added something new to the presentation of character that every single writer who has written in English since then, has been influenced by (to say nothing of his influence in other languages as well, like German, where he is, if anything, even better known than in English).
Now that I’ve blathered on for over 600 words, I leave you with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation. I would say, pay close attention to the title of this little article and the way it appears in the following quotation. Emerson wrote this quotation when the world thought Shakespeare was just a cheap entertainer. Emerson was among the first to see deeper on this issue (not the first, but among the first, which amounts to the same thing; because there are no “original” ideas):
“Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand…He is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice.”
“I’m so tired because I’ve been driving for almost eleven hours straight in a row with hardly a break at all,” he told himself out loud while continuing to drive his small car down the abandoned-looking highway in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
All of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the “middle of nowhere.” There is really nowhere, he told himself, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that is not the middle of nowhere. And, after all, that is why you have traveled here, Sir (for some reason he called himself Sir inside his head although it was not a term he usually applied to himself; but she (who was now gone) had sometimes used to call him Sir; sometimes tenderly; sometimes satirically; and now that he was alone and far from her he was carrying on the tradition).
You are here, Sir, because it is the middle of nowhere. That and HEMINGWAY.
“Big Two-Hearted River” is one of the greatest American short stories ever written. It is set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the story, Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, travels to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to get away from civilization because his body, mind, heart, and soul have been damaged by his service in WW1.
Hemingway himself got blown up over there. Over two hundred pieces of shrapnel in the legs at the age of eighteen while working as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. Anyone who thinks Hemingway loved war is wrong. Sometimes he thought it was necessary. That is a very different thing, and a very questionable belief. But Hemingway was not a war monger. He also worshiped the animals he killed in the way Native Americans did and some still do. He once wrote, of an animal, “It is not a sin to kill him if you love him.” Crazy Horse said the same thing. Such a statement has a different weight when it’s said with utter, deadly seriousness. Everyone who eats meat is a killer even if they don’t actually do the killing themselves. Too many animals have been killed and we are in the most massive age of extinction the world has ever known (except for the dinosaurs) and all of it should stop. Should stop, not will. But Hemingway was born when McKinley was president. It was a different era…
These are the kind of thoughts he kept having as he drove down the road, chain-smoking Marlboro Light cigarettes and chain-drinking black truck stop coffee. Later he would have a small stroke and develop stage one emphysema before he was sixty because of such habits as these (and the drinking in the bars (which were so loaded and thick with second-hand (and first-hand) smoke that it was like sitting in the middle of a cloud of beautiful poison for years), and the drugs, and the depression, which he called The Triple D’s) (and tonight alone in the cheap motel outside of Sault Ste. Marie, this shit would give him a panic attack; that and not having eaten any food (almost) in two days); but right now he was thirty-three years old and strokes and emphysema were the last thing on his mind; and he would never regret a single thing, which is, after all, what badass Nietzsche really meant by the thought-experiment concept of Eternal Return…
He took a drag of his cig’ and a healthy slug of the lukewarm coffee.
He had one hand on the steering wheel and the burning cigarette was in his other hand between his cigarette-stained fingers as he slumped there, exhausted and alert, behind the wheel.
The abandoned-looking road here was literally crowded with pine trees right up to the edge of the road, making a darkness, but sun fell down, between the trees, all over the road, making the road a bright yellow ribbon (follow the yellow brick road) of possibility for a few moments at least.
He drove with his knees and lit another cigarette with the smoking butt of the last one. Then he poured more black coffee from the thermos into the cup between his legs, and in doing so, he spilled a bunch of the coffee all over his crotch and felt the warm wetness all over his shorts (it was summertime) and all over his…
He laughed and called himself “Sir” again, almost hearing her voice out loud as he did so. She had also sometimes called him “Bear,” because his last name sounded like it had the word “bear” in it (even though it was spelled differently).
So he called himself Bear, there, alone, in the car, while driving, smoking, meditating, and drinking coffee, and just as he called himself “Bear” (like she had done), he looked up to see a bear standing in the middle of the road right in front of him. And it was a WHITE BEAR!
He slowed down fast then slammed on the brakes so he didn’t hit it because it wasn’t moving, at all.
It just stood there on all four gargantuan paws in the middle of the empty road (there had been no other cars for a very long time) staring at him.
And how the fuck was there a white bear in the middle of the road in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula!?
He knew that black bears lived here. Not only did they live here, many places in Michigan’s U.P. have more bears than people in them, by far.
He’d studied polar bears in books and documentaries, and at the zoo, and he’d seen wild grizzly bears from a Jeep in Alaska (the guide had said they weren’t too close). He knew enough about bears to know that this wasn’t, surely, a polar bear, a grizzly bear, or a panda bear who had escaped from a zoo (or something). He also knew that not all black bears are black; some are brown, or cinnamon-colored, etc. etc.
But this bear was utterly WHITE, as white as freshly fallen snow, as white as Snow White, as white as Moby Dick, as white as the whitest hair on the oldest person who ever lived (there was probably someone somewhere in the world who’d once lived to be 130), as white as heaven, as white as you can think of, or imagine. (He also knew that albino creatures have pink eyes and noses, and he could clearly see that this white bear’s eyes and nose were dark – very dark.)
And within that split instant of time that stretched itself out like a pink light beam shooting out to the edge of the universe (and then beyond) he knew that this might get him killed, mauled, sent to the hospital, whatever, as he opened the door of his stopped car and stepped out into the road not too far away from the white bear who was standing there in the middle of the road, looking at him.
And he and the bear stood there and stared at each other as the sun fell down into, and upon, the brightly yellowed road between them.
Then the bear stood up, massively, on its hind legs and sniffed the air in his direction.
Then it dropped back down onto all fours, and with its head lowered, it stared, and stared, and stared, at him.
They were about forty feet away from each other and black bears can run faster than horses.
And as they stared at each other, the man (the young man) felt the power of the bear SURGE through him – marking him for life.
And then the bear swung around and ran away into the trees.
In the good old days, this street had been rowdy, ragged, loud, edgy, marginal. For at least two miles in length, one bar and liquor store and cheap restaurant after another on both sides of the street had sat beside each other inviting in any intrepid soul with a few bucks in their pocket and the desire to get partially drunk or completely drunk. The music here had been raw, Chicago blues bands or punk duos or some combination of blues and punk or imitation-grunge or garage rock moved on over from the garage into the bar. It wasn’t always the greatest music (by far), but it was usually heartfelt and it had soul.
“The good old days” in this context meant the late 1980s, the 1990s, and shading into the very early 2000s. After that a shift started to occur that happened gradually, then suddenly.
Now this street was too clean. The restaurants were too expensive. The dive bars had been replaced by workout centers, hair salons, specialty shops, and boutique stores. The music was utterly perfect and utterly soulless. The people here now were the kind of people who walk at the same pace always, never speeding up and never slowing down. Lots of them were nice enough on the surface but as a group, as a race of humans, they were miserable to be around. And “race of humans” here meant people with enough money to hang around and enjoy this atmosphere. It didn’t matter what color you were any more. All that mattered was whether you had the money.
He didn’t hang out on this street any more, and he even avoided driving down it for the most part, except when he wanted to relive old memories by taking a journey back into the past where he could imagine it the way it used to be and remember. A few of the bars still had the same names, even though they weren’t the same kind of places any more, at all.
It was the Fourth of July weekend in the Year of Our Lord 2018. He was here to visit some old friends, and he’d come over here because he’d been becoming so isolated from “the world” lately that it was starting to scare him a little bit, sometimes, perhaps (or deeply). He hadn’t seen most of these people he was about to see in fifteen or twenty years.
And he couldn’t believe, which literally meant that he could not believe, just what it was he saw.
They all looked so old! Even though they were, most of them, no older than he was!
He quickly realized it wasn’t so much in the gray (or graying) hair, the wrinkles, the extra pounds. After all, he himself had all of those things as well. No, not at all, it wasn’t in the surface details where their age sat. It was more in their eyes, in their postures, in their attitudes. People who’d once seemed like lively carefree souls to him now seemed like closed-off, uptight, unimaginative bores.
And as he sat in the bar with them (there were about seven or eight of them) trying to be social at some level, he quickly realized that these folks, who now had become truly strangers to him, were all dominated and dwarfed by a quadruple threat, which was made up of: the large screen, the small screen, the dollar bill, and the beer mug.
There were five or so men and two or three women, and they were all doing the same things in sequences and orders, almost like metronomes: staring at the baseball game on the large screens that dominated all walls of the squeaky-clean establishment, scrolling on their phones, discussing the low stakes gambling they were all involved in, women too, and slowly, steadily consuming their alcohol.
He wasn’t drinking because he was an alcoholic who couldn’t drink. After a single sip of alcohol in any form, all bets would literally have been off. He would’ve followed that up with two or three more beers in quick succession, then gone straight to the hard liquor. He would’ve drank for days and days until he passed out and later woke up not knowing where he was and with the most frightening hangover that it literally would’ve made him consider putting a bullet in his brain just to end the pain, not because he really wanted to leave here. He’d quit drinking because of the suicidal tendencies it had started to create in him; and other reasons. His brain chemistry had been so warped by the constant alcohol at that point that he couldn’t even write any more. He hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.
So he wasn’t drinking. And he realized now how drugged they all were. It wasn’t even difficult to be in their presence and not socialize with them, since they were all so obsessed with the double screens, the baseball betting, and the slow, steady consumption of their soul-killing alcohol that you could sit there in their midst and quite easily not even be noticed (almost).
He was just about to bail out, call it good, shake off the depression this had all caused, say, “See you in another twenty years!” (once he’d gotten away from them, that is) and go do something else when he saw HER.
He didn’t know who she was and he knew he’d never met her before because he would’ve remembered for sure.
She didn’t look old like the rest of them.
She had the same wrinkles and the same extra pounds (except quite a bit less so of both perhaps).
She was a blonde, what used to be called a bleach blonde. She looked, almost, like Marilyn M. if Marilyn M. had grown up to be fifty or so years old. She smiled like M.M.
She had a lively walk like M.M.
Her eyes were ALIVE like M.M.’s.
They sparkled with HUMOR like M.M.’s.
She looked around her like she knew what was going on but also didn’t care – like M.M. She had a rebel soul like M.M. (or so he imagined).
And she was lost and vulnerable like M.M., too (again, or so he was imagining).
And she walked right up to him, asked him what his name was, and sat down right next to him! And when he found out that her name was Marilee, his belief that there are no coincidences was reinforced again for the trillionth time (he was a trillionaire in his belief that there are no coincidences).
It turned out that she was the cousin of one of the beer-guzzling sports drones.
And he discovered rather quickly that it was difficult to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger in this stultifying atmosphere: this clean, safe, comforting (to them), conforming atmosphere. (He realized that these were the kind of peeps who would’ve been hanging out in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.)
But she kept glancing at him from the corners of her long, lovely, long-lashed, sleepy-wide-awake, dark green eyes with blue eye shadow on.
She smelled like a beautiful dream and looked like a beauty queen.
He hadn’t “been with anyone” in years, both on purpose and not on purpose.
Just sitting next to her basically lifted him up into the clouds – in a very good way.
It made him not care at all about the lives of all these soulless bores. Let them rot in their own open coffins for all he cared. What did he care? He didn’t care!
There was still someone like this, like her, in the world!
He looked at her again.
She was already looking straight back at him.
…
But there were some things he needed to go take care of. He was, after all, the kind of person who frequently had “things he needed to go take care of.” Even the few people who knew him best didn’t know what those things were most of the time. They laughed at him a lot, and thought he was an enigma even more so. He frequently said to them, “I have some things I need to go take care of.”
“What things do you need to go take care of!?” they would shout at him.
But he didn’t like explaining himself.
He understood why Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards so no one could read his writings; and why Vincent Van Gogh ended up spending most of his time alone in the fields, sometimes even sleeping there. (VVG was a much happier man than they portray him as in all the movies; although he definitely had his down days as well.)
And today, alas, he really did have some things he needed to go take care of.
The first thing was his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, who’d suddenly phoned him out of the blue with a minor emergency while he was sitting there next to his new Marilyn Monroe friend wondering how to strike up a conversation with her in this stultifying environment.
His kids’ friends’ baby was sick (both of the parents were eighteen) and nobody had any money and they needed him to give them a ride to Urgent Care.
He’d also decided that he couldn’t go through this totally “sober.” It turned out that she was drinking quite a bit faster and quite a bit more than the rest of the party, not to mention stepping outside to have a quick ciggie pretty frequently. She wasn’t drinking like a full-blown alkie (like him), at least so far, but definitely like an expert boozer. He would need some “medications” if he were going to pull this off right.
That fact meant that he needed to make a little trip to go see a friend he had.
He’d already heard them all saying that they would be here for a while, that they would maybe move to another bar, but they were definitely planning on staying on this street tonight for the duration, because it was a holiday weekend, because it was summer, and because some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while, etc.
He even asked her if she was planning on hanging out for a while.
He told her that he had a couple of things he needed to go take care of.
She stared at him with her bright, lively, intelligent, knowing, a-little-buzzed, green eyes and he could tell she was almost about to ask him what things he needed to go take care of. Next, he could also tell that she wouldn’t ask him, since they’d just met. A good sign!
He figured he could go take care of both the things he needed to take care of within ninety minutes or so and get right back here.
And he told her so.
She looked straight at him and said, “Never fear. I’ll be here when you get back, sir.”
…
He was not a person who always walked at the exact same pace, never slowing down, and never speeding up. Instead, he was a person who changed his pace all the time, sometimes walking super-slowly and stopping to smell every single figurative rose he happened upon, other times walking so fast he looked like he was in a joyful hurry to get somewhere even though he wasn’t going anywhere special, he was just going.
He walked super-fast to his small car, unlocked her, hopped in, called his friend with the “medications” to make sure he’d be there in about an hour, and took off to pick up his kids, their friends, and the baby.
Just as he was rounding his first corner off the street that he had hated before and was now planning on returning to soon (as soon as he finished the two crucial missions he was on) because maybe after all it wasn’t so bad if she was here, a woman who was doing something on her phone pulled her car out in front of a woman who was driving her car down the street like a maniac. The maniac driver slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of her car with her purse, as the woman who’d pulled out in front of her stuck her hand out the window and gave her antagonist the middle finger. The woman flipping the bird was unable to move her car forward because of the traffic, and the woman with the purse now pulled a pistol out of the purse, ran up to the other woman’s car window, and stuck the pistol in her face. The terrified driver turned her face away then ducked down into the car, and the woman with the pistol screamed, “Stay out of my way you stupid fucking Mexican bitch!” Then she hit the top of the car with her pistol butt and got back into her own vehicle, traffic started moving again and everybody drove away.
The incident would come back on him later in a nightmare, but right now he was in too much of a hurry to sit for long with the witnessing of this minor trauma. His two kids and their two friends and their baby were waiting for him. The parents of the baby were also sick and within three or four days both himself and his two kids would all come down with the same brutal, wicked, nasty, ten-or-eleven-day-long summertime cold, but for now he drove the kids to Urgent Care, made sure everything was OK as they signed in at the clinic, made sure a nurse looked at the baby before he left to make sure nothing was an emergency, handed the kids half the money he had in his pocket, and darted out the door back into his car.
As he was driving across town to go meet the man he planned on getting the “medications” from, he played the song “Soul” by Van Morrison over and over again, from Van’s great album Keep It Simple (Van’s thirty-third album released in 2008), and he (the main character of this story), quite literally, calmly wept behind his sunglasses as he was driving. He wept because the song was so beautiful and for no other reason. He played the song LOUD over and over before he switched to the title track and calmly wept along with that too, behind his dark glasses. It was a happy weeping, a cathartic weeping, a joyful weeping, a crying for beauty, and a tear-stained face because beauty still existed, very much so, in the world, in this world.
Himself and his brother called the man he was going to meet Alley Man behind his back because the alley was where the man hung out, and they called him the name he called himself to his face, even though they knew his real name was Mohammed.
As the main character of this story approached Alley Man who was standing there in the alley he instantly knew something was wrong because he, Alley Man, had lost about fifty pounds since the last time the main character had seen him, which hadn’t been that long ago.
The two of them stepped into Alley Man’s garage to make the transaction and then the main character of this very true tale asked Alley Man how he was doing.
Alley Man, who was about the same age as the main character, raised his shirt and showed the main character a huge, massive, red, bulging, sore-looking, worm-like-looking bright scar across the middle of his chest in the shape of a cross.
After a heart attack recently, Alley Man had had triple bypass surgery to save his life, and while they were in there, they discovered the malignant tumor on his lung, which they also removed while they were in there (taking half a lung with it), so that the surgery lasted all day and on into the evening.
Alley Man removed the lit cigarette from his mouth and said nothing could kill him, praise God.
They high-fived and fist-bumped each other and the main character told Alley Man to take care of himself.
As he was almost about to get back into his car, the main character ran into Alley Man’s brother-in-law, who was a man who was four and a half feet tall and had one eye.
This man’s wife was always hiding his shoes so he wouldn’t go roaming around the alleys all day and all night, but it never stopped him.
The man with one eye was wearing ragged pants, a ragged shirt, and nothing but ragged socks on his feet because his wife had hidden his shoes again. He came up to the main character, holding a beer can in one hand and an unlit cigarette stub in the other. He had another cig’ behind his ear.
He asked the main character if he had any spare change. The main character handed him a dollar. The man with one eye asked him did he have any more, brother. The main character shook his head no, gently, and told the man whose name he didn’t remember to take care of himself. The one-eyed man looked at him closely, looked at him some more, then wandered away in his ragged socks sipping from his beer can.
Alley Man had said they often found his brother-in-law sleeping in the alley. He was a street person with a place to lay his head if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to (except sometimes). God knows what had made him that way and maybe it was God himself; or herself; or itself.
In the car, the main character took about a third of the “medications” he’d purchased from Alley Man. As he sat there in a traffic jam listening to Van Morrison (the song “Behind the Ritual,” from Keep It Simple, over and over again) he felt the warm, mild, steady, liquid, consoling, BUZZING, humming, reassuring glow from the medicine seeping into his brain, his heart, and his whole system, changing everything for the better, at least for now.
He knew the “medications” would last for at least a few hours and he knew the afterglow from the “medications” would last for at least a few hours more beyond that and he knew he had more when that ran out. It was good enough for now, and now, he reminded himself, is what matters.
But the traffic jam was a bad one and it held him up for a long, long time. By the time he returned to the street that gives its generic name to the title of this story, all the beer-screen-sports-and-dollar drones were still in their usual positions, exactly as if they hadn’t moved one iota in all that time. But SHE (Marilee) was gone.
Instead of ninety minutes his little trip had taken him two and a half hours, probably even closer to three, because of weekend holiday traffic and because he’d pulled over at one point to sit and enjoy the buzz of the “medications” while meditating a little bit.
He asked some folks from the group if they knew where she’d gone and they told him she was still somewhere on this street probably – most likely somewhere in another bar. Then they quickly turned away, back to their screens and beer mugs, offering no more information.
He looked for her all up and down the street, peering into all the establishments, entering some, just glancing into others.
Just as he was about to give up and was thinking about going back to ask someone in the herd whether he could get her phone number perhaps (and he was stressing very much about that because of his intense social anxiety), he looked up and she was standing there on the formerly attractively ragged and now too-clean street corner staring at him.
She ran to him and almost collapsed into his arms.
By now, the sun was going down, and it threw a warm, beautiful, sunset glow over the whole summertime street. She smelled better than anything ever and her warm, soft, collapsing body (along with the “medications” he was on) literally transported him immediately unto another world – a better one.
She asked him if he had a car and they went to his car and she got into the back seat so he got into the back seat beside her, after rolling the windows down so they could feel the wonderful summer eve coming in.
She verbally unloaded on him then, as if they’d known each other since childhood.
She told him all about her accident last year when she’d shattered her ankle in a bicycle-riding accident, how long it had taken to heal, how she hadn’t been able to work during that time, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her new life in Florida (his heart had sunk more than a little when she’d told him she lived in Orlando, 1,200 miles away from where they were right now in Chicago, but he filed that info away to deal with later and kept on listening) and how hard it had been, how things had not exactly gone as planned down there so far, and that was an understatement, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her son, who was in his twenties and was addicted to opioids (no comment).
Her son lived in an apartment above a bar on “the street” and that was where she was staying while she was in town.
Then they started making out, out of the blue, there in the back seat of the car with the windows open.
They held hands, and kissed, and hugged (nothing else) in the back seat of the car as if they were teenagers. It was dreamy, beautiful, wonderful, warm, close, intimate, intimidating, great, awesome, amazing, totally unbelievably personal and proof that life was still okay despite the fact that this society itself had landed in the toilet a long time ago and would soon be flushing itself away into who knew what, for sure.
She said she had to go now and asked if he’d walk her over to her son’s apartment and asked if he’d meet for lunch tomorrow at one PM at a restaurant on the street. Yes! to both.
As he was walking alone back to his car after dropping her off, a guy from the sports-drone crowd called his name and hustled over to him on the sidewalk. He asked the main character to hold out his hand and when the main character did so to humor the man, the man placed a wad of cash in his palm. And he told the main character, grinning, that it was three hundred dollars. Someone had placed a bet in his name, and they were all honest after all, so congratulations!
He thanked the fellow heartily (the main character was on a very un-fixed income for a wide variety of reasons that shan’t be gone into now), drove over to where his kids lived with their mother, and gave them the money.
The next day, she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch.
He waited at the restaurant, and in the vicinity of the restaurant on the street, for at least three hours (and probably more). While waiting, he texted her exactly three times (they’d exchanged phone numbers the night before).
SILENCIO.
He texted her (very briefly) exactly once a day for the next three days in a row, then quit.
A week or so later, he couldn’t help himself, and he looked her up on the internet, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.
She’d very recently (within the last twenty-four hours) posted a picture of herself sitting on Daytona Beach snuggling arm-in-arm with another guy. They were both in their bathing suits and they both had huge, frozen smiles on their faces (almost like grimaces) and were showing plenty of perfectly whitened teeth for the camera.
He popped a few more pills (cold medications and Alley Man refills) and put on the Van Morrison song “And the Healing Has Begun” from the album Into the Music (1979); and turned it up LOUD:
Taylor was from a farmhouse in the Midwest and she was pretty with strawberry blonde hair but very shy and mousy. She looked like Chloe Sevigny and she hung out with the nerd patrol in the TV room and watched Star Trek with the brainiacs almost every night.
Long Island raised Jewish Princess Fern didn’t know what compelled her to sit next to Taylor. But the lights were pretty dark in the TV room. Fern was feeling frisky after a long night of partying at the campus pub. She let his hand fall on top of Taylor’s. No one could see. Taylor didn’t say a word as she grabbed Fern’s hand.
It was thrilling. No one else in the room knew what they were doing. When Fern tapped Taylor’s leg to follow her out of the TV room as she got up, Taylor didn’t make a move.
Not until Fern left the TV room and went up the stairs toward Taylor’s hallway. Five minutes later Taylor followed.
Taylor looked Fern in her green eyes, smiled widely and slowly opened the door to her own room on the girl’s hallway—and they didn’t say a word.
Fern ran her hands over Taylor and slowly kissed her.
Taylor seemed frightened at first but then quickly and hungrily made out with Fern, tasting the beer and cigarettes on her breath. They were both so naughty now and Taylor loved it.
Fern felt Taylor’s perky tits and cupped her tight ass.
Taylor started to get undressed quickly and before Fern knew it, they were fucking on a fluffy blue rug on the dorm room floor.
Licking each other’s wet, candy-flavored pussies. They still had not said one word to each other.
But Taylor moaned loudly and scratched Fern’s arms and back as she came.
Taylor was a real hellcat in the sack and the coolest part was they never said one word to each other…they didn’t have to.
When they saw each other the next day in the TV room they ignored each other. But later that night, they repeated the previous night’s ritual. As Fern left, she noticed Taylor’s nerdy friend Paula smiling. Obviously, their secret was out of the bag. The later sessions would never match that first time…which was like the first Star Trek…far superior to later incarnations.
The Publicist:
Brad met Brandi, the publicist with wavy, blonde hair at a music event and then took her to Cirque du Soleil. Brandi was a divorcee and she loved to be told what to do. Brad treated her like his own personal fuck slave and she loved it. He would make Brandi beg for him to fuck her in the ass and then he would tell Brandi how her female co-workers would like to join in. He ordered Brandi to lick their pussies and assholes. Brandi loved the dirty talk and Brad loved smoking some doobie before she came over.
“Get on the bed now and pull down those pants so I can fuck your ass like the little bitch whore you know you are…”
“Yes master, thank you…”
”Shut up and get those pants down bitch.”
Brad’s cock was never harder than when he would go through these B&D scenarios with the publicist. They engaged in phone sex all the time and Brad discovered that a lot of women love to be humiliated. Even though he revered and respected women… when it came to hot and dirty sex…why not? They were both adults… and the dirtier he talked to Brandi the more she loved it.
”That’s right…your girlfriends are all watching me fuck you in the ass you little whore…now they’re turning around so you can stick your nose in their ass cracks and lick their assholes…you’d like that wouldn’t you?”
“Oh yes master, you know I would…”
“Of course I know you would…get to it”
Brad usually just fucked Brandi in the ass…while he did it she would finger her clit. When she left to go back to San Francisco …Brad would miss her. Brandi was a cool chick and a great fuck…and as publicists go…she was one that Brad could actually tolerate…
”Next time my crew wants an exclusive interview…you better fucking make it happen or I’m going to make you suck their cocks while I pound your ass…you understand what I’m saying you stupid fucking publicist whore?”
“…yes master…you’ll get the first interview every time…”
“You’re damn fucking right I will! Now take it in your ass you little bitch…”
“Oh yes…oh my god… yesss”
“Take it you bitch…”
“Oh yesssssss, thank you.”
“That’s right, thank me for it you fucking publicist cunt.”
“Oh yes, master I’m a stupid fucking whore.”
”I know you are, bitch…take it up your ass …that’s right just like that…”
It would go on like that every time until they both came and then they would laugh and smoke a joint and then Brandi usually went home.
The cosmetics executive:
Once Stephan got a taste for the B&D games he found there was no shortage of women that liked to take part. Cindi, the cosmetics executive with the short black hair and pale complexion, was a friend of that hot co-worker Shelly who worked in the women’s dept.
Cindi was a set-up and she was totally game to be told what to do. Stephan made Cindi agree that if she was going to stay over at his apartment that she would follow his orders and do what he said.
There would be a safe word and he tied Cindi’s legs and hands up with a robe belt and tie.
Then he blindfolded Cindi, kissed her beautiful naked body and then put plastic laundry clips on her nipples.
Cindi’s pussy was slick and she was moaning like a woman possessed.
Stephan looked down, took another toke of a joint and admired the beautiful, writhing executive stretched across his sheets…he slid a vibrator onto Cindi’s pussy and she started to moan even louder…
”That’s right you’re such a good little slave that I’m going to make you come…but I want you to remember that your pussy and asshole and mouth are my property…”
”Yes, they are master”, Cindi moaned.
Stephan was glad Cindi remembered that she was supposed to always refer to him as “master.” The candle was originally there to drip on her…but instead he dipped it in the jar of Vaseline and slid the wick end slowly and wickedly up Cindi’s inviting asshole.
“That’s right you little slave bitch…suck on that candle with your asshole like you’re sucking on a lollypop…and don’t you dare let it slide out of your asshole.”
“oooooh….ahhhhh…ooooohh…oops…I’m sooo sorry master…it slipped out of my asshole by accident, Cindi gasped apologetically.
“SMACK!!!…now, don’t let it happen again slut…now, slide it right back in…” her pale white asscheek now had a bright pink handmark.
“oooooh, yessssss, master…thank you so much.”
Stephan jerked off on her back after Cindi came from the vibrator and that was the first of their many “play dates.”
After a while Cindi wanted a relationship and Stephan wasn’t the guy for that. But he always kept a candle and laundry clips in his kitchen drawer in case Cindi would occasionally decide to reach out for an impromptu booty-call.
The Blonde:
Porsche was blonde and she had been introduced to Ben by Manfred. There was some instant chemistry…but Ben didn’t act on it until months later when he used the aspiring actress for a TV modeling segment.
Manfred had said he had fooled around with her, but Ben doubted it and Porsche confirmed that too.
She was Italian and she looked like that blonde from Raging Bull…Kathy Moriarty…Ben discovered that her thing was getting spanked and phone sex. Ben was glad to oblige…
”Porsche I know you are in the bathroom right now…let me hear you…I want to hear you go to the bathroom…that’s good…now wipe yourself off and go into your bedroom and pull out that dildo I told you to buy earlier…did you remember to tell the clerk that you needed a big dildo so your master could fuck you in the ass for being such a nasty little slut?”
“…yes master,” Porsche replied.”
”You’re lying you little bitch I can tell by your voice”
“…no master I told him…I have the dildo right here”
“…you are a lying bitch…and you know what happens to lying bitches don’t you?”
“No master, what?”
“…they get fucked in front of all their co-workers…next time I call you in the office,I want you to finger yourself under your desk…do you understand me?”
“…yes master I do”
“…good girl…who owns your mouth, pussy and ass?”
“…you do master “
“…say it then…”
“My mouth, my pussy and my ass belong to you master…”
“Good girl…now stick that dildo in your pussy…”
Porsche started to gasp. Before long she was moaning into the phone…“oooooh…..ahhhhhh.”
”you want to lick your girlfriend’s pussy don’t you?”
“..Yes master..unghhh…oooooh.”
“You are a dirty little lesbian whore aren’t you?”
“..yesssss… master…uhhhhh”
This girl was hot all right…Porsche did play around with her girlfriends on occasion and if Ben hadn’t been seeing someone else at the time he would have really enjoyed fucking Porsche.
They kept meeting at parties and they kept trying to slip away to a private room so Ben could give her the spanking he kept promising her on the phone…but something or someone always seemed to bust it up before Ben could lay a hand on her delicious ass.
The best he could do was give her a pinch.
One time, they were in the elevator going down with other people in the car. Ben asked Porsche to hold his drink as well, then without anyone watching, Ben non-nonchalantly slid his hand between her legs on top of her pussy. She was wearing panties but for twenty seconds she stood there blushing as the other people in the elevator paid no notice. Ben whispered in her ear…”that’s mine… isn’t it…” she whispered back a breathless little “yes.”
Saragun Springs 