Guttersnipe Das

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Nicanor Parra

2012-01-19T00:37:00.003+09:00

Nicanor Parra
ANTIPOEMS: How to look better & feel great

bilingual edition
antitranslation by liz werner
New Directions, 2004

Liz Werner has got to be one of the luckiest translators of all time. Living in Valparaiso while still in her twenties, she called up Chile’s famed anti-poet (then in his eighties) who told her to come right over.

Werner writes, “The house was full of sculptural artefactos, made out of handwritten signs paired with various household objects that changed the phrases or gave them second meanings. As soon as I arrived at the coast for the first time he showed me each one, and I came up with ideas for translation as we went from room to room. Some were in English already: for example the bible paired with a sign that said, “This book is not for fun.” I suggested, “This book is not for sale,” and he went to get a marker to change the sign. All this happened before I had even put my bags down.”

This same playful spirit fills the entire book. This is a bilingual edition and, because Parra often uses very simple language, even readers with a very small amount of Spanish will be able to see other possibilities for translation.

Nicanor Parra was a mathematician and physicist before he became a poet and Werner uses this to give the best explanation of “antipoetry” that I’ve found: “In 1928 a physicist named Paul Dirac came up with a mathematical equation that predicted the existence of an antiworld identical to ours but consisting of antimatter. Each antiparticle of this antiworld would exactly match each particle of our world, but would carry an opposite charge. viewed through the lens of antimatter, antipoetry mirrors poetry, not as its adversary but as its perfect complement; it is not by nature negative, but negative where poetry is positive, and vice versa; it is as opposite, complete, and interdependent as the shape left behind in the fabric where the garment has been cut out.”

The thought of trying to describe Parra’s antipoems brings immediate despair. Humor and sadness and frolic and outrage presented in a way somehow exceptionally naked. (“Presented” is already entirely the wrong word.)

My favorite antipoem is titled “Mission Accomplished” and is written in two colums, one a list of the contents of a life, one of numbers. The tally starts with

‘trees planted
children begotten
works published

sum total’

but soon moves on to:

‘regular kisses
“with tongue
“at the mirror
“luxury
“Metro Goldwyn Mayer

sum total’

and eventually gets to things like:

‘literary gems
fathers of the Church
hot air balloons

sum total’

Meanwhile, on the other side of the page, the numbers are making a poem of their own. Sometimes appearing to comply, other times going quite splendidly awry.

While I lived in Santiago, I was impressed by the great fondness Chileans feel for Parra, still very much alive aged 97. (Everyone has an acquaintance whose grandmother is Nicanor Parra’s close friend. Everyone has met one of his children recently.) Although many people couldn’t give a definition of antipoetry or an antipoet, they are certain that Nicanor Parra is genuine, the real thing. They’re right.

Parra-inspired stuff (with apologies to Parra)

2012-01-19T00:31:00.002+09:00

reading nicanor parra makes me think I, too,
can write anti-poetry

one thing about
this all-pervading fear
like a flow of water that won’t turn off
(yes, like wetting my pants)
like an unending series of slaps
pay attention!
is whatever happens within
this fear flood
this excess of attention
I remember
so that therefore
although it’s terribly
uncomfortable
it’s also worth more
somehow

?

not sure
it counts
as charitable
work

volunteering
each day
to be
the fool

genre problem

As practiced by myself and, quite frankly, most other people, genres have the following problems:

The trouble with fiction is it feels fake, full of cardboard scenery and people forced to do dumb things urgently, as if they constantly needed to pee.

The trouble with poetry is it tries all the time to be special, like a boy who pretends to be very sophisticated, like a girl who wants you to think she’s tremendously spiritual.

The trouble with essays is they have too much “I” in them, like being trapped on an airplane next to a talker, when all you want to do really is look out the window at the clouds.

If only it were possible to write a breeze!

Or the way it feels when you’re sitting at your desk, finalizing your “to do” list, and your sweetheart walks in to give you a peach.

Or when you lost your phone somewhere in the house and so you ask your friend next to you to call and he does but, instead of the phone, the doorbell rings.

poetry

just an excuse
to sit
around

naked

marriage: a fable

Once there was a man who married a rock – because he didn’t have to do anything for it. He didn’t have to kiss it, buy it presents, consider its opinion. He said his was a perfect marriage – he was never inconvenienced in any way.

His loyal wedded rock sat in the corner. He never moved it or anything. It was a very large rock.

Unfortunately the weight of the rock, left so long in the corner, weakened the structure of the house so much that, one night without warning, the floor collapsed. The man devoted to the marriage for which he had to do nothing was killed.

What a terrible story! It must be admitted that nobody much missed him. People are so selfish. “Never did anything for me,” they said.

my fame

walking down bombero nunez
in santiago dreaming of publication

in prominent internationally-recognized literary
magazines as ahead of me a stray dog darts
into the street my fame
the car swerves my success
confused the dog runs
so incredibly
important beneath the tires
my certain fame

if only I could trade it
for the life of the dog.

theology

maybe it isn’t
holy
really

maybe it wasn’t
holy
until
we
said

yes

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Viscount Lascano Tegui

2012-01-16T05:35:00.002+09:00

Viscount Lascano Tegui
On Elegance While Sleeping

Idra Novey, translator
Dalkey Archive Press, 2010
(Originally published in Spanish as De la elegancia mientras se duerme, Paris, 1925)

First of all, how brilliant to declare oneself a viscount. It never occurred to me that I could simply give myself a title. Then again, Lascano Tegui also declared himself to be a dentist – quite a scary idea!

In a similar way, this book is called a novel. It is true that, after several rereadings, I began to appreciate the peculiar and unnerving way that images and obsessions appear and return, throwing out shoots and warped fruits. Still, the hints of plot, the murder at the end – these are not among the principal pleasures or satisfactions of the book.

This book will appeal to fans of Lautreamont and Poe, and above all to anyone who has read Baudelaire’s prose poems in Paris Spleen a dozen times and wished that there were more. Here are dozens of prose poems, anecdotes, contemplations and oddities, like the fragments of a surreal memoir.

There’s no shortage of gruesome details -- or marvelous black humor. Best of all, there is a tendency to now and then toss out casual insights that seem absolutely essential. This narrator may be mad but his treasure is real.

“A broken watch ticks more often than one in perfect condition. It lives more.” (72) Or: “Novelists overplay their hands when they put an end to their characters with some catastrophe – a terrible fire, a murder, what have you. They don’t trust in the asphyxiating monotony of everyday life.” (71)

I am glad to be reminded of the dangers of generalizing in brothels, as well as the fact that a book, that infamous fetish object, is simply “the vegetal pulp left behind by man”.

Dalkey Archive Press is a heroic outfit to which I am deeply grateful. (Without Dalkey: no Flann O’Brien, no Juan Goytisolo, no Harry Matthews, no Diane Williams, no Coleman Dowell!) I hope their heroics will soon include more translations of Viscount Lascano Tegui who, despite being entirely fascinating, and a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, was out of print even in his native Argentina until the 1990s.

Fear Dines Out

2012-01-16T05:33:00.001+09:00

I am afraid of everything but, above all, I am afraid of eating out, alone, in foreign languages. Afraid of the moment when I must push open the door and stand there as the wait staff discovers I am a hopeless moron: I have not been here before, I do not know the routine, I cannot speak, I do not understand. Do I wait to be seated? Should I just sit down? Could someone please arrange to rescue me now by helicopter?

It is the moment of evaluation that is the worst, followed by the careful pasted smile of the waitress or the flash of annoyance across the busy waiter’s face.

I have been eating out in foreign languages most of my life. Which goes to show that some things do not get better. No. The fact is, in Asia it was completely different. There was no moment of evaluation. Everyone assumed I was a moron the moment they saw me.

It’s so much easier – though certainly this was one of the things that made life in Tokyo so very odd – to earn good money and always be treated like a severely disabled child.

There’s a lot to be said for it – I realize, too late, here in Chile, where everyone must always discover afresh that I am a helpless moron who does not speak the language.

Now I will tell funny and heartwarming anecdotes about how I overcame my fears, about how you too can overcome --- . Except. Shit. I haven’t overcome anything. Ever.

So therefore I will shift, slightly, and recommend this variety of terror to travelers who wish to incorporate weight loss into their travel this season. When I left the U.S. I was about ready to resign myself to a 34 inch waist. Now all that keeps my 32 inch jeans from landing around my ankles is the long piece of string I use to cinch them around my waist.

Five weeks of anxiety and avoiding restaurants has melted 15 pounds right off of me. Other people may want to try this. If you are scared enough you can lose weight even in your (broken, fitful) sleep!

For more about this, please see my forthcoming blockbuster, The Deep Fear Diet. A hundred thousand advance copies have already been sold and I am booked for every one of the morning talk shows. Which scares the living crap out of me.

Why am I holding up my pants with string, you ask? My belt broke. If you think I am about to march into a store and demand something as difficult, as fiendishly complex, as a belt – obviously you are not paying attention.

I choose restaurants purely on the basis of terror. Wherever seems least terrifying, that’s where I go. Half empty glass fronted tourist pits most frequently. What I actually want to eat is no consequence. Of course I want to eat at the crowded humming places where all the locals go, where everyone seems to just magically know what’s on the menu.

But that’s out of the question.

Which is why I am writing these notes at Mr. Jack’s Burger Bar, despite the fact that it is phenomenally expensive and I am opposed to beef on multiple levels. In fact, I am one of those excruciating people who can tell you 25 reasons why you should NEVER eat a hamburger, for reasons ranging from the individual to the planetary, and from high philosophy to hygiene. I feel very deeply about this and would list all the reasons here and now, except that it seems bad form to do so while waiting for a half pound blue cheese bacon burger.

If only I could simply appear as a hulking, loud, ignorant Norteamericano – well, one more is hardly likely to cause a stir. The problem is that I am unable to conceal the fact that I am dreadfully, dreadfully nervous. In an Edgar Allen Poe sort of way. I am terribly nervous. And that makes other people nervous too. They want to know why I am nervous.

They fail to understand that naturally I am petrified of the petite and smiling waitress, and of the busy waiter who couldn’t care less about a thing and would be satisfied if I just jabbed my finger at the menu.

You see, Chileans, on the whole, are rather spectacularly nice. Yet I speak to them as though they all had suspicious moustaches and were holding rather spectacular swords.

Added to this absurdity (I use the word because others use it. It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.) I have now received three weeks of instruction in Spanish.

‘Received’ is a very strong word. The language was very capably taught. I was present in the room. I was conspicuously diligent. I understood what was said. I can even speak a little – if I can just take a few notes first and everyone will please wait through the stammering.

I was certain that Spanish lessons would clear up my fears. I can understand! I can speak a little! But no. My 3 weeks of Spanish are a tiny matchstick house and my fear is the vast and shaggy paw of the Abominable Snowman who, it turns out, lives in the Andes and is native to Chile.

Stomp, stomp, goes the Snowman. The terrible and enormous shaggy snowman of fear, who, absolutely everywhere I go, insists on dining out with me.

What the hell is going on?

The truth is, even in English my speaking is a little odd. (The rules of polite behavior dictate that, at this moment, you ought to appear slightly surprised.) My sentences appear amid pauses and stammering and often sound rehearsed, unnecessarily convoluted and perhaps, even, slightly unnatural.

Polite surprise.

I cannot explain except to say that, to me, language appears conspicuously important. Extraordinarily weighted and powerful and I cannot relax in its vicinity anymore than I could while holding a gun.

Here we could perhaps pause a moment to reflect in gratitude on the fact that writing is my vocation. Rather than, say, firearms.

Naturally I make mistakes continuously. As should be expected. What with this language standing over me all the time, like a looming and omnipotent waiter, who may bring what I want or who may not.

Words matter terribly. Overmuch. Like a woman so important I cannot think clearly in her presence. Like a man so beautiful.

Which is why I find television so disturbing, as it spews out non-stop careless and bossy words. Or the plantations of columnists or bad novelists, where words are bred, and penned and shorn like sheep.

This must be the problem. This thing called language. Which is a synonym for action. Which is a synonym for karma. Which is a synonym for the fact that, at every moment, every single thing is at all moments interconnected and entirely dependent upon every other thing.

I am unable to escape the feeling that absolutely everything matters. Therefore it is no surprise if I sometimes feel overwhelmed, dining out in foreign languages.

On the Proper Role of Caution

2012-01-13T00:37:00.002+09:00

Santiago, Chile

There exist in Chile a number of forms of enjoyment that have not been freely practiced in the United States since the 1970s. These include: chain-smoking, tanning, loose halter tops, all terrain vehicles and sodas in their original unmitigated forms, including orange Fanta, which no Chilean family must ever be without.

Chileans will remind you that ordinarily they are buttoned down, clean living, los hombres sanos, but today (just today) there is a special barbecue and so there must be an enormous quantity of beer and pork, charred beyond recognition, as well as piscola and Lucky Strikes.

Please remember that this is only a barbecue, and does NOT qualify as a party. You will be corrected if you make this mistake. I am not certain what it takes to qualify as a party, but at very least there must be dancing and a visit from the police.

On Sunday afternoons my Chilean friends and I “make a picnic”. This means that we drive to mountains, to a campground, to the area designated for picnics, and sit on blankets in the dirt, smoking Pall Malls and drinking piscola, enveloped in the roar and dust of the circling all-terrain vehicles.

For years I have been under the misconception that I am an easygoing person. In fact I am spectacularly uptight. So uptight that I frequently fail to recognize what is going on.

At the start of our trip to the mountains, the beautiful girl in the backseat declared that we had to buy beer. So we stopped off and bought a six pack of Escudo, the cheap beer that is so frequently consumed here that my body now accepts it as being “just what water tastes like in Chile”.

And I thought to myself, what a shame – we haven’t a cooler and the beer will be warm by the time we get to the mountains.

See? Clueless.

The beer, of course, was for the car. We all popped our cans of Escudo, the driver too, and laughed and chatted as we swerved along the mountain roads. I did my best to enjoy the views, the laughs, and the fact that my future had been drastically simplified and there was no longer any need for long term plans because I was already drinking beer on a narrow mountain road.

Unfortunately, a panicked voice from deep within me kept interrupting the proceedings to exclaim, we are drinking beer in a car!!! This was exactly the same way that voice used to interrupt those extraordinarily friendly parties in Amsterdam by declaring, we are naked except for our boots!!!

I can’t help it. Of course I am enjoying myself very much. (I am!) I just wonder if maybe it would not be better if we could maybe please be just a little more careful.

At the picnic I sit in the cloud of dust and drink more beer and wonder if I should tell the beautiful woman with the halter top and the unruly mane of hair and lines around her eyes from the sun and Lucky Strikes, “Darling, this is the very last year it will be charming for you to play the role of the drunken girl. 36 is pretty much the limit.”

I am certain of this, just as I am sure that 37 is the limit for gay men who devote their lives to fucking around. Of course you can continue as long as you like (that is what Bangkok and Montreal are for) but after age 37 it becomes too painful to watch. That is why, age 38, I have recently become wholesome and all-knowing. You’re never too old to be a prig.

What is the proper role of caution? Could someone please write in? Because certainly it is possible to die by driving drunk on mountain roads. The warnings on packages of Lucky Strikes are real. (There are gory pictures of mouth cancer but the most common warning is of impotency and shows a shirtless man looking down at his groin, which is covered by a large thumb pointing down.) Making the Christmas rounds in Santiago I shook hands with a cordial smiling man lying on a sofa, home for the holidays from the hospital, where doctors are doing what little they can for his cirrhosis.

Yet, often an excess of caution seems worse than none at all. Despite my dissolute life, I am well-aware what perfect caution and responsibility look like: my in-laws are Protestant Republicans in Iowa. They live precisely as dictated by good sense. They have a white sofa on a white carpet, their retirements and even their deaths are already paid for, with enough money left over to hopefully assist their grandchildren to survive on a planet devastated by generations who thought that safety meant only keeping safe their arteries, immortal souls and wealth.

Good sense is desperately in need of an update. As currently formulated, danger and safety are dangerously stupid. At present, we have an option. Who would you like to poison? a) yourself. b) everyone else. c) all of the above.

At least the Chileans, with their relentless barbecues and beers passed to the backseat insist on today, that today is what matters, today, today, today. It may be that they are harm themselves more. It may be that, over all, they do less harm.

How is it possible to live so that I can have my days, until I pull my vanishing act, and leave a world where others can have their days too? The cloud of dust from the all-terrain vehicles does not disguise the fact it is a quite superlative world. The next generation would doubtless like to enjoy its picnics, halter tops and beers, even if I wish I could talk them permanently out of beef barbecue and orange Fanta.

The list of things I do not want includes: cancer or a house, a cigarette or a career, a case of the crabs, a job in advertising, another can of Escudo or Coca Cola, a white picket fence, an unblemished reputation. In particular, I find all my big opinions especially worthless.

Lord Jesus Christ, my personal savior, please put an end to whaling in Japan and meanwhile deliver me from endless days of charred meat and a house in Sun City, Arizona. I do not want a party every day (as in Santiago) or a white sofa on a white carpet (as in Iowa) and, above all, I do not want my old dead habits, the round of oatmeal, porno, weightlifting, vanity, mortal terror, moisturizer.

Long walks and great literature are still welcome, because both are continuously interrupted. It is the nature of both to consist of interruptions and wonders, of inconveniences and openings.

As for the rest, I will sit here with my rubber mallet and pop things on the head as they come up, not this, not this, not that, not that.

Of Fear and Traveling

2011-12-18T00:46:00.006+09:00

short essays from Santiago: series 1

A Guide for the Fearful

I often imagine that I would like to write a sort of travel guide for those who are perpetually afraid. I am well-qualified to do so: I am afraid of everything. For a long time I was afraid of cars, people, dogs, crowds, public speaking, fine breakables, hard work, guns, knives, family members and fireworks. Finally, I decided to simplify, and also to tell more of the truth. Thus: I am afraid of everything.

I suspect that there are others like myself. And I would like to say to them: It is all right. You can be afraid of everything. There is no reason to stay home.

Of course, choosing to act in spite of overwhelming fear does not in any way excuse a person from the necessity of making sensible, judicious, and pragmatic choices. As indeed I fully intend to make someday.

As it is I have landed here, in Santiago de Chile, in the house of a man I barely know. I have no job, no Spanish, no pretty face. I don’t have that marvelous thing called confidence, that fabled positive outlook that Americans are supposed to come equipped with. I am very much afraid. And that is all right. I would have been afraid, too, if I had stayed home.

Learning to Say Ola

Late yesterday afternoon -- which, in Santiago, may mean as late as 9 -- G. announced that he had located the root of the problem. I could not say Ola. In fact I was absolutely awful at saying Ola. My Ola sounds like the squeak a schoolgirl would make if she woke to find a grizzly bear in her small tent.

G. says, “I see you in the shop when one man come in. He say Ola to you. Your shoulders go bad. Your head go bad. And you say Ola. Your Ola is terrible!”

He insists I must stand up straight. I must open my chest. I want to explain to him that I couldn’t possibly. Not in the first six weeks.

“You stand straight! Like man! Say, Ola!”

“Ola.”

“Ohmygod, no. Not like that. This is the very worst Ola I ever hear in my life.”

“Ola.”

G. winces. “You are a big strong man. You see this in the mirror sometime? Iz true.”

I try to explain to him that I am only 45 kilos, 4 foot 11. The muscles, beard and 5’11’ are only decorations. Like clouds seen out an airplane window. He’s not having any of it.

Over and over again we say Ola. It is remarkable how many ways I find to a small thing wrong. G. can’t decide what is worse, the way I say ‘O’, or the way I say ‘la’. In particular, he despairs at my tendency to turn suddenly into a high soprano.

“You do this in front of my father he will look at me like ‘what you bring into my house?’”

Again and again we say Ola. I squeak. I bow like the Japanese. My Ola comes out singsong, or does not come out at all. Ola and ola and ola all over again. The neighbors, presumably, are exchanging quizzical looks.

No doubt G. is asking himself why he ever extended an open invitation to such a self-evidently loony person.

“Ohmygod,” he says. “Now I have new job. I just teach you how to say Ola.”

The War Between Fear and Enthusiasm

Fear and enthusiasm are perpetually at war within me. I am vastly and comprehensively afraid and would no doubt spend my life in a secure institutionalized setting if not for the fact that I am also brimming over with entirely immoderate enthusiasm. An enthusiasm so vast and exaggerated, hovering always near hysteria, that I frequently forget my terror long enough to leave the house and sometimes even get as far as the airport, which lands me in situations like this one.

Alone in Santiago for the first time, I scuttle awkwardly along the sidewalk, darting among pedestrians who are all as dazzling and put together as neon billboards. Crossing the street, I am hampered somewhat by my disbelief that cars, which stop for other people, will stop for me as well.

Arriving at the curb, I stop and admire the Andes in the distance. If the Andes are unavailable, I pretend to be engrossed in the contemplation of a radio tower. I wait for an upright citizen, someone whose life is really worth saving. A mother with a stroller is ideal. I then attempt to shadow that person across the street without them noticing. I repeat this routine at every intersection, at the end of every block.

I suspect that I am as subtle and inconspicuous as one of the Marx Brothers.

Economy / 1

I brought a small suitcase to Santiago, the kind that works as carry-on if you don’t pack it too full. I also brought a small backpack full of books. I unpacked my bags in G.’s apartment and now I have more things in his apartment than he does. Of course he has larger things: a sofa, a dining table, a CD player – but I think I have more actual items.

My first thought was that this was some elaborate set-up, he didn’t really live there, that I would now be a middle-aged gay princess held hostage in Santiago.

I almost never watch TV. And still I get these ideas. Perhaps they are floating in the air?

G. explains that he does not like to have too many things. He only keeps what he intends to use that week. The rest he gives away. He doesn’t see anything elevated or holy about this.

“It is easier to think,” he says. “And easier to clean the house.

Disciplines

Cell phones, it is reported, make life simpler and more convenient. But not always. And not for everyone.

G. has two phones, but cannot make a call from either one. If he wants to talk to his sister, he sends her a numeric page and she calls him. If he wants to call someone else, he pages his sister, she calls him, and he asks her to make a call on his behalf.

For some reason, this system does not always work. Then he must page his mother. When she calls, he asks her to walk across the street to his sister’s house and ask her to call him so he can tell her to make a call for him.

To me, this system seems likely to result in homicide, but I cannot find any evidence that any of them mind it. G. says, “When I can make calls, I make calls all the time! It is very expensive. This way it is better.”

G. is similarly disciplined in other areas of his life. For breakfast he blends fruit in the blender and adds raw oatmeal. To his tea he adds only stevia, which friends bring him from Peru. He never drinks coffee or alcohol or smokes cigarettes unless he is at a party.

How fortunate therefore that there is always at least one birthday party a day, and sometimes two. Birthdays are considered extremely important in Chile – to not attend the celebration is to jeopardize the friendship. Thus he is able to maintain strict discipline, and also to take breaks from it every day.

I have not yet been able to discern if everyone in Chile has five hundred friends, or if Chileans simply celebrate their birthdays six to eight times a year.

Cures for the Rash

Living in a city where you do not speak the language is like having a rash. A pink and minor, itchy rash. All over your body.

A rash which lands you in a perpetual state of low-grade irritation, which makes you shy away from every contact. Which means that you are cast forever in the role of the idiot and appear always in a cloud of apology and irritation, with a deplorable tendency toward self-pity. Unable to ever appear dignified or settle down. Because you have this rash, this officially non-serious, non-life-threatening, misery-making rash. This rash all over your body and your face, even in your voice, your stance, the way you wait in line. This pink and unpleasant rash of not being able to speak the language.

What can be done? Options include limiting activities so as not to induce irritation – to stay as much as possible within five star hotels and sightseeing buses, in faux Irish bars around the world. You can attempt being so drunk and/or horny you don’t care you have a rash -- and are a total ass.

Another option of course is to learn the language – a total cure, but very slow and requiring, in the beginning, the willingness to make everything drastically worse. Before you were quietly the idiot, sitting in the corner, signaling for the bill – now you are the idiot jumping up and down!

Other options? One more. You can be so submerged in wonder that you couldn’t care less, like a very old woman, heedless of pain, at home in her garden. The tourist has forgotten his camera, his charge card, the word for bathroom, the fact that he is again today an entirely ridiculous fool.

Foul Play

Walking past a newsstand I see the face of Pablo Neruda. The headline underneath contains the word ‘asasinado’. The family, it is reported, now suspects foul play and wants the body exhumed. Until now it has been said that Neruda died of prostate cancer, or of a broken heart after the assassination of Salvador Allende.

“Assassinate Pablo Neruda!” I say. “Who could even think of such a thing?”

G. gives me a look. “Not everyone reads poetry,” he says.

Sponsor.

This clear morning looking out on Cerro San Christobal, this morning with birds singing, with a hairy neighbor in the window across the way padding around in his underpants, with bright sun and the last of the jacaranda blooming, this moment (please remember) is sponsored by Tokyo. It’s Tokyo I’m burning now.

The misery I piled up for years, along with stacks of ichiman-en notes, my appalling Tokyo layer cake: work, porn, alcohol, work, porn, alcohol. With isolation for a crust, with lovelessness for frosting.

What makes Cerro San Christobal so lovely? It is the jacaranda, the shadows and the birds, and it is the memory of the platform at Meguro station in Tokyo, the lines of black- suited commuters staring into their phones, the memory of evenings so exhausted I would only just get inside the door, and lean there, in my dull wrinkled suit with my head against the wall, shuddering until I finally got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down at the computer.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from the moon.”

Rapture

I spend much of my time here in Chile as I assume all newcomers must, astonished and humbled by the discovery of how much extreme pleasure, ungodly ecstasy and unbridled voluptuousness it is possible to undergo, simply by eating an avocado.

Amongst all my conquests (darlings I adore you all) the avocados of Santiago de Chile hold an honored place.

Now, mind you, the avocados of California are nice enough. The avocados of Tokyo are particularly fine, if your assets are such that investing in one is a possibility for you, but the avocados of Chile – it’s something spiritual really, Saint Teresa in ecstasy before a small bowl of avocado, mashed with a little lemon and a little salt, the texture that of homemade whipped cream, the richness surpassing anything found in the Old Testament.

I fully support you in coming to Chile simply to eat avocados. It is enough. (The mountains also are nice.)

Up to now, I have only eaten from the market the cheap and medium-priced avocados. The expensive ones would no doubt prove perilous – both to my fragile nervous system and to the peace of my neighbors, who assume, no doubt, that I spend my afternoons being ravished by incredibly spectacular lawyers, or abogados.

Economy / 2

On my second day here in Chile, G. took me to a friend’s birthday party – old friends from when he worked in advertising, pretty girls unafraid of whiskey, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes. They fed me sausages and pisco sour; everyone was overwhelmingly kind.

When we returned to G.’s apartment I asked if I had done all right, as a cancer patient might after a PET scan, or several cups of barium. G. said, “Everybody they like you” and, true to form, I cried inconsolably for several minutes.

Everyone had been so kind and still I had been so frightened the entire time, as though I’d been given the job of replacing the bulb on a skyscraper.

G. was patient with me, patting my back and cooing to me exactly as he would to a beloved elderly relative he was visiting in the asylum. I tried to explain my fear of everything, which conveniently came equipped with a universal sense of shame, like a razor you can plug in anywhere.

When I was finished he said, “When I have a problem it is because somebody is sick, or maybe somebody is die.”

The Wall of Glass / The Dais

Funny how I misremember the name as Receptivo. The map reminds me that, of course, the street I mean is Recoleta, which runs down the edge of the neighborhood of Bellavista and intersects with Dardignac, and which I had just crossed when I looked at the neat and proper workers hurrying to work through the enormous open square at the neat and thought, “I am going to be all right.”

My fear shattered all at once, like a sky-high wall of glass, and left me standing there, on the corner of the open square, feeling as if I would never be scared again.

In fact I had perhaps ten minutes, tops, before I found the ceiling-less wall of fear miraculously reconstituted, clear and hard as ever. But in the meantime I had this opening, this gap, for liberty and looking out.

Santiago!

Have I ever been so entirely wrong about a place before, or found something so totally contrary to that which I imagined? As I confessed to G., “Please forgive me. Everything I know about South America, I learned from reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez and watching porn.” He was appalled. Deservedly so.

How surprised I would have been if someone had told me that, in imagining Santiago, I ought to think of a city like Stockholm. or perhaps Singapore. A green and flowering city of commerce, control and good manners. Without the army of students studying and protesting and remaining liplocked for remarkable lengths of time the city might well feel two sizes too tight, buttoned up and sensible to within an inch of its life.

It is no exaggeration to say that the city in the U.S. from which I departed to come here seems nearly barbaric in comparison.

G. explains to me that the center of Santiago is meticulously maintained by the government and the police and may thus be accused of being a false front. Still, that appearance involves the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people and would be the envy of nearly any city on Earth. Who can be blamed for valuing beauty, cleanliness and safety?

However, as I was numbered for many years among the undead of Tokyo, I cannot be relied upon to gush rapturously about the glories of convenience and order.

On Sunday afternoon G. and went out to the park beside the Mapuche to visit the ‘Gourmet Fair’. The park was lush in the gentle late afternoon light, the people beautifully put together and the food stunningly devoid of flavor. There was not a single item that would have appeared out of place in a supermarket in California: organic jam, Irish stout, avocado oil, flavored honey, pimento pickle with cream cheese on a Ritz cracker. No spice but in the sauce for barbecue.

That evening I read in Neruda’s Memoirs: “The absurd ‘racial’ pretentions of some South American countries, which are themselves the results of many national origins and mixed breeding, are a colonialist vice. They want to set up a dais where a handful of snobs, scrupulously white or light-skinned, can appear in society, posturing in front of pure Aryans or pretentious tourists.” (Memoirs, 163.)

It seems possible to me that Neruda may have had central Santiago in mind. (“Blue eyes are only in the city center,” G. tells me. “So much money for blonde hair! So much for skin white cream!”)

At a party on Via Italia, drinking champagne to celebrate the opening of a new jewel-box row of boutiques in this the up and coming part of town, I had an interesting talk with two sisters.

I admitted that I was surprised to find Santiago’s center more wealthy, clean and well-maintained than that of any city in the U.S.

The older sister spoke proudly of her city, which was wealthy and safe, where poverty and trash were not often in view. The city was a symbol of country and a region that was gaining prominence in the world and, best of all, it was simply a delightful place to live.

This seemed to me undeniably true. As did what the other sister had to say.

The younger sister was a student of anthropology and, though she understood English well, was uncomfortable speaking it. Nonetheless, I watched her consider her opinion and gather her words. She stretched out her arms as much as she could in the crowd of champagne drinkers. She beamed.

“This is all fake,” she said.

Forthcoming in Epiphany: Juice Box

2011-12-07T06:21:00.005+09:00

Please check out my essay "Juice Box" in the forthcoming issue of Epiphany: a literary journal. "Juice Box" is about Dharamsala and Denver, about hustling and praying, and about surviving when nobody gives a fuck if you do or not.

Thank you to everyone who supports my work including K. Timmer, C.E. Zeeb, and M.K. Riddell. S. Bear Bergman also encouraged me a great deal when I wrote this essay.

Above all, I owe thanks to my friends Anthony and Sunny. And to Stinky, the black and white dog who kept me awake at night.

2011-11-16T04:29:00.001+09:00

Gentle reader:

I wanted to see what happen if I just gave up and wrote as myself, in the way that comes most naturally to me. Without grasping after the structures I am quite hopeless at anyway. What follows is the result: 137 very short sections from a book length project titled ALL ELSE FAILS. Please be advised: parts of it are explicit, even graphic.

I am grateful to anyone who reads my writing and indebted to anyone who responds to it. Never more so than in this instance. Please feel free to send me a note at guttersnipedas(at)yahoo.com.

ALL ELSE FAILS

2011-11-16T03:58:00.003+09:00

to the friends I lost to death or meth: come back.

from the Prologue

(#)

Because there is so very little time.

(#)

The way a whale’s mouth opens (didn’t he read that it actually unhinges?) the way it feeds by letting in great expanses of the ocean.

(#)

Every day he wakes up beneath a sign. A sign with parts that flip, like in a tacky office in the Seventies.

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21ST AND STILL YOU AINT DONE SHIT.

(#) reminder

That every day you should remember death.

Which is sure to come and may come at any time.

That we are as fragile as soap bubbles and at death must leave everything behind.

Resolve therefore to make the best possible use of your life.

(#) naturally he overdid it

He overdosed. Not on drugs. On death awareness.

Therefore he got no further than: There is something I ought to be doing! Time is running out! There is something I’m supposed to be doing! But what but what but what?

(#)

Proud of himself for not wearing a watch. Thinks he’s more free than most people.

But then he wonders, “What time is it?” And, before looking at a clock, he guesses.

Even hung-over, even with a lover, even in a foreign city – his guess is always correct within three minutes.

(#) Q:

Now that he is alone, he wonders, “Should I have said to my lover, “Let’s be as unhappy as most people!” And to my brother, “Drink!”

Should I have said to my father, “You, sir, are a great king!”

Is that what I should have said?

(#) his family

As evident from their strained expressions.

(#) family theory

His theory: his family decided to be polite. Of course. They were polite people. Beyond that they resolved to have as little as possible to do with him.

Some months later, he was born.

(#)

Presumably everyone else has already noticed that one gets in the very biggest trouble not for arguments or insults but for saying things that are absolutely spectacularly obvious.

(#) A:

The answer to the previous question is: No.

(#) thanks!

His father writes: my affection has been boundless. The problem is that you are difficult to love.

(#)

What is the inspiration actually? How to Turn Ordinary Complaints into Thousands of Dollars?

(#)

Boiling nettles.

(#)

Burning shit for fuel.

(#) on prophecy

Fortune cookie says: Keep your eye open for an opportunity soon to come!

He wonders: why only “eye”? One?

Like Odin? What’s my other eye supposed to be doing? Is this that one-eyed snake business?

Soon to come!

(#)

Not that he’s so interested in money, really. Not, like, compared to sex. (Sex!)

He just thought this might be enough. Just this.

(#) reassurance

He tells himself that, even if he was the very ugliest man in the world he would still have the chance to see a giant turtle swimming.

Followed swiftly by the fear that he may very well outlive all the giant turtles.

(#) everybody needs a motto

Fellatio. Because it’s not always possible to go snorkeling.

(#)

This panic. Turn it over. It is the intolerable underside of a blanket woven with birds, colors and stars.

(#)

Can anyone remember why I was called? Was it something about plumbing? Was it about the lights? Are we saving something? May I alphabetize? Are there boxes to carry?

(#)

Don’t tell me to be reasonable! Do you have any idea what this day is worth!

(#)

Courage was accumulating. He could feel it. It would be several hours before he had even a quarter-teaspoonful.

But still

from My Acrobat

(#) grapes

He agreed to help Anita with the grapes. No big deal, he thought. Only two vines. He didn’t even see any fruit. Really just a country way to decorate a cyclone fence.

It wasn’t until he actually climbed inside with a plastic bucket and lifted up the vines –

Hour after hour after hour plucking grapes.

Such a relief to be given a simple repetitive task.

(#)

Back in Denver, he saw half a dozen guys from the bad old days. Old lovers. Which is not to say anything particularly romantic. Or even specific.

(#) Denver

New and abandoned. The sky and strategies for living with it, ignoring, narrowing it.

Denver: the sidewalks are empty and the bars are full. Everyone is here. No one walked.

(#)

By the time he left Denver, age 25, he’d pretty much sucked off every guy who didn’t jump back fast enough.

And guys didn’t jump back. Almost never. Let no one suggest the kid was good for nothing.

(#) Denver / 2

Plastic banners along the street. 50 McNuggets for $9.99. Pitchers three bucks all day!

And most people apparently decided, What the hell why not?!

To judge by their stunned expressions.

(#) America

America. The body yearns to bloat. The face swells and the eyes recede inside the head.

The United States of it’s-so-hard-to-stay-Awake.

(#) America / 2

One of those reclining chairs that take up half the living room. Pull the lever. Your feet fly up and your head falls back.

So cozy until you think, how the hell do I get out of this thing?

(#) flattery

“I can’t believe you still have such a baby face!” said the big floppy cocked blonde who, it turned out, after all these years and minus most of his hair, was named Mark.

He was very happy to hear this. He was flattered. It was several minutes before he realized that Mark was just surprised his face was not sunken from retrovirals or gnawed by meth.

(#)

The bathhouse still had corridors the color of rotten eggplant and carpet that could take the skin right off your feet. When he’d used to come here in the 90s, the place was a hospice party, the cubicles full of companionable dying men calling out, hey you can come in my mouth.

Now it was just a gay-themed drug den, a spooky playground. Guys didn’t even bother to undress. They waited in their rooms and stared into their phones.

(#) meth

Such a thing as evil spirits.

(#)

Here he was back at the baths and everyone who was still alive was doing what they’d done before except now it was mostly rapturous finger-fucking since they couldn’t get it up. (Spirits.)

(#) consolation

Mark still had his all-star cock, impressive even floppy.

Who knows, without that cock maybe he would have had to put on his pants and get a life.

(#) potato

He even saw his old boss, who, when he’d known him before, was still wearing his ghoul on the inside. He had been an entrepreneur – made money turning junk houses he’d fixed up and taking in developmentally disabled sex offenders. He used to boast all the time about one of them, who was hung like an ox.

Now here he was, the old boss, crouched in the triple X video lounge. He looked like he’d been boiled so long he’d popped his skin. Like a forgotten potato.

(#) dumb question

He asked Gerald, “Why don’t they shut the place down? Everyone there is on meth. Even the doorman’s on meth.”

Gerald said, “The cops don’t want to go to no faggot fuckfest.”

Thank you, Gerald.

(#)

Gerald was half Ute, half Lakota Sioux. “Do you know what the purpose of the universe is?” Gerald announced. “The purpose of the universe is to HIDE from the universe.”

(#) nametag

Protagonist must have a name. Despite the fact that names are seldom used in the places he goes and real names almost never.

What use is a name? Pass it through a gloryhole: HELLO! The cock you are sucking belongs to __________ .

(#)

A name. Because in America it is now illegal to travel without identification.

A name. Because otherwise, when two gay guys have anonymous sex, there’s no way of telling who is doing what and to whom. (Even with names it’s often difficult.)

Shaun. Because it is the plainest name the narrator can think of at the moment.

(#)

Shaun met Gerald at Broadway’s, at Broadway and 10th, but both of them remembered the place from when it was called Mr. Bill’s and they were both under-aged hustlers sneaking in the back.

(#) buffet

They remembered the grand old days of Mr. Bill’s free Sunday meal, the legendary Petty Crime Buffet, when the drunks and the hookers and the thieves and the losers gathered together for the only decent meal most of them would get all week.

Beloved old Mr. Bill, who looked like a bloated corpse even on his good days, stood right beside the salad to make sure no one picked out all the shrimp.

(#) losing track

Shaun saw Gerald later at the baths. Above his towel he was wearing a black t-shirt to hide his tits and belly.

“Hey Gerald. Didn’t expect to see you this early.”

Gerald looked kind of embarrassed. “I thought it was six in the morning. But it’s six at night, innit?”

(#) truth and beauty

Shrimp!

Because crazy old drunk Mr. Bill decided that, not only would the petty criminals of Denver be given a free meal, they would be given spinach salad with shrimp. And roast chicken. And fruit salad with berries. And homemade bread.

(#)

Lest anyone imagine that compassion is practiced only by pious Anglicans, with their bologna sandwiches.

(#) concern

Why is it he is unable to hear the dance version of “Love is in the Air” without imagining nuclear holocaust?

(#)fantasy

See the dull-faced workman. His eyes are empty and his back strong. His shoulders up around his ears. No one in camp cares he doesn’t talk. He works.

Here’s the newcomer, curly-haired and dark-skinned. From somewhere nearer the sun. “What’s up with him?” asks the newcomer.

“Never mind him. He’s always like that.”

(#)

The two men work alone in the field. Workman doesn’t talk. Late in the day, the light changes. Newcomer is tired of silence, of shoulders up around the ears.

Without thinking, Newcomer touches Workman’s back. “Hey buddy, loosen up.”

Surprised, Workman shudders and pulls away. He has started shaking and cannot stop.

(#)it’s magic, that’s why

Newcomer understands. He holds Workman. He does not stop holding him.

The two men tumble to the ground beneath an immense and ancient tree.

It cradles them.

(#)

Workman sobs so much he falls asleep, exhausted. Newcomer continues to hold him.

In the middle of the night the men wake up, blazing with moonlight, and fuck like mad beneath the stars.

Their semen nourishes the tree.

(#)

The two men wake up at dawn beside the roots of the great tree.

There is light in the leaves of the tree and in the eyes of the men.

(#)

This is the story Shaun tells himself so that he will be able to sleep. Jacks-off, or doesn’t. Night after night.

Imagines himself held by the man from somewhere nearer the sun, whose hair is curly, whose eyes are like rich brown bread.

(#) blessed

Miss DeeDee rubs her giant jeweled hand against Shaun’s crotch and asks, “Are you blessed?”

The pock-marked Latino at the recreation center is an evangelist. “Brother, are you blessed in the Lord?”

And, no matter how lucky Shaun feels, to appear just now in the bright crumbling world, he has no choice but to say, “Not in the way that you mean.”

(#) fashion

Bags are stolen, valuables taken, and everything else gets tossed onto the narrow tarred shores of 8th Avenue or 11th. So that, in a few weeks time, Shaun has no problem accumulating an entire wardrobe of stolen clothes. Evidently everyone robbed was about his size: plain average. No one had much money. There are sweatshirts with frayed sleeves and bargain jeans, an acrylic ski cap. Nothing is fashionable, there is no 100 percent anything.

Shaun takes home the clothes and boils them. Dresses himself in theft. Fits right in.

(#) lice

Shaun got two kinds of lice. (As if one were not sufficient.)

First he got crabs, which were a nuisance, albeit an exceedingly familiar one. Two rounds of insecticide and three loads of laundry cleared that up.

Except he still itched. Even after six more applications of Nix and nine more loads at the laundromat – each of which gave him a holiday of maybe three hours before he started itching again.

Finally the bitter truth dawned: he’d caught invisible lice. Invisible lice were maybe a fraction less disgusting – since you couldn’t pluck them off and watch them wriggle in the glow of the desk lamp.

Trouble was those invisible fuckers were almost impossible to eradicate.

(#) lice / 2

And were they invisible really – or just very very small? Exceedingly small – but certain to swell into visibility if he ever had an actual date with a halfway decent, employed, tender-voiced man, a gentleman almost, albeit a very hairy one. On whom the invisible lice would then be found, big as blood-engorged ticks.

Shaun considered himself an expert on the ordinary and extraordinary effects of sleeping around. But he had no idea what to do about the invisible lice. All he could do was wash and wash and wash.

(#) refuge

Cigarettes, vacations, beer, beliefs, television.

But the body is its own escape. You can follow the animal. You can burrow into the mechanism.

What a relief to be horny, so horny it obliterates everything else, like the hunger of the saints.

(#) mantra / 1

Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –

Grace!
by definition
comes
to those
who do
not
deserve it!

(#) winners

Late Sunday afternoon at the baths – these men all have something. Anyway you can tell they had it once. Some reason this all worked very well for them. Once upon a time. As even the most wretched gambler (if you’ll just lend him a dollar) will talk of jackpot wins, these men all have tales of Spectacular Sexual Success.

(#) gods

The attendant beams at Shaun. “Man! The guy you were with the guy in Room #3 – do you know who that was? That was Morgan Steed!”

Shaun gets to bed even later that night (the sun is already up) but he swears he feels less tired. It helps to remember he was chosen by one of the gods.

(#) repeat

Even more satisfying than the first time with a porn star (he’s ashamed to admit) is the second time, when he knows it’s Morgan Steed in Room #3 and makes him wait, a little. Not too long, just a little. The third time he passes the open door he stops. The god nods to him and he goes in.

(#) Morgan Steed

Oh the porno expanse of Morgan Steed! Every cultivated inch of him. The chest hair buzzed to an elegant bristle, the teeth white as correction tape. The Herculean shoulders and luxuriant armpits. The cock as from box covers – the length indisputably his, the girth reportedly augmented.

It’s true his penis doesn’t feel exactly real, not any more real than it feels to be having sex with an actual porn star. His face is the same as it was in movies from the Nineties. The eyes and mouth still move.

Overall Morgan Steed is remarkably lifelike.

(#) hockey

Shaun has his mouth on the giant smooth balls of the star and the star has his eyes on the television. The porn star stares up at the porn as Shaun licks his balls, his perineum and finally his famous porn star asshole which is as smooth and as groomed as a hockey rink. And Shaun believes he’s doing well when Morgan Steed begins to gasp and groan and swear and what comes out of his mouth is a high-speed distillate of Nineties porno dialogue: “Fuck yeah.” “Suck that cock.” “Hell yeah, motherfucker.” And finally he says, “You’re killing me.”

(#) pardon?

You’re killing me. Shaun stops and looks up. Logan Reid takes his eyes off the porn, looks down at Shaun and grins.

OK, so “you’re killing me” doesn’t mean, for example, “watch out for the teeth.” This is just how Morgan Steed expresses pleasure.

“You’re killing me. You’re killing me.”

(#) switch!

Abruptly Morgan Steed apologizes, “I’m making you do all the work!” (This is a job they are doing.) Then Shaun is on his back on the bed and Morgan Steed is sitting on top of him, vast, verdant and sculpted, like a designated national monument. Morgan Steed is touching him, looking at him.

He wishes Morgan Steed wouldn’t bounce so much. He’s afraid he’s might throw up. Not really from the motion, really. From fear of visibility.

(#) let’s just admit it

Because the goal is to be successful, finished, and away. To get out of there before Morgan Steed can say, “Hey one of your ears sticks way out” or “your forehead resembles an accordion” or “what happened to your leg?” To have sex with a porn star and feel oneself to be endorsed, just a tiny bit taller. The actual sex just a vulnerable place in-between.

(#) cum shot

Shaun’s happy when Morgan Steed gasps, cusses, blows his load. Porn star spunk. Except nothing actually comes out. The voice of Logan Reid is now aw-shucks all-American boy. “Too much edging, man! Sorry! I’m shooting blanks!” Morgan Steed is the very definition of good gay sportsmanship: willing to kiss someone who has spent much of the last hour licking his asshole. Shaun doesn’t push it however: declares his great happiness and pleasure, his vast and abject gratitude, then moves swiftly backwards out the door. As in the movies.

(#) apocalypse

He dreamed of apocalypse, most commonly. Fighting for his life with a few others on what green scraps of Earth were left.

As time went on, these dreams became increasingly unnecessary. Apocalypse was more and more often the day’s programming as well.

(#) in defense of the world

Despite its abundant trap doors and shoddy broken-down appearance, despite the ascendancy of cell phones and the onrush of old age, 99.9% of the time the world remains vastly preferable to contents of the mind.

(#) how extremely unfortunate

Human beings, it turned out, were spectacularly bad at considering the big picture or the long term.

Thus they had arrived in a world which they were ill-equipped to think about. And even less inclined.

Meanwhile, the old goals were increasingly beside the point. The usual victories turned out to be overwhelmingly toxic.

(#) therefore

No refuge other than the moment, which could neither be cut apart nor located. The indivisible, a demon saint with an axe: now now now now now.

The moment as a life raft then. An attempt to add an oar and a sail to the paragraph.

Miniscule prayers – if you believe in such a thing. Otherwise – small superstitious gestures.

(#) mammal

Such as the likely superstitious notion that acting like a human being mattered even now. Presuming the human was a positive opportunity and not some kind of cosmic shorthand for the condition of having blinders. Human, i.e. blinkered.

What do you think? Do pigs insult each other by saying, Man!

Like a great hearted animal then. Like a true mammal. An elephant aspirant. With a heart like a whale’s open mouth.

(#) early reviews

The critics are scathing. Already Narrator hears them.

A sort of potpourri of promiscuity and deep thoughts.

(#) the truth about yourself

An acquaintance reported on him. “I watched you walk down the street. You duck your head down and shuffle along. All the way until you arrive at the next corner. At the corner you look around like you’ve never been there before in your life. Like you just arrived on the planet.”

(#)

This acquaintance didn’t like him much. Obviously. Felt that he ought to hold up a mirror. That people ought to see the truth about themselves. And become normal.

(#)

He was perfectly aware he was ludicrous. His ludicrousness was a hard thing to miss.

He simply knew no other way to proceed. Shuffle shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle shuffle.

(#)

Smart enough to understand that his stupidity was what he had going for him. Overall he understood nothing. Parts only.

All he could do to proceed one broken piece at a time. Pick it up. Turn it over and over in his hand. Then put it down.

(#) concern/2

The fact that, over the last 5000 years, the human brain has shrunk.

Which is the same thing that happens to animals that have been domesticated.

(#) no meaning, or too much

One of those tacky pictures that look totally different depending on where you’re standing.

From one angle: chaos in a broth of wasted time. From another: Divine Providence is running a schedule tighter than the Tokyo Metro.

(#) the good news

Up at 3 am sodomizing a Mormon!

Lest anyone should think life is bereft of hope or purpose.

(#)

How alarming, with almost no warning, to find oneself in the arms of a man who is actually paying attention.

This lean blonde Mormon, the way he cocks his head and says, “Hey! One of your ears is flat to your head and the other sticks way out!”

How scary is that! No way to say, “Please, sir. Pay me no mind. I am only the invisible man who has swallowed your cock.”

(#)

Among the principal dangers of anonymous sex:
At any moment you may turn into a real person.

(#)

He’s a hell of an exceptional Mormon, really. If he was any better looking it would be impossible to do anything with him.

After sex he plays with Shaun’s hair, which is heavy and dense like a dog’s. “Now that we’ve done the sleazy part – can I take you out to dinner and hold your hand?”

Shaun reckons he’s never heard anything so sweet in his life. The sensation in his chest is akin to that of lung collapse. Of course he agrees.

How could Shaun possibly forget something so wonderful, so piercing?

Nonetheless, he will forget. He will be sure to.

(#) grapes / 2.

The task of plucking grapes. Simplicity comes as sweet relief. Washed and de-stemmed, the grapes may then by crushed or boiled down.

The simplest process however, requires only placing a heaping cup of grapes into a sterilized jar, adding a quarter cup of sugar, then filling the jar to the rim with boiling water.

In this way juice is produced although the grapes remain intact. Green or purple, the juice has a delicate color, and makes a suitable gift for those who do not mind humble things.

After several months the grapes appear nearly translucent. A few float at the top. Others nestle at the bottom of the jar, dense as honeycomb.

(#) public transportation

He imagines the talks buses must get into, on those rare occasions when a bus wonders if human actually think, or even have feelings. Who knows, maybe humans even talk amongst themselves!

Oh that screwball bus! Everyone knows that only buses think. Humans get on and off – that’s it.

(#) veteran

Shaun wonders if new arrivals, just learning the language, sometimes made the mistake of thinking the word “veteran” meant “a ragged figure standing on a street corner holding a cardboard sign”.

(#) nope, didn’t see him.

Two angry bicyclists stop fast in front of him.

“Hey! D’you see a red-haired guy, pink polo, runnin’ this way?”

“No. A pink shirt? Definitely not.”

The bicyclists speed off.

Shaun feels incredibly happy. What a pleasure it is to be asked a question to which the correct answer is so self-evident and clear!

(#) buddy booth

In other words, a hole in the wall. Lanky black guy won’t take it out, just lets Shaun feel it through his jeans, so hard Shaun thinks it must be fake but, no, it’s real. Or at least it is firmly attached.

(#)

Something’s wrong, Shaun thinks, and buckles up and walks back into the shop, back into the bright afternoon, to stand among the pink dildos and the magazines.

The clerk is standing there like he’s a greeter at church. The men in the store aren’t nearly furtive enough.

Vice.

(#) invisible buttons

When Shaun was a child he believed that streets were dotted with invisible buttons. Take one step and you might in an instant teleport into another time or nation. Into a wholly different situation, a battle or a jungle. Outer space, a lover’s quarrel.

About this it turned out he was entirely correct.

(#) prayer

Before his cock is even soft he’s back on his knees – this time on a red leather pad among the pews before the Holy Virgin at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

To Shaun the Virgin always looks as though she can’t quite make up her mind.

He prays. In case the Vice Squad is in pursuit. In case the Holy Mother has taken charge of horny morons in triple-X video arcades.

(#) impossibility

If it was enough to be handsome, well, maybe he could manage that. The 99th time someone wanted him – or maybe the 999th – that would be the magic trick.

The problem is that what he’d really like to feel, if only for a moment, is undamaged.

Which unfortunately does not appear to be an option.

(#) whole

The way people describe the almost unimaginable bravery of their elderly relatives.

He eats the fat right off the roast!
She drinks real milk!

(#)

The towering otherworldly whiteness of the basilica, with its stone gods and jewel-box windows, like a spaceship landed among the pawnshops, bars and payday loans of Colfax Avenue.

As Shaun kneels before the Virgin, a man runs in shouting, “I saw a man killed running a red light on his bicycle!”

(#)

The priest walking up the aisle only nods. He is immune to distress. The man who has just seen a man die runs a lap of the saints and hightails it back to the street.

The basilica on Colfax. It is possible that help was once intended. As it is, God has built himself a fortress. He stays hidden inside it. Does not look out.

(#) dogs / 1

He is like a man with a yard full of dogs. Mad half-dead dogs. Can anything be done with them really?

Would a man who was honest, wise and kind – just pick up a gun and start shooting?

(#) dogs / 2

He doesn’t know what to do with all these dogs. One by one he carries them into the house. Pats and examines them.

What sorry-looking dogs!

The dogs lick his hand, growl, bite, shit, die, wag their tails, shed fur.

(#) every character has a history!

Therefore, this summary of the past.

A bookish hustler fell asleep at the baths.

(#) education

A very strange convoluted dream in which he was awarded a scholarship and completed his studies in a branch of knowledge entirely luxurious, the kind of education the rich buy for their daughters after they’ve already purchased the most exquisitely gorgeous carpet.

(#) marriage / employment

At which point he found himself in a foreign city that resembled both a pinball machine and an airport transit lounge, wherein he married a man (!) and became a lecturer.

He wore a suit and stood before a line of desks. The words that came out of his mouth never made any sense.

The man he married never touched him.

(#) travel

Exotic destinations flickered past, as in a Bollywood music video. Like a flying dream, albeit strangely bereft of exhilaration.

(#) history (finish)

He woke up. A bookish hustler at the baths. As ever.

It was true that a significant amount of time had passed.

(#)

To interpret the events of the day like events in a dream.

Even when the most obvious message would be: Buddy! Fucking A! Keep it zipped already! Dude!! Less coffee!

(#) Denver / 3

Bulldozers and yellow poplars, red table umbrellas, dollar refills, tight jeans, burrito supremes, pitchers of beer.

Denver, city of the teasing dare:
you could not possibly enchant me.

(#) fox

At one a.m. walking down Speer past the little park called Sunken Gardens, he sees a fox. The fox bounces on all four feet and has a great bushy tail that appears, at first glance, to be highly impractical.

Beneath the street lamp, the fox plays in the snow. Runs in circles, rolls on his back.

Shaun allows himself to feel encouraged.

(#)

The medical students beside him at the cafe are preparing for their big exam.

What is it called when you try to use your coffee cup to mow the lawn?

(#) staff / 1 (our apologies)

If the same guy would show up to write two days in a row – that would help a lot. That would be invaluable!

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be possible. As it is, this book is being run with a staff of day laborers, guys who hardly know each other, all of whom are prone to wasting time, to the bottle, to throwing everything over in favor of some fresh (or even tawdry) beauty passing by.

(#) shy.

Years before, when Shaun worked as a towel boy at the baths, he had two nicknames. One of them was SLUT. The other was SHY. Because he often was heard to say, “I’m shy” and equally often was found fucking in a hallway or halfway down the stairs or even in the parking lot. As if performing a demonstration. In case anyone had questions. About technique. Or other considerations.

It was true that he was also uncommonly shy.

(#) catapult

The kind of cowardice that functions as a catapult. The occult force generated by ten thousand times cowering, or flinching as if about to be struck. A force which may be dissipated in addiction or which may, on exceedingly rare occasions, result in actual acts of bravery.

(#) crow, unicorn

The young man at the next table has a young crow perched on his shoulder. The crow stays entirely still and leans slightly forward, as if concentrating very hard on what the pretty young woman with glasses across the way is saying.

The crow is a fake crow twenty-three hours a day.

The woman is talking about a woman she met at dinner party who said, “Could somebody please explain it to me? Are unicorns endangered, or are unicorns extinct?

(#) outlook

Entirely screwed-up. A mess. A busted head. A poisoned river. The chance of positive future developments – exceedingly slim.

Then again, it seems equally unlikely that such a person would be able to wash and dress himself or make words and gestures comprehensible to other people.

As happened today again.

(#) two cents

Killed a cockroach.
Prayed it might be reborn as a honeybee.

(#)

The night before, as he walked on Broadway past the Capitol building – this message in blue chalk:

Clearly we have all gone INSANE.

(#) staff / 2. (apologies continue)

If only a professional and conscientious staff were available – this book would be great!

Even better, a truly skillful and pragmatic team would swiftly decide that, considering its premise, promise and subject matter, this book had better remain unwritten.

Saving both money and time!

(#) point of view

This him, this you, this I, this quadrillionth. Infinitesimal ambulatory fragment of sky and sea. The immense throttling air, the fertile fucked-up plasticine sea.

The cod may go ahead and die.
Or the cod may grow another eye.

(#)

The way a whale’s mouth opens. How it actually unhinges. And swallows the ocean as it goes along. Millions and millions of gallons, innumerable microscopic lives, mysterious abyss – all flows into the whale’s gullet.

Questions beyond number.
Uncountable grief.

(#) mantra / 2

Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –

Incredibly!
good news!
to those
whose dreams
did
not
come
true.

(#) my acrobat.

My acrobat. He likes to say.

How often does a person get a chance to put those two words together? This must be a very peculiar life we’ve stumbled upon! One of those lives in which things that almost never happen, happen.

Which must also be very common and ordinary. Enough “almost nevers” for everyone to have a few sprinkled on.

In this case the chance to say, “my acrobat”.

(#)

To his credit, he is aware the second word negates the first, that ravenous possessive.

Makes a mockery of it, even.

(#)

The acrobat. Shaun noticed him the second time they had sex. (Let’s assume it was the second time.) As soon as he was in the door at the baths, before he’d even gotten to his locker, a man put his arms around him from behind, kissed his neck.

(#)

He was very young, maybe twenty, and looked like a tremendously sad angel, who’d never saved anyone.

Shaun knew he wasn’t eligible for a guy like him – and also he was fairly certain he’d had sex with him in the last ten days. He wasn’t exactly sure.

(#) clef

The young man told Shaun to find him when he was ready. Then he turned and walked back toward the showers.

At the top of the spine was a bass clef. That was when Shaun remembered. The bass clef.

Yes – he was an acrobat.

(#) forget

As essential thing about promiscuity, which sure as hell nobody had ever told him: you won’t remember.

All those lovers from the baths – the half-dozen from this week, the half-dozen from the week before – they are all stored someplace exceedingly temporary, like dreams.

(#) forget

Damage is memorable: warts, brush-offs, amputees. Every cold dismissive word. All that is yours to keep. Otherwise, the men dissolve. Even the pretty ones, even the lucky ones. The perfect ones especially.

(#) forget

He knew exactly how to grin when a brand-new lover said, “Hey Shaun, good to see you again!”

(#) forget

He’d even forgotten an acrobat. How could he forget an acrobat? When so few acrobats will ever be vouchsafed to one’s arms!

How could he forget? Like forgetting one’s only sight of a giant sea turtle, or the Northern Lights, or a whale breaking the surface of the water.

(#) tender

Tender acrobat. Not like the gods who just stand there awaiting tribute, shoot their load, shrug, walk off without a word.

That was easier actually. You be the god. I’ll be the devotee. He knew how to do that.

The acrobat was crouched down on the floor. And here he was – excessively visible. He reached over and dimmed the light some more.

(#) monster

“You’re pretty much what crippled boys dream about,” Shaun said.

“You’re not crippled.”

“My left leg is crippled.”

“Didn’t notice.” More kisses. “Anyway if the monster comes, I’ll defend you. You won’t have to hobble very fast. Or else you can hobble away while the monster’s eating me.”

(#) work

The acrobat acted as if he beauty were entirely beside the point.

As if this was just what he did for work – dress up as a Apollo, naked.

(#) aspiration

Being an acrobat was just an aspiration actually. So far he’d been a dancer.

“I never had to do anything more than that,” he quickly added. “Just tease.”

(#)

The heaviness in the face of the acrobat – the darkness beneath his eyes and his face as hewn from stone. Was that the habit of sadness – or just a side effect of retrovirals?

(#) monster / 2

He thought maybe the acrobat could explain. Every day at least somebody offered it to him. Was it was just something about Denver, or was America now on meth?

“They’re curious,” said the acrobat. “You’re sort of butch. Your cock is thick. They want to see what kind of monster you would be.”

(#) hooked.

“So – were you ever hooked?” Shawn asked.

“Only when I was a kid,” said the acrobat.

(#) childhood.

“My dad was a mule,” said the acrobat. “Back and forth to Mexico. So I was a mule too. I was ten. So much coke. But then he went away to jail.

“When I was 12 my mom said she was tired of buying my clothes. She faked all my paperwork and made me 2 years older. So I could go to work. But then, guess what, pretty soon I could take her to court and I was, like, you are pretty much the worst mother ever and I became an emancipated minor. And I was only 16, like, on paper.”

(#)

The way he said all this was off-hand and matter-of-fact, the same way he said, “You can fuck me if you want.”

(#) woods.

Lying there, in a cubicle at the baths, the acrobat said, “I’d really like to get way out into the woods with you.”

Shaun agreed. He had dreams like that.

They said they would exchange numbers. Of course. They even promised.

Shaun wondered, did anyone ever make it out to the woods?

(#) remember.

My acrobat.

Here he is again.

Please, this time, remember.

Four Canadian Perverts and Some Associated Reflections

2011-11-01T06:47:00.006+09:00

Or, Still More For Nothing

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. – SB

ONE

To the youth of the world, gazing toward me, awaiting tips on sexual success: be extremely wary of anyone with a fetish for playing barbershop.

His pants were around his ankles; he had an uncapped bottle of poppers in one hand and electric clippers in the other. To my credit, I did think, “Is extreme arousal the best time to give or receive a haircut?”

By the time the poppers wore off he’d shot his load. I had no hair.

I am upset because I am on the verge of having nothing. Ditto being.
What’s next? Shall I rage against the sun? Or time – that’s a good one!

Idiocy is believing special rules have been made, and just for you. The
compensation is feeling part of the popular crowd. So tremendously
special!

The stripper boys this evening are more attentive than ever. It used to be obvious I’d be getting it elsewhere for free. Now – not so much.

The black muscle hunk arrives to breathe on my neck. He wants me to buy a private dance. Optimistically speaking, it is entirely possible that I could die before it came time to pay. And die happy.

Some people rely on virtue. Personally I find that being broke, while not nearly so glamorous, is vastly more reliable. For goodness it helps to be broke.

A cap of dark stubble and a bushy gray beard. Although I have occasionally acted like a crazy person, and very frequently felt like one, this may be the first night I have actually looked the part.

Aside from when I wore a bandanna and a ponytail and then I was 18 and thus, I hope, excused.

Am I excused?

That is all right. I did not expect to be.

Life is random and appears so. Absolutely everything is accident and
chance. Everything except bad luck, which has been meticulously, even
divinely, designed and tailored to oneself. This particular pimple,
exactly now. This latest arrogant cuss who has divined those few perfect
cruelties to which one is not yet inured.

With such precision our infections are embroidered! For each small
opening, exactly the right despair. A job by chance, a random marriage,
and suddenly here it is: the perfect cancer.

AUNT

After we’d been out all evening – first to coffee, then to dinner – my aunt turned to me in the car and broke the news, “People find your gentleness disconcerting.”

Gentleness gets out of hand and runs roughshod over my life.

TWO

Guillame has some requests. He would like to kidnap me, knock me unconscious, and abuse me. His daily emails are just full of ideas!

There’s a problem however. Guillame is very shy and entirely tenderhearted. He’s going to need a lot of guidance if he’s ever going to be a halfway passable kidnapper and assailant.

The only abuse Guillame can think of is forcing me to suck his cock (Guillame you evil monster!) but then I suggest that he is welcome to punch my chest and slap me in the head as well. He promises to try.

G. regrets to inform me that the walls of his apartment are very thin so that, while he hopes I’ll put up lots of resistance (until the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform) actual screaming is out of the question. “Moaning is probably OK,” writes G.

I assure him that I will put up plenty of fight. And curse him under my breath.

We here at the Bureau of Truth and Misinformation would like to attest,
again, that it is possible to feel at the same time totally lucky and
entirely wretched.

I may be nobody with nothing and no chance of much but that doesn’t
mean I’m not grateful, grateful as anyone would be who has all that I
have.

THREE

This elderly man in his floppy hat in the chair across from mine – for the last hour he’s been penciling his Sudoku as he gums a cookie. Now I look and he’s struggling with the thick plastic wrap on a bottle of poppers.

Unnecessary to mention, really, that the cafe is in Montreal.

Are poppers actually legal in Canada? Or is it in the gray area, i.e. the cops have better things to do than bust gay guys who like to self-administer small doses of brain damage while masturbating?

He doesn’t look like he’d survive a whiff, the shaky old duffer. Perhaps he intends to pop a Viagra and self-deliver.

He pick pick picks at the hard red plastic wrap. This is a very fashionable cafe. A croissant is nearly six bucks.

I remember my pal Vito in Bangkok who tried to pry the cap off a bottle of poppers with his teeth till the whole damn thing exploded and took an incisor as well as two in the back.

Finally I say to the duffer, “That plastic sure is tough, isn’t it? I can never do that!”

But the old man wants no part of me or my help. Is he making progress now? What happens when he gets the cap off?

Sometimes I can almost hear them, the voices whispering. Should we tell
him? Absolutely not! A little even, just a smidge? No, he must know
nothing.

GENTLENESS

Which is a punishable offense in New York, Amsterdam, and Rome.

Which is generally looked down upon, even in those areas in which it is officially tolerated.

Which is welcomed only in minor places, in West Bengal and Laos and certain parts of Oregon.

Which is not only onerous to the general public, but burdensome above all to he who is afflicted with it.

Which used to be acceptable for women. Not anymore.

FOUR

How this guy managed to sneak up on me, here in the video room at the Oasis Baths, I have no idea. Considering that he is wearing enormous rubber galoshes and gigantic rubber bib overalls, overalls so big he has enough room to put both his arms inside to beat off.

I’m not sure what his fantasy is, exactly – but it seems to mean a great deal to him that I will even tolerate it in my vicinity.

I think I’m supposed to press myself against him – though how he can feel anything at all inside all that rubber is a mystery to me.

As I watch he takes out his delicate penis and thwacks it against the rubber, pleased as a boy with a paper clip. He is not old but his hair is colorless; he wears glasses and seems overwhelmingly sad, as is appropriate for a man indoors dressed for a cataclysmic storm.

It upsets me that I must always understand exactly nothing. Why can’t I know a little? Would it interfere so much if I was given even the slightest inkling of the plan?

BACK TO TWO

A thing that is difficult: to pretend you are unconscious while a hairy film student crawls naked over you and shoves his thick tongue in your mouth.

You can try it yourself or you can just take my word for it.

The game he wanted: I’m a mean jock looking for a room to rent. I show up late and look bored as I sniff around his messy basement room. I need a place where I can bring my girlfriend.

As I sneer toward the bathtub he attacks me from behind. We grapple against the wall until he whispers, “You’re losing control.” Agreeably I slump to the floor.

I’d recognized the problem as soon as he’d answered the door. My assailant had the body of a baby bear and eyes like Jesus.

I felt absolutely totally safe.

How difficult it must be to be Guillame. Anytime he mutters, “Gonna fuckin’ rape yer ass in an alley”, the victim pipes up, “OK sure whatever! I know just the alley! Private yet atmospheric! OK to bring a blanket?”

Naturally even while playing dead I’m worrying, am I doing it right?

Stockholm Syndrome sets in early. Slipping in and out of mock unconsciousness we fight, I cry, I plead for mercy, but then things get out of hand, deteriorate, and soon we’re making out like a couple of lovestruck puppyboys.

Oh, terrible, tyrannical and relentless gentleness, don’t you see how we suffer? To all our attempts at perversity, tenderness adheres like lice. Why, in the name of depravity, can’t you give us a ten minute vacation? Let us be as awful as the world, as bad as the weather.

Guillame brandishes the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform. Just one more time, he says. Please? Play dead.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Jan Morris

2011-10-25T12:59:00.008+09:00

Jan Morris, Hav
Introduction by Ursula K LeGuin
New York Review of Books, 1996

I read as much as I can. I particularly love to scout out books that are unusual and perhaps a little neglected. Once a year I settle on a favorite – and then I irritate my friends (and anyone who will listen) begging them to read it.

In the past I’ve chosen books by Halldor Laxness or Gyula Krudy, by Bruno Schulz or Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector. Writers well-known in certain circles – but not nearly so celebrated, it seems to me, as their brilliance warrants. I call these books my “holy books” – they sustain me as I try to live and write and think in my own way.

Jan Morris’ Hav is the best book I read all year. Here is your chance to tour Hav – a country which does not exist, though Jan Morris knows it intimately and, indeed, has friends there.

This book actually contains two books. The first, “Last Letters from Hav”, was written in 1985. Morris' account of Hav is jam-packed with wonderment and peculiarity – and meticulous as a guide to the Louvre. Hav returned me to the mystery of places I knew when I was young, places I loved without ever quite comprehending – to Delhi and Kathmandu and Hyderabad most especially.

Twenty years later, the New York Review of Books asked Morris to write a kind of sequel. I am grateful to NYRB for many reasons (such as making available GV Desani, Nirad Chaudhuri and Robert Walser) but this was a stroke of brilliance. Unwilling to settle for nostalgia, the second book, “Hav of the Myrmidons”, is remarkably different from the first.

Given the chance to return to Hav, Jan Morris did the bravest and most honest thing to the tangled old city. She destroyed it. Hav rebuilt is convenient and comfortable – the resort is world-class. However, the bears however are extinct. And the troglodytes live in apartments. The famous snow raspberries are genetically modified. And canned. Also, the history of Hav has been rewritten – and any visitor with a sense of self-preservation would do well to keep that fact in mind.

Jan Morris claims her story is an allegory, even claims to not fully understand it herself. Yet she has somehow managed to capture, better than anyone else, what has become of the world. Fiction gets to the truth better than the facts can. What has become of Hyderabad since 1991? Read Hav. Shanghai? Hong Kong? Lhasa? You must read Hav. (I was unsurprised to learn that some of the plans and funds to rebuild Hav originated in China.)

When people ask why I had to leave Tokyo despite its convenience and comfort – I’ll tell them to read Hav. When people want to know what’s become of the family farm – I won’t try to explain, I’ll hand them a copy of Hav. I’m telling you, you must read Hav -- it's the best book I read all year.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Derrick Jensen

2011-09-26T09:55:00.004+09:00

Derrick Jensen, Dreams
Seven Stories Press, 2011

A few years ago I started to read books about ecology and climate change. First I read books like Thomas Friedman’s Hot Flat and Crowded, that claims we can use a “green revolution” to save the earth and get rich. (It’s embarrassing to think that just four years ago this seemed to me a reasonable idea.) Then I read the more serious books, that argued that profound sacrifice would be necessary: Orr, Brown, McKibben.

Meanwhile, natural communities are destroyed at ever-increasing pace. Meanwhile, government and business are wholly unwilling to make real changes to avert destruction. They can’t even manage hollow gestures and window dressing! Meanwhile, many of the smartest and best people I know -- who appear otherwise thoughtful -- say they can’t be bothered or hide themselves away in easy nihilism or nauseating New Age vapidity.

People act as if they had someplace else to live. They appear to be waiting for an new iphone application that will save the Earth in just one click.

Now here is Derrick Jensen, every cell in his body radiating outrage, kicking in all directions in his fury. I think Derrick Jensen is wrong about plenty of things. I only wish that he was wrong about the things that matter most. He’s not wrong. He’s right: there is no reason to believe that the system of which we are a part, and which is destroying the Earth, is going to voluntarily dismantle itself for the good of all. It isn’t going to happen.

I groaned aloud when Jensen related yet another zombie nightmare but the zombie metaphor is hideously apt: what are we doing but moving in stunned lockstep toward the destruction of the basis of our own lives and spirits?

Naysayers will find this book effortless to dismiss. On page 9 he talks about how pet dogs communicate with him in dreams after their deaths. And on page 12 he’s back calling for the end of civilization as we know it.

I’ve spent enough time in Cambodia and China for my blood to run cold when I hear someone calling to remake society but – there is no other option that I see. We are headed off a cliff.

Derrick Jensen’s style is extremely casual. The chapters invite us to think and fume and dream along with him. Sometimes it seems that he can write about as fast as I can read. (At one point in the book he provides times.) I often wished that, since I had to spend so much time, he’d spent more time too. Is Jensen so revered that someone is afraid to edit? The strongest chapters are brilliant: Extinction, Fungi, The Bear, Reciprocity, Wisdom. Others could have been condensed or cut entirely. Sometimes he sounds like a visionary, other times like a peevish eighth grader. He is often brilliant. He is often downright snarky.

I am very glad I spent many days reading this book and taking notes. I wrestled and sighed, complained -- and learned a tremendous amount. I hope that portions of the book can be edited and tightened and made available to people who cannot or will not read the entire book.

As for me, I’ve taken to hauling the book around and begging people, “Could you just read the chapter ‘Reciprocity’? Please! I’ll make you tea. I’ll rub your feet. I’ll wait. Please, please! Read ‘Reciprocity’.”

The Complete Apologies

2011-09-26T09:36:00.003+09:00

for P + V

You don't get an appointment. That's not how it works. You give your name at the desk and you wait. Maybe the doctor will see you. Maybe the doctor will find out what's wrong. Something will be done about it. Maybe. It doesn't sound so likely, does it?

Still, I sit and I wait.

This notebook is just a ruse. I sit here in the corner of the waiting room, half-stuck to the leatherette, trying not to be gutted by the fluorescent lights and celebrity magazines. It is better to write than to scream. Also it keeps me from staring. It’s rude to stare, especially at this young man here, with his burned face. One side is entirely scarred; he doesn't have much of an ear. I'd still go to bed with him, though. I don't mind damage in men. And external damage, well, it's like a holiday in comparison.

But if I stare, he won't ever think, that middle-aged lady wants to get me in the sack! No, he'll only think that I am looking at the scars. So I keep my eyes on my notebook and I write diligently, as if I were someone with things to do.

Ideally, I would only write notes. Never speak at all. Just pass notes. Good Morning!!! Oh this rain! Please one black coffee plain rye toast no butter. Bless yr heart! I can't tell you how much it would help me, to never once have to hear the sound of my own voice.

Hey boys, how have you been?
Hey boys, it's been awhile!
Hey, let's get together?
I sure do miss our dinners!
I thought just in case you lost my email --
I changed numbers so --
I thought I'd just drop by.
Why is it you never ask me to dinner anymore???

I remember I told people, "Everything they do is perfect, but they're not stuck-up."

I believe there are millions of people who want ardently to save the world. However, I suspect 67% of them are in more or less my situation -- cannot use an electric can opener without supervision, do not take proper care of their toenails, and keep losing gigs at the temp agency.

Which is how I met Vasily, actually -- working the phones at his law office. This was before the divorce was finalized, when going to work was still required. We shared a few dumb jokes and then -- waving grandly toward a dusty fake fern -- he asked me to please take care of my pink cactus, which is about to flower. A reference I correctly ascribed to Colette and to the pink cactus kept by Colette's mother Sido.

Sido, at the end of her life, refused to visit her daughter, whom she adored, because her cactus was about to flower and she knew, if she missed it, she would not live to see it flower again. This was the one and only time I ever managed to impress Vasily. And I was invited to dinner.

Most folks in this waiting room are perfectly well. I can tell by looking at them. They are just here for a slightly better acid-reflux pill, for dermatology. They are here for, god forbid, preventative medicine. They simply cannot go to the doctor enough. They want him to look at every little thing. They want to know how he is doing.

I ought to have priority.

All my life I have believed in the power of prayer -- and now it appears I was wrong. It's perfectly acceptable to say the car doesn't work, my watch doesn't work, the clock doesn't work -- but it's not okay to say God doesn't work. I begged God to guide me, but I never got any less lost. If your cat was as unresponsive as God, everyone would agree if you said, my cat is dead.

This waiting room isn't such a bad place for me: very orderly, fairly quiet. Especially now that I am sitting here in the corner beside the potted palm. Which I believe is a fake palm, though I am not sure. It's hard to tell. Fake things are so real nowadays and real things are increasingly strange. New genetic engineering will soon grow new plastics. Babies will be born with a scratch-less surface, all of them geniuses and flame-retardant.

Why am I so afraid? Nowadays doctors just take care of things. They make incisions where no one can see them.

As soon as I have one thought, I lose the thought that came before. If thoughts were clothes I would never be decent. I'd be seen on the street wearing only a red scarf, only a silk glove, or just one sequined high heel pump. Because certainly some of my thoughts are very interesting. They just aren't the sort of thoughts one needs for daily living.

I enjoy homosexuals. I always have. They notice what you are wearing; they don't judge you if you sleep around. Gays are like a mini-vacation. A girl can have a nice dinner and not have to perform. A gay man just tells you how big is dick is, instead of actually hauling it out and showing it to you. It's much easier to think of what to say.

Walter and Vasily, I remember the first time you had me for dinner. I even remember the menu. Melon and prosciutto, homemade lemon sorbet, Cornish game hens in clay pots, blackberries and cheese. Walter, you filled my glass and told me, "This was Marie Antoinette's favorite wine." It took me a nearly a decade to realize you were kidding.

Your dinners were a paradise of attention. Walter pouring wine and Vasily laughing at my jokes, making references to writers whose books I did buy and read, once I puzzled out the spelling: Goytisolo, Foucault, Beckett, Saramago. I was glad to read those books, though when I referred to them, you always looked as if I'd taken something from the cabinet that children were not meant to play with.

Those dinners built a sort of dome around me, painted on all sides with beautiful ideas. For days afterward I did not smell monoxide from the buses and I did not hate myself. I slept well.

I would like someone to explain to me exactly what it is that makes doctor's offices smell. What is it? Disinfectant? Is it a human smell? Is it the metallic smell of fear -- or the promise of a good clean death? And why, if medicine has progressed so much, is it still the same damn smell?

Nowadays almost everyone you meet is dehydrated. Even if they're not entirely wizened, they are still obviously parched. And then there's everything that goes along with that. Dwarfism, alcohol abuse, television. I try to keep that in mind when I meet someone. You have to imagine what they'd be like if they were loved.

Remember Sea Monkeys? What were they actually -- brine shrimp? You had to add water and wait for days, just to see if anything was there.

I am a student of ecology. It is some weird relief to know exactly how bad things are, and how bad they are supposed to get. When the Gangotri glacier disappears, the Ganges will be only a seasonal river. Honeybees suffer traumatic stress and lose their way home. Already Yemen has no water. It's not just me, in other words. The Central African Republic is also falling apart.

It is natural for me to seek the company of the world, which could also perhaps be saved by a massive and costly intervention involving the unified effort of everything, from China on down to the aphids -- but which is also probably well past its tipping point. Yes, it looks like we are going all the way down, the world and I.

Of course it's somewhat unfortunate that life on Earth must end -- just so I can feel slightly more comfortable. But that seems to be the trend.

Nowadays -- can't they just take a knife and cut it out? Or, better -- isn't there something they can do with lasers?

How glorious it was to be favored by the two of you: as if everywhere we sat there was a little sign overhead which read: Cleverer Than Other Children.

You divided up skills and qualities, as couples will.. Walter made perfect scones, and Vasily perfect espresso. Walter preferred T.S. Eliot, and Vasily Dr. Williams. Walter enjoyed Almadovar, Vasily was a connoisseur of the Iranians. How lovely it was to be a part of this. Lovely to be served scones with tiny sour berries and cappuccino. Lovely to listen to poems and watch movies. I felt as though I'd arrived in the blessed abode of beautiful and correct answers.

Yours was the last word on all things. The eggs you bought, those are the eggs one is supposed to buy. Your car will arrive in the next world unashamed of its emissions. Yours is the marriage of ethics and good taste. You are proud, rightfully, of your Masters degrees, your appreciation of Modernism, and your monogamy. Yours is a deep, true, and great love, more than mere mortals find. It is natural for you to look in pity on the world.

Vasily -- the way you smiled when you asked me a question. Like you knew the answer already, but wanted to see if I could come up with it on my own. Of course I never got it exactly right. Life was something you knew how to do. Other people's floundering, well, it was amusing, for awhile. We needed something to talk about as we ate spinach salad with pecans and goat cheese and tiny grapefruit wedges. But all that floundering must grow tiresome, when you are the smart kid in the class, the one who knew all the answers even before he walked in the room.

Walter was an educator, but not directly, he taught the teachers, somehow. Vasily was a lawyer, but of some admirable variety. Walter was cook and concierge, Vasily the conversationalist. Walter was more human, ostensibly, capable of raunchy jokes and bitchy moods. Vasily was the perfection of sanity. His parents were from one of those little squashed countries discovered when the Iron Curtain fell. Estonia? Moldavia? Anyway, he was a distant but direct part of the royal family there. You could see it in his forehead.

Classic homosexuals: those who have not yet traded culture for promiscuity.

These are the kind of lights that hum. A very subtle hum that takes a long time to notice -- but once you notice it, you can't stop noticing. I am sorry that Edgar Allen Poe died so young. On the other hand, he was spared the advent of lights that hum. Speaking as someone who also is nervous! very very dreadfully nervous. I would also like to state here that, if I ever destroy human civilization, it wasn't because I meant any harm. I just wanted to stop the humming.

I wonder if the doctor can give me pills so I can think. Can't hurt to ask. Wait. I need to make a list so I don't blank out when I see the doctor. First, the problem. Second, toenail fungus. Third, some pills so I can think or, rather, so that my thoughts, when I think them, stay -- thinked (?) and I don't have to be all the time thinking them over again.

Walter and Vasily, I've heard how you talk about old friends who've fallen from favor with you. Everything they do is a little pathetic. They are not so evolved. Their love is not as deep and true as yours. They are only invited to the larger, more general dinners. You smile at them so warmly that anyone would think you were being paid for your time. You show such a beautiful tolerance.

I am certain you do not often think of me. After all, I am not family, not a lover. I am just someone you had for dinner. For a few years I was a Friday night diversion, entertaining for while. A woman of easy virtue and one spectacular divorce. A divorce so profitable I could afford to be lackadaisical about my mental health. I remember, in the beginning, you told me I had an interesting mind.

For forever it seemed like it would be enough, if I could just get my head together and clean up my act. Be happy for once. Keep buttoned up. But you know how it is: before you know it, you've got real problems.

I finish a sentence and I think, that's it, they'll call me now. That was the key, the spell. But, no, the nurse calls someone else or else just looks around, clears his throat and goes back to looking at the charts.

Everyone in this waiting room is doomed. I recognize that now. Palliative care is the best we're going to get. And you know they hold out on the morphine until you can't even properly enjoy it.

If only I could put my thoughts in order. According to importance. Or color. Alphabetized, even. If only I could 'make sense of things'. Lord knows, I've got things. Only sense is lacking. If I knew what to be sorry for, instead of just being sorry for everything.

I never thought you were arrogant. I thought you were right about everything.

The glass room in which you live, with literature and exorbitant groceries, looks arrogant only from the outside. Inside it is the warm sweet hearth of favor, like a warm summer night with deer on the barbecue and a bug zapper hanging from a tree nearby, zapping the souls of those not deemed graceful enough to enter.

Your new fag hag is Sri Lankan. Pursuing her doctorate in literature. Specializing in South Africa. In multi-ethno-culturalism, women's issues and endangered languages. Absolutely gorgeous. And so funny! We all had dinner together. Once. I could easily have poisoned her.

I liked her very much. I did. You could have kept two favored fag hags, you know. Lord knows you have the table settings. The silver and the crystal.

Why exactly I wasn't good enough for you, anyway? You could have at least sent in a comment card. There is nothing I would not have changed. I am not so attached to myself. I'm hardly even connected.

Did I tell the story about buying bras with wire support too many times? Too many drunken sex tales? Maybe it was the glass of wine I tipped over? Or the pasta I grasped firmly with the tongs but released over the linen? Maybe I shouldn't have accused vichyssoise of being pointlessly snooty? Maybe I should have asked you more questions? Maybe I shouldn't have asked questions at all?

Tell the Sri Lankan girl to call me when she gets phased out. I can't make vichyssoise to save my life but my liquor is all top-shelf.

I think it is possible that, with proper socialization, I might have become part of the human family. If some very tender person had spoken softly to me and stroked my fur and passed me, now and then, a piece of fruit through the bars.

And why is it that whenever I think this way, I always imagine myself in Brazil? I have never been to Brazil. Is that why there was never a chance for me?

Can't they just take a knife and cut it out?

I was a lot better looking then, I know. A beautiful tramp is more interesting than a middle-aged woman who is aggressively willing.

Undoubtedly my problems and complaints became tiresome. Imagine how it is for me, living with myself all the time! You could have told me. I could have found new problems, brought them to dinner.

My life is spent attempting to determine exactly where I went wrong. Finding mistakes -- that's effortless, but finding the one, the tipping point, that's like finding one specific kernel in an entire field of corn.

Even your cooking was stuck-up. Venison tortellini pie. Good God, there was even more in it than that. Shrimp, figs, rabbits. Any one of those things would be better alone. And so am I.

This is how you get off, isn't it? The perfect gay married couple. The lawyer. The educator. Homemade sorbet and seven grain bread. Goat cheese and Foucault. Iranian cinema. Pine nuts. All that actually matters to you is making certain you always feel superior to absolutely everyone.

Stupid stuck-up fags!!!

I have one thought -- and lose the thought that came before. For example, right now I can't remember exactly what it is that's wrong with me. Or, rather, I can't remember how I was ever going to explain. How can a woman who can only think one very small thought at a time ever describe something so big and so wrong?

Nowadays, can't they just take a knife and cut it out?

I am the Orange Latchkey bird, at home in the South Pacific. The Orange Latchkey bird, singing my own quirky little song. No one expects a little birds to provide full explanations, to lay it all out on the line -- climate change, salinization, desertification, tipping point. That little bird can't even say the one essential thing, Tuvalu is sinking!

You probably think I am so crazy I haven't noticed anything.

In the beginning you both wrote right away -- or one wrote and the other called. Then, one or the other would answer. Later, this took time. Now I've written many times, left many messages. I even remembered how to send a letter. But I do not think that I will hear from you again.

If only I could understand, once and for all, what exactly has gone wrong. I could make a full and complete apology. And then we could begin again. As it is, I am all the time apologizing, but my apology is never the right one.

Can't they just cut it out?

What a lovely time this would be for sheer and utter rescue. The nurse should just rush out -- no, make it two nurses, strong, well-built and compassionate, with pills and gags and wrist restraints. Yes! Protect me from myself! The nurses would not allow me to say a word. The doctor, too, would hush me. Any word from me would only clog his perfect understanding.

No explanations, please. In my fantasies I am as self-explanatory as a brand-new amputee.

That was the key. The spell. The doctor will see me now. Now --

Now.

I miss you both so much.

I imagine the postcards aliens write home from this planet:
Wow! I never imagined I could be -- at the very same time -- so bored and so scared!!!

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Philip Hoare, The Whale

2011-09-20T04:47:00.003+09:00

The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare
Ecco, 2010

The book’s original title, “Leviathan”, is more appropriate, if less marketable. Expecting a natural history, I found instead a history of humankind’s obsession with the whale. The book is composed of elegant meandering essays which explore literary history (particularly Melville and Thoreau) along with whaling ports (New Bedford, Nantucket, the Azores) as well as natural history and the business of whaling.

If someone had told me this book was largely a history of the whaling industry, I would have put it back on the shelf. I am grateful for my mistake – and all that I learned by reading. I had no clue what a driving force whaling has been in history or the extent to which the early industrial world was built on the bodies of whales.

As a long-term resident of Japan, I was especially grateful for the detailed and unsparing discussion of whaling in Japan. (Japanese nationalism has made a fetish of whaling, which it claims is an essential part of Japanese culture. The actual sources are more complicated. Whaling was encouraged by McArthur during the Occupation.) May this book be swiftly translated into Japanese!

The book strives to be elegant and literary -- and occasionally tries too hard. I sometimes felt as if I had been trapped at a high class dinner party with far too much silverware and not nearly enough wine. He wants to be WG Sebald – and who can blame him? Although I sometimes rolled my eyes, I didn’t really mind. If the journey is marvelous, a little melodrama from the guide is easily accommodated.

The details he provides are delicious. In a day’s reading I learned that the milk of humpback whales is so rich it resembles cottage cheese, that Moslems believe that the whale that swallowed Jonah is one of ten animals that will enter heaven (I imagine it there, hanging in mid-air, like an exhibit in a museum) and that young Melville lost a job because of his atrocious penmanship.

There are sections that are irresistible, such as a history of sea monsters in the 19th century. The section about the arctic whales, which leads to a discussion of whale life spans – some live more than 200 years – is unexpectedly moving.

In a mania of greed we nearly destroyed the whale. Now we belatedly and halfheartedly attempt preservation. Not surprising, our ignorance has proven remarkably durable. The whales remain mysterious. This book is an elegant ticket to that mystery.

The Story of the Spell

2011-09-12T11:33:00.006+09:00

The state should keep me. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose. -- Franz Schubert

Because the essential thing, it seems to me, qualifies just as well as mental illness as it does as art. Thus, if no creative grants are available – can I just go ahead and apply for disability?

Not in America, obviously. Someplace Scandinavian and enlightened. Or Canada, maybe?

The conviction that ordinary words, if arranged exactly right, might function as a spell. Or as the numbers of a combination lock. That something new might appear or something old unlock.

This is the goal, isn’t it? And does it not also transparently qualify as nuts?

The primary purpose of the Devi Mahatmyam is neither entertainment nor instruction. If you recite the scripture, which relates the story of Durga’s victory over the buffalo-headed demon, your demons will be subdued as well. Because what good is listening to old stories of victory if you have demons of your own?

How’s that for literature! Never mind self-help. (Every time I see the word, I want to add: As if!) Divine intervention – now there’s a thing worth reading, writing, listening for.

But maybe it isn’t possible anymore? How satisfying it would be if people reading my stories found themselves, for example, comprehensively deloused. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? How much pleasure it would give me to overhear, for example, “I have been reading the stories of Jonathon Mock every day for a week -- and my toenails look great!”

Seriously, if I can’t do as well as one of those little disposable hand-warmers, what the hell is the point?

As I’ve been sitting here in the cafe, three very pregnant women have walked past. There may have been other pregnant women whom I missed. Three very pregnant women. That’s got to be a good omen. I am going to allow myself to feel encouraged.

The story is underway. It is not necessary to make up hoards of imaginary people. People are already sufficiently imaginary.

I’m not certain if I was born a fictional character, but I have been one as long as I can remember. Seriously, I am completely made up. I’m not even particularly convincing.

Every day a man is here at the coffeehouse, standing at the counter near the door. He always wears a suit and carries a briefcase. His bowtie is askew and his thinning hair is lank, as though in allegiance to Crazy People Regulations: if you’re going to be crazy, you ought to look crazy.

His every move is purposeful. He straightens his coat on the chair, goes to get another sugar, stirs, sips again, gets another sugar, straightens his coat.

He writes standing up, in a thin blue booklet, like students used to use for writing exams. He peers thoughtfully, his pen moves. His head tips obediently forward, like a schoolboy receiving dictation. Then he must straighten his coat again, get another sugar, stir it round his silver cup.

He always carries a silver cup. He doesn’t use the regular cups, only his own special cup. I hope his silver cup helps him feel a little better, a little safer, a little more in control.

This man appears here at the coffeehouse every day. He never sits down, his every move is purposeful, he takes careful notes. He repeats his routines for hours: stirring, straightening, writing.

Reports differ as to whether there are actual words on the paper. Some people say the words are gibberish; others claim the page is blank. I do not have the heart to look.

My husband pointed this man out to me and said, “You’re not like that, are you?” To his credit, he was very sorry when after watching the man for a moment, I started to cry.

My husband is not a cruel person, I don’t think. Still, whenever he sees the man in the suit, he says, “There’s that man.” Always standing, always wearing a suit, drinking out of his silver cup.

(I am watching this man right now. After each sip he wipes the rim of his silver cup with a napkin, as though it were a chalice for communion.)

I prefer to sit in the corner. I strongly prefer. At least by the wall. I particularly dislike sitting in the middle of a room. Still, it is not required. OK, it is rarely required. Occasionally there are times when I must sit in the corner. At least if I want to think about anything other than the fact that I am not sitting in the corner.

Those are also the times when I find it acutely painful to hear two songs playing at once. And many people seem to be chewing more loudly than is necessary -- or even polite.

As a small child, alone in the ancient farmhouse, I believed in the power of odd and even numbers, in Jesus Christ, in house cats. All these were powers to array against the ghosts and bogeymen of that vast dark house.

The cats were number one. Jesus and math might or might not come through. And so I ran night after night through the dark corridors of that house with a cat twisting in my arms.

I’m sipping my coffee. Strictly speaking, I probably should not be allowed to have a refill on a large. But it’s not like I am being supervised. I am expected to moderate myself.

As if!

If coffee suddenly vanished, would writing also cease? Do other people worry about this?

Is my vocation simply a side effect?

I wrote my fears to my sister. Maybe it isn’t real writing at all, I wrote. Maybe it’s just a symptom.

My sister wrote back, You make art because you are an artist you nitwit.

I was strenuously grateful for this. I copied her words on a note card and taped them to the inside of my door.

Unfortunately her opinion cannot be entirely trusted. She’s on the list. Of people who are biased. And thus cannot be entirely trusted.

What a pity that that list includes everyone who loves me.

Recently I discovered that all my stories have a plot. (I, too, was shocked.) They are absolutely plot-driven. There is almost nothing but plot.

The plot is: a man is on a quest. He is looking for divine providence. He wants to know if it exists. He thinks probably not. Almost certainly not. Nonetheless, this doesn’t discourage him. Or anyway does not stop him. He asks, am I delusional or is the divine participating? Or is the divine attempting to participate and I am only getting in the way?

I am obsessed with plot!

Thus I am extremely interested whenever anyone appears to set up their life in a way that appears to demand a response from God. Most commonly when they say: Next month’s rent will come from somewhere!

In the last year I’ve known two people that have done this. One was an evangelical Christian missionary. Donations were down because of the economy and the weak dollar. He didn’t know if he’d be able to pay the rent and continue his ministry.

The other was a budding New Age luminary who wanted to teach Tarot. Both gentlemen had rent bills in Tokyo of nearly three thousand bucks. Both felt that, if God supported their work, then goddammit he could come up with his share of the rent.

I awaited the outcome with interest. Who would prevail, I wondered, Jesus or Tarot?

A year later, the missionary is moving out and the Tarot master is still at home.

Unfortunately the seeming clarity of this outcome is totally fake. After all, Jesus did come up with eleven months’ rent. Maybe it was just time to move on? Why Jesus would want anyone to live for long in Tokyo is a fathomless mystery to me.

Also I seriously suspect that the Tarot master is actually loaded and just says “I don’t know where the money’s coming from” so he and his affirmations can score a victory, so he can pretend to be like us.

Obviously further investigation is required. And that means reading t-shirts in crowds and billboards on buses and counting pregnant women as they walk past. Constantly examining events and asking oneself, “Is this random, or am I being directly addressed?”

Close attention must be given to sudden pronouncements from total strangers. In particular, I am slavishly obedient when odd strangers tell me what to read. Why else would I read Celine? Or Million Dollar Mermaid? How would I ever have been able to survive without A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or Esther Williams?

Are the things that happen to us meaningful or not? -- is widely considered a reasonable question.

But then: how can anything be meaningful unless everything is meaningful?

See how quickly one arrives at total nuttiness? It’s right next door. It might not even be a different door. There might not be a door at all.

Here we are.

As soon as you even ask, “What matters?” --

Then, God help you.

Or not.

Disability payments are more regular than grants, presumably. And no lectures are required. Still, there’s the matter of glamour. Presumably it is easier to maintain one’s self-esteem as “artist” than “sick fuck”.

I should admit it does not much matter to me personally, as long as I am permitted to go on writing sentences on blank white three by five cards.

Here, then, is the story. It’s finished now. Please feel free to forward it to whatever authorities you deem appropriate.

2011-06-29T01:01:00.000+09:00

Islands in the Stream

2011-06-29T00:55:00.003+09:00

They agreed that Barbara should wait at the restaurant. The heat – it was too much for her. The heat and the noise and the dust, and having to squeeze past crowds, past paper lanterns and beer t-shirts, past silk scarves and skewers of meat just to inch along the street – it was not for her. There was just today in Bangkok. Tomorrow they would go to the beach and her husband and daughter had promised her that she could have all the quiet she liked. Quiet was good for her. Or maybe it wasn’t good, but she liked it.

Barbara enjoyed fast food restaurants. The key was to eat as little as possible, so as to minimize the harm. She folded her hands on the little table in front of her and looked out through the glass wall to the street, to the crowd pushing past, smiling but not stopping for the big blonde girl who’d gotten her dangling earring caught on an awning.

Barbara felt safe. As if there was a guarantee that, in this air-conditioned box of nonsense, nothing meaningful could occur. She was protected. You clogged your heart of course – but that was only trouble for later.

Her husband said she had a lot of strange ideas. She said she believed in paying attention. Her daughter said she paid so much attention she completely missed the point.

Look at this giant chicken, with his cowboy hat and his outstretched arms. A chicken beaming among the red yellow orange balloons above the red yellow orange chairs. On the walls huge faces of white children were emblazoned among deep-fat fried giant chicken parts. Each white face was laughing, but very carefully, so as to show only the top set of teeth.

There were reasons for this, Barbara was certain. Probably bottom teeth had been found by some marketing research group to signify uncertainty or mortality or lust – and thus had no place in this, the haven of fried chicken and joy.

She enjoyed this restaurant very much. She could feel entirely safe here, almost. If only she hadn’t seen that horrible chicken documentary. Because, even if the human race were perfect in every other way, just for what we did to chickens we would never be forgiven.

Barbara often dreamed of Armageddon. She wondered if this was normal. Barbara was interested in being normal. Which turned out to be difficult because it wasn’t like there’s a list posted anywhere: Guidelines to Normal. You were told what your ideal weight and blood pressure – Barbara was too high in both – but as for the rest you had to figure it out. That is why Barbara wished she could give surveys.

She wanted to ask: How often do you dream of the end of the world? She dreamed of the end all the time. Just the night before she’d been up on the Twin Towers getting ready to climb down an external fire escape with no provisions other than a rotten head of lettuce.

“You think too much!” her husband said, several times each day. Her daughter said so, too. They said it as if they expected her to simply and obediently stop thinking, right there and then, the way a dog drops a bone.

Her husband was almost certainly, at this moment, getting a blowjob in a massage parlor. She supposed she ought to mind. The truth was that sex would make him feel guilty, guilt would make him kind, and kindness would drastically improve their vacation. That blowjob was service to the whole family, really.

Barbara hoped he was with one of the glamorous lady boys they’d seen bobbing down the street among high heels, ringlets, adam’s apple and acrylic nails. Her husband had stared at one, and then he shook his head, as if to say, “Can you believe that?” But Barbara wasn’t fooled for a minute. If I get breakfast in bed, she thought, I’ll know it was a boy.

Her daughter said that Barbara had absolutely no sense of humor. But she did. There was just so little she could say out loud.

She looked around the restaurant. It was two-thirds full, but almost silent except for the piped in music and a timer going bing in the kitchen. Everyone was looking at their phone. Even the baby in his stroller had his own play phone. When he was ready to talk, he’d call somebody up.

According to Barbara’s estimation, it had been about eighteen months since the world had fallen to second place. Now, for those who could, the screen came first and more people looked at it than at the world around them.

What a perfect word: screen. As in a play or lady’s dressing room. A screen, as in a shield. Some place to hide. And Barbara didn’t blame them, not at all. The world became more frightening each day, as our toys turned against us, as our idiocy bounced off the clouds and rained down upon us. Barbara would have hidden, too, if she could, but screens didn’t work for her. Perhaps she was too afraid.

“How’s Thailand doing?” she’d asked the elderly but energetic taxi driver on the way from the airport, after he’d explained that the way he kept up his stamina was by drinking the breast milk of his much younger wife.

Her daughter had rolled her eyes. Her husband was already asleep. “King die soon,” said the taxi driver. “Then civil war start. Same day king die. Not next day. Thailand no one country. Two, three countries.” He said this quickly and matter-of-factly, as if slicing up a fruit.

Barbara had been startled. She assumed she was visiting a stable country. Everything seemed all right. But the lady at the hotel said the same thing, when Barbara asked about it. Thailand was – only a temporary situation. The king was in 24 hour intensive care.

She tried to talk about it with her daughter, who’d said, “That man believed in the power of breast milk!”

“I breastfed you,” Barbara said. And was told, again, that she was incapable of understanding the simplest sentence.

Barbara was sitting very still. No one could say that was wrong. Her back was not touching the back of the seat. Her bottom was sore. The crowd continued to jostle past outside the glass wall. The chicken presided over her with outstretched arms.

The key, Barbara believed, was to remain at all times the same size. She shouldn’t become any bigger. She was already too big, as she learned every moment here, just trying to walk down the street. It was even more important that she not become smaller. She ought to remain at all times Barbara, age 54, five foot six, big in the hips. She should not become the size of a child or a cat or a kitten or a mouse or a roach. Above all, she should not be Alice-in-Wonderland all over the place, now the size of a matchbox, now the size of a house.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with Barbara, her doctor said. She was too sensitive and thought too much. A little vacation might be just the thing. When she came back – perhaps she could find herself a hobby? Of course she had her painting – her little pictures with their unusual colors and that was very nice and he was glad she could enjoy that – but maybe she could find a hobby that included other people. For example, she could join an art class and receive some instruction and paint, you know, actual things.

What she needed, her doctor explained, was a new role – her daughter was grown, her husband busy with work. A new role, a flexible one, of course. She’d still be there when her family needed her!

Someone’s phone was beeping. Was it the girl in the red hat? The boy with the headphones? Just beeping away. It was impossible to tell who because everyone, of course, was playing with his or her phone. Was that necessary? Of course not. Someone had their headphones in. It was completely inconsiderate. That’s how it was nowadays. People couldn’t hear themselves.

Barbara took a small card from her pocket. It read: I am a cultured and wise and yet, a humble person. Her doctor had given Barbara some affirmations and told her she must recite them each day. She should use them instead of her own thoughts. Affirmations like: I feel great about myself! Fear is only a feeling. All is well in my world!

Barbara had a problem with sounds. When she felt a little – ill at ease – she became very sensitive. Voices, footsteps, chewing, sniffling, bells. All kinds of sounds. Sounds that, when she complained about them, her daughter said, “Mom! People don’t even hear those things anymore!”

Not only did Barbara think too much, she felt too much as well. Thus the appointments with Dr. Dillman. To help her make progress toward thoughtlessness and senselessness. She also needed to love herself more, since the time others could spend loving her was very limited. Perhaps self-love would come naturally, when she was thinking less? Right now she was only talking to Dr. Dillman. Drugs were also “an option to explore”.

From overhead, help appeared. The music had changed to the theme from Dirty Dancing. Barbara would have liked to dance. But she was careful to sit still and not mouth the words – she didn’t want to look like a mad woman!

How she wished she could give surveys! She would love a job like that. But only if she could choose the questions herself. Otherwise she’d be stuck asking about race and age – two things widely rumored to not even exist. Whereas, Barbara wanted to ask about Armageddon and, lest that seem overwhelming, she also wanted to know if other people missed Patrick Swayze.

She missed Patrick Swayze so much. And not the same way she missed milk delivery and safe streets. Not even the way she missed, say, Katherine Hepburn. She missed him in a tender down-to-earth way, but not immoderately, as if he’d been the Hollywood equivalent of the check-out lady with the bandanna at Safeway, the one who smiled at you in a way that made the day 35 pounds lighter.

She was older than every person in this restaurant. Including the manager who was by no means young. She would be all right with aging except that the years were so incomplete. Nothing was ever properly finished. So much was not even started. Like notebooks with just a few pages scribbled in, and then so much torn out. If life was in any way reasonable, one would be allowed occasionally “time outs” to make changes to, say, the Spring of 1991.

Barbara had fallen behind, in other words, and, if ever there was any doubt, she had her husband and her daughter to tell her so.

She looked sadly around the restaurant. Thai people would eat at places like this from now on. They’d get fat like Americans and their hair would lose its luster. But what could she do? God help her if she tried to interfere with the global distribution of deep fat fried chicken. They’d lock her up for good.

What could she do? She could do nothing. Therefore, she shouldn’t think about it. That was the formula. So many things not to think about! Almost everything that mattered.

Barbara heard a sound like fireworks. And for Barbara fireworks were never all right, as if she were being reminded of another life, full of bombs. National holidays were awful for her – she also distrusted flags. “You’re like some kind of refugee,” her daughter told her once, and it was true, but – from where?

Barbara put her hands on both sides of the table. She frowned at herself. She was thinking the thoughts she was not supposed to be thinking. The table had gotten so big.

First there was only one siren. And it was a long way off. But then there was another and the first siren was closer.

What could she do? She could do nothing! Therefore, she shouldn’t think. Tomorrow they’d go to the beach. She could have as much quiet as she liked. All she had to do in the meantime was sit at this restaurant and not think and -- ? Love herself. She couldn’t do anything for the chickens or the atmosphere or the Thai people getting fat but she could love herself and think less.

I am special and wonderful! I am my own best friend and cheerleader.

There was another siren, or it was the same one, only closer now. The timer went off in the kitchen. Someone’s phone rang.

Barbara shouldn’t listen. Barbara shouldn’t think. If only she could learn to think, not hear, not feel, not speak – how much better it would be, how much healthier! So much easier for everyone!

Another phone rang. More sirens. Someone stepped outside to take a call and looked concerned. Was that the sound of police cars or ambulances?

I have many qualities, traits and talents that make me unique. I give myself permission to shine!

More sirens. Ambulances or police cars. Maybe fire trucks. Why did the music have to be so loud? Why couldn’t people stop talking on their phones? More fireworks. Or maybe they weren’t fireworks at all.

What if the war had started? Maybe the king was dead.

How about a survey? How fun it would be to give surveys if she could ask all the questions herself! She had a question wanted to ask everyone in this restaurant and also everyone all over the world: how often do you find yourself singing “Islands in the Stream”?

How do you do it exactly? Do you sing Dolly? Do you sing Kenny? Do you try somehow to belt out both parts at once?

Barbara found herself singing “Islands in the Stream” all the time. She couldn’t help herself.

That is what we are!

How can we be wrong?

Sail away with me!!

Having met by chance in the street, Barbara’s husband and daughter returned together to the restaurant together to find Barbara sobbing hysterically, her head on the small orange table.

Both of them felt absolutely terrible. It was just as they suspected. Even small, simple things were too much for Barbara.

Barbara’s daughter put her arms around her mother. Barbara’s husband didn’t know what to do. He was feeling so terribly guilty. He’d even bought a small gift for his wife: a styrofoam container of mango sticky rice.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Isaac Babel

2011-06-10T23:56:00.010+09:00

Isaac Babel Red Cavalry and Other Stories Translated with an introduction by David McDuff Edited with notes by Efraim Sicher Penguin Classics, 2005

I was surprised by how difficult I found this book, especially the famed Red Cavalry series. I’d read plenty of Russian literature and lots of modernism; I cockily assumed this book wouldn’t pose any difficulty.

Instead I found that, after the series of “Autobiographical Stories”, this was a book that consistently required (and rewarded) two cups of strong coffee and my full attention. Perhaps it was the density of language and detail -- or maybe I am just unaccustomed to battle stories, where the quality of one's horse may turn out to matter more than anything else.

I thought it might be helpful to offer a little advice to others like myself – earnest types of middling intelligence – who wish to make a serious attempt to read Babel.

I suggest buying both of the popular translations. Passages that seem opaque in one, may be perfectly understandable in the other.Peter Constantine’s translation is sometimes more readable and the imprimatur of Nathalie Babel cannot be ignored. However, when I got really bogged down, I appreciated David McDuff’s selection. His introduction to the stories was particularly helpful. (Unlike the notes, which were divided into two sections and drove me nuts.)

Whenever I thought the Constantine translation was better, there’d be a paragraph from McDuff that couldn’t be improved upon. (I have no clue as to the accuracy of the translations. I only mean that I found some passages so beautiful and funny I did not care if they were correct or not!)

“I felt sorry about that stallion. He was a little Bolshevik. Red as a copper coin, a tail like a bullet, legs like strings. I’d planned to take him to Lenin alive, but it didn’t work out. I liquidated that little horse. It tumbled down like a bride. . .”(157)

Or, my favorite, “God has given us, his lickspittles, the slip. Our destiny is a turkey, our life is a copeck, stop using those words and hear, if you will, a letter from Lenin”(148).

I was impressed by how much a three page story could contain. A downright exhausting amount, it turns out. The Red Cavalry stories are like a group of lurid paintings from which it is impossible to look away.

Unlike the Red Cavalry series, which I found difficult, most of the autobiographical and Odessa stories are told in the deceptively cozy style of the village storyteller and are immediately accessible -- and sometimes unforgettable. When I got frustrated, I’d reread “The King” an elegant and funny story as perfectly constructed as a mousetrap.

It took me three tries and several dozen hours to finally finish all these stories but I was glad that I persisted -- and grateful for the help I had along the way.

Artist's Statement

2011-06-08T11:18:00.002+09:00

White walls. A single elegant object, thoughtfully chosen, arranged, and in the light just so – to be accompanied by something classical, by cappuccino with meaningful foam, by the most exquisite frosted biscuit.

Fine if that’s your thing.

Oh to be generous as a dive bar! Lit by strings of colored lights, some of which blink. Pin up girls beneath portraits of the King and Queen garlanded with exhausted marigolds with plastic irises.

Green walls with pink stripes. Pillars to match. An altar to the Buddha with a red electric candle. Large tropical fruit decals! Bar girls in halter tops and heavy makeup, their beauty undisguised though stranded here.

With everything: beer and cheesy music! Crescendos, Singha, and sing-along’s. With death always nearby, waiting to be shrugged at.

These goldfish clearly did not receive the memorandum that they were only to grow to fit the size of the tank. No larger.

About the Author

2011-06-08T11:13:00.003+09:00

Dedication and toil in a person without talent is a thing entirely pathetic. Another humpbacked basketball star. Still more wheelchair rugby. Casanova with a gumdrop in his trousers.

The shopkeeper’s son isn’t quite retarded – though it’s clear he’ll never live away from home. He tells everyone he’s going to be a doctor.

“A doctor is a fine profession!” coo the customers. His mother (what a fine long-suffering woman!) has even given him a toy stethoscope.

He sits beside the door with it and greets everyone who enters. “Hello, doctor!” say the customers. They are pleased his mother has found a place for him. It’s not as if he can count change.

Breakfast at the Mali Restaurant

2011-06-05T12:51:00.008+09:00

(Bangkok, 2009)

from the series What I Found When I Was Lost

When I was 24 I threw myself in front of a train. Naturally, my timing and my aim were off. Sissy boy. Couldn’t hit a baseball, couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t hit a Light Rail train -- not even with myself.

The Light Rail was new in Denver -- and turned out to have excellent brakes. The conductor stopped the train and cussed me out. “What is it you are trying to do?” Frankly, it was more embarrassing than anything else. I stumbled back to my friend’s house and didn’t tell anyone. My clothes were soaked. I said I’d fallen in the snow. As suicides go, it wasn’t much, but, hey, it was an attempt.

The next day I decided that, since I was going to kill myself, I might as well go back to India first. I’d been going to India since I was 18, prostrating to swamis and lamas, reading novels, getting dysentery, and cruising the bamboo at Cubbon Park. I stumbled off to India and got hooked back into life. Whatever works, right?

More than a dozen years passed, several different lives and countries, but, despite setting records for sustained neuroses, I never seriously considered killing myself again – until about two weeks ago.

I live in Tokyo now, where the trains are very fast and doubtless would have done the trick, but thankfully I was trying to be modern, also painless, and so I googled ‘Ativan lethal dose’.

Do you know what you get when you do that? You get 15,000 online dealers trying to sell you Ativan. Which pretty much extinguishes any warm and fuzzy Ronald Reagan-type feelings I have toward capitalism.

On the plus side, there were so many budding capitalists that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.

When I am lost to myself, when the demons have spirited me away, I sit in the corner drinking beer and scrawling notes to myself on scraps of paper. Two weeks ago, the morning after a hopeless night, while tidying up the cans and papers, I found a little note that read: I’m not going to kill myself because I want to eat breakfast again at the Mali Restaurant.

“Dude.” I said to myself. “Nice idea.”

I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok and here I am, eating rice porridge with pork, suspended in a humid cloud of fish sauce, green onions and monoxide, sitting outside at the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok.

Now that my insanity has been firmly established, I would like to tell you my mystic theory of restaurants. I believe in soul mates basically. Not for romance, but for dining out.

(It’s better if you pronounce this next part in your best Osho-faux guru accent.)

Each soul receives, at conception, the name of a restaurant and that restaurant is the soul’s destiny, where the soul and the stomach are perfectly satisfied.

For some souls it might be a sushi bar, for others a hot dog stand on a sunny corner. Some tragic souls never seek out their restaurant -- they keep going back to Panda Express at the Food Court.

I’ll leave it to Hollywood to work out all the dramatic implications.

Anyway, the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok is the restaurant of my soul -- for me, it is the best restaurant in the world. The food is excellent, of course, Thai and Western both, and all reasonably priced. Inside it’s dark and cozy with cushions and photos and bric-a-brac. Outside there’s an intricate wooden verandah that’s glorious if you don’t mind the street noise. The management and the waitstaff greet you tenderly, as if your mother had called ahead and asked that they be especially sweet to you.

However I suspect that the Mali Restaurant’s principal attraction for me is its strange and occult power, a bit of benevolent witchcraft. At the Mali Restaurant it is impossible to feel afraid or hopeless.

I have fled to the Mali in the thick of a panic attack, or after a day at the baths when I could have torn out my eyes from self-loathing. Demons can’t get inside the door. Mine can’t anyway. I can’t explain it otherwise.

Naturally I have my theories about this.

The Mali Restaurant is run by two men, a couple, one American and one Thai. Of course they are ordinary men, with complaints, with aches and pains. They are ordinary and at the same time I think it can also be said that they are beautiful experiments in human goodness. Experiments such as these – experiments in the cultivation of the good heart -- may have unforeseen peripheral effects.

The American was a soldier in Vietnam and, from what I’ve overheard, is some nights haunted still. I heard him say once that he keeps his room heavily fragrant “like a French whorehouse” so that he won’t smell corpses. It may be that, in creating a refuge from his own fear and suffering, he has created a safe haven that others may share as well.

The other man, the Thai, has a compulsion for preserving life. At the market he will buy frogs and even goats to save them from slaughter. Eavesdropping as I ladle up rice soup with pork, I note that he does not speak like someone who woke up and decided to be virtuous, but rather like a man who cannot help himself. He cares especially for dogs. He saves dogs the way other men drink.

The leftovers from the Mali -- the unfinished lunches of embassy staff, the leavings of sex tourists who overestimated their appetites -- all go to stray dogs. But his care extends much further than this.

Driving one night three years ago, he saw ahead of him a truck full of dogs. A not uncommon sight. He knew these dogs had been captured and were being taken up North where they would be slaughtered and served in a restaurant.

Upsetting, isn’t it? I would feel outraged if I saw such a thing. And I could be relied upon to not do a damn thing.

He forced the truck off the road, marched up to the driver’s window, and announced that he was an undercover policeman. He is not a tall man and certainly not a musclehead. He only has a big voice and episodes of total fearlessness.

After threatening to arrest the three men in the truck, he told them he’d let them go -- just this once -- as soon as they moved all the dogs from their truck to his.

A happy hijacking, in other words. Robin Hood for dogs.

He brought the dogs all home. Dozens and dozens of dogs. (“I was used to this sort of thing,” said his American husband. “But not more than three goats at a time.”) Luckily the owners of the Mali have land of their own. They now operate a dog shelter and work to stop dog trafficking.

Courage on such a scale is bound to have effects. Don’t you think? Unintended, peripheral effects. Medicines have side effects – and so do kindnesses.

By which I mean to say that I am just another of the dogs.

Another stray, or house pet that got lost. A lucky dog rescued at random on the way to its destruction, who winds up instead eating breakfast at the Mali Restaurant.

The Artist's Husband

2011-05-29T12:49:00.002+09:00

His wife likes to make collages out of trash. Specifically the trash she finds along the street. She doesn't understand that every art undergraduate student has already done this and most of them better than her. He suspects she really thinks she’s innovative.

He has given her an entire room for her “art”. He figures that if she’s not going to have even one baby, she needs something to keep her busy. And the price is right. What does he pay for? Glue.

Of course it’s embarrassing to have a wife who’s often seen staring down as she walks beside the highway. But other wives – they max out credit cards and have affairs. His house is clean and dinner is on the table. He can admire bottle caps if he has to.

Only rarely does he worry. “You’re not going to start picking up cigarette butts, are you?”

She isn’t like the other artistic wives he knows. She doesn’t meet with friends to drink expensive coffees and discuss The Artist’s Way. She is legitimately fond of trash. She’s one of those women with nothing better to do than recycle perfectly. Not a milk carton gets past her, not a tiny plastic cup of creamer.

It’s too bad she can’t have a baby. All his girlfriends had the same problem. Women nowadays have become unnatural. She’s not even upset about it. At dinner she shows him the rusted wheel of a stroller and considers what she might to do with it. Hang a mobile?

Recently he offered her his Starbuck’s lids, his Belgian beer bottles, his men’s interest magazines. But she wasn’t interested inhis trash. He reminded her that it would be more convenient. Also much more clean. Finally she said, “But that wouldn’t be Providence, would it?”

Once she made a sort of sculpture out of a cassette tape and chunk of asphalt that included a “snug-fit” Kimono condom. For a moment he panicked. That wasn’t one of his, was it? He always took care to destroy the evidence. Then he reassured himself: seriously, she was just not that aware. . .

Bent nails, bottle caps, broken CDs, a rain warped pornographic magazine. He’s a very kind person. He was brought up in the church. There’s just no nice way to tell a woman she’s become pathetic.

He wonders if he ought to divorce her, marry one of his other girls: someone younger, smarter, more aware. The next one is bound to be fertile. This wife doesn’t seem to care. She isn’t even so concerned with him. She cares about her “treasures”.

Tonight on the table beside his dinner: pieces of a smashed blue bottle, three Styrofoam peanuts, busted sunglasses, an owl feather.

Children's Scissors

2011-05-26T17:34:00.002+09:00

Bangkok, 2011

“I don’t believe in karma but – maybe – because, the day before I lost everything, I stole a pair of scissors. Just a small cheap plastic pair, from Seven-Eleven. I didn’t even mean to, I needed to open my chocolate packet and – you know how it is on Xanax – those scissors just floated out the door with me. . .”

Oskar is begging on the sidewalk outside Saladaeng station when I walk past after the bars close. Twenty-three years old, from Sweden, he says he’s been an addict since forever – but he’s got it under control now. With Tramadol, the key, he says, is not to take it every day. So he takes it every other day.

I give him 20 baht and we reminisce about the hell of benzodiazepine withdrawal. “The doctors, they pass it out to anyone who marches in the door and says they’re anxious.” Oskar laughs. “Yeah well -- nowhere near as anxious as you’re gonna be when you stop taking that little pill!”

Oskar has red brown curly hair and the lines of his forehead are grooves. He leans against the wall with ankles crossed, as if sunning himself in Bangkok’s neon light. He’s not wearing underwear. He has the eyes of a puppy that’s been buried alive. He’s a very friendly person, Oskar.

Oskar’s arm is in a sling. Muy Thai. Says his teacher is the best in Thailand. Says he’s dislocated his shoulder twelve times and every time it’s worse. The pain’s excruciating.

When I ask him how long he’s been in Thailand, he has to stop and think. “A year. And four months. It doesn’t matter about the visa after awhile. The most they fine you at the airport is 20,000 baht.”

Then he tells me about the day he lost everything. First, somebody stole all his money. He doesn’t know how. Maybe he gave it away. Fucking Xanax. He doesn’t care about money anyway. “I’m nonmaterial,” he says.

“But my phone! With all those pictures I want to look at when I am, like, seventy years old!”

“Then I went to a club and the guards -- they wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t have 20 baht. I just sat on the curb and smoked. Then I went to talk to a friend and – somebody stole my cigarettes! The guards just laughed and laughed at me. . . People aren’t usually like that here.”

“Sure, I got family,” Oskar says. “My dad’s a businessman. I gave him advice and saved his business. It wasn’t even such special advice. But he is like the dumbest man on the planet. I made him a logo too, a really cool one. It reads the same way backwards and forwards. I made a website for him. My friend did the programming. He doesn’t use any of it. He is a seriously stupid man.”

“My mom? She’s a nice lady. She worries about me. She didn’t want me to come here. I get in trouble here. But in Sweden I get in trouble too so maybe – this is more easy for her. Sometimes, you know, it is more easy for people if you just disappear.”

We pause then and look around, at the sky and the street and the overpass. It’s 2am outside Saladaeng station. The metal gate has been down for hours. Almost no one is left walking around.

We have disappeared.

Somewhere else, in the world that matters, the people who matter continue their lives. It is nothing if a few of us vanish. Whole continents can vanish -- must vanish, in fact, if these people are to continue unimpeded their secure and respectable lives.

May it be considered an act of generosity, of mercy: the way we use our stolen scissors to cut ourselves from the picture.

Oskar says he’s saving his money real carefully now. (On a good night he makes a couple thousand baht.) “My girlfriend is 41. But her daughter is 23. The same as me. Her daughter -- she follows me with her eyes. It’s only a matter of time. . .

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

Donger

2011-05-24T12:59:00.002+09:00

When Brian got really, like, down on himself, like when his Dad, at his 80th birthday party, called him a no good punk, Brian liked to remind himself that he really did have things to be proud about. Like his day with Kyla Timberlake, when he’d been a porn star, sort of.

He’d fucked Kyla Tiberlake -- whose breasts had been almost certainly the largest on the planet. Kyla Timberlake, a top performer in the industry, who’d been in the news recently for an emergency with her implants. (She was going to be all right. Just smaller.)

He’d fucked Kyla Timberlake and been paid 500 real American bucks, 300 of which he spent that night at the bar – because what’s the point of fucking a porn star if you don’t tell people about it?

The way it happened is this. His pal Greg was one of the cameramen for one of those “reality sites”. You know, one of those things where, if you pay just 24.95 a month, you can waste the better part of your life.

One night at the bar, buzzed with Greg, he said, “38 sites! Euro Bride Tryouts! Slut Seeker! Cougar Recruits! All Wives Cheat! Man, there’s got to be a place for me somewhere.”

Greg took him into the restroom for a moment and, sure enough, Brian got a job as one of the Donger Brothers.

Brian was kind of nervous on the big day, but the set-up was basic. All he had to do was shoot the breeze with Kyla Timberlake until she “noticed” the freakishly huge penis hanging out the leg of his shorts. Then he could fuck her.

Except it wasn’t really his penis.

It was a twenty inch latex dildo. “Lifelike.” If they came in that size. His actual penis rested inside, an infinitely frustrated and disgruntled understudy.

Brian thought he had a nice penis. Hefty, even. No reason to be shy in the locker room. Up until the very last moment Brian hoped the director would see the actual equipment and say, “Hey, buddy, looks like you don’t need any help!”

But nobody so much as nodded at his actual penis, which anyway wasn’t all the way hard, what with all the bright lights and people standing around.

He didn’t even get a porn star name. Not that he cared. He just thought it was automatic. But, when he asked, the boss man first said he didn’t need one, then said, “OK, you can be Brian.” But he was Brian already. He’d been Brian all his life. Anyway, on screen, Kyla called him “Bill”. It didn’t matter.

He’d fucked Kyla Timberlake!

Except that, you’ve got to figure, with a twenty inch dong, which was also hugely thick around, Kyla Timberlake was always nearly a foot and a half away. Factor in the world class enormity of her silicon tits and – it was remarkably difficult to get anywhere near Kyla Timberlake.

He didn’t get close to her until she was long gone and he was at the bar, buying beers and shots for everyone. Then she was really in his arms.

Brian told the story all night long. He declared his undying love for Kyla Timberlake. The guys were all jealous. Even the girls were impressed. He didn’t tell anyone about the twenty inch plastic dong. When he needed to piss he went into a stall.

TOKYO HEART

2011-05-20T12:00:00.003+09:00

(Tokyo, 2010)

At Shinjuku South Exit, in the midst of the crowd, an elderly hunchbacked dwarf in a tweed overcoat and a black beret hurries past. I love that black beret, it says, "All of you may think as you like. I have not abandoned myself. Neither do I despise myself."

Just the same, as I push toward the train, I try to reassure myself: 78% of these people have also been disqualified. That's on a train. On a bus it's maybe 94%. (Many people, in fact, believe they will be disqualified just for riding the bus. In bad weather you can hear them mutter: Look at all this rain! So much for true love and good luck – here comes the bus.)

78% of the train has been disqualified, according to this afternoon's precise guess. And that is not anyone's fault. (Is this true?) That is just how it works.

Each day we are told again: you have lost. You are a person who has lost. Commonly known as a _____ . In compensation, we are going to let you work for us. In compensation, please feel free to purchase something.

Once, in my early twenties, I sat at lunch with an older gay couple who announced, "In most people's eyes we've been dead for years!" They roared with laughter -- and went right on enjoying themselves. I loved those two men very much. Unfortunately they dropped me a year or two back. I am no long sufficiently young, cute and adoring. No more venison pot pie for me. No more Marie Antoinette's favorite wine. No more prosciutto and melon balls. But that is just how it goes...

If this is going to be a story, there needs to be a plot. Let's take a moment now to provide one:

She stayed, though she did not know if she was right to stay. She did not know if it was right or just an utter waste of life. Meanwhile, she got no younger.

A common plot, which will relate to many people. That's what's best for those, such as myself, who intend to address a large and varied audience.

On the train we sit beneath advertising banners. Lines of happy people hang from the ceiling, drink beer and flirt above our empty commuting faces and our oily thinning hair.

It is as if you can actually see, above our heads, our daydreams of leisure time and friends. Our fantasies of non-exhaustion.

Looking up, I see the Tokyo Metro subway company has a new promotion. This one shows three men in uniform with hard hats. They are standing in a cavernous black tunnel beneath a vast concrete arch. One stands between the tracks. Two stand at the side. They are all carrying powerful flashlights. The caption beneath the photo reads: Tokyo Heart.

I did not actually scream. I don't think so. At least -- nobody looked at me. But then nobody would, would they, especially if I screamed.

Who made this sign? Excuse me -- can I get a message to this person?

I want to ask: did you intend to tell this much of the truth?

Should she stay, the woman wondered, or should she go? Was it too late to start over? Once she'd extricated herself from convenience and comfort, would she miss it? Moreover, how was she expected to feel cheerful, knowing that she would become ever so slightly more funny-looking every single day until death?

It's easy to believe that all human beings are significant, lovable and worthwhile. At least until you haul that belief onto the train and attempt to apply it to actual people. This dead-eyed salariman, for example, who cannot possibly have smiled at any point in the last 5 prime ministers. (This is Japan, so that's only, like, 4 years -- but still.) His lips pucker in permanent distaste. The only thing he ever touches gently is the screen on his phone.

The thing to do is to imagine him in the presence of the one thing that makes his face light up. Often this means the nieces. For those without nieces, there may be a little dog. Copper-alloy non-stick pans? You must imagine him in the presence of the one thing that makes him light up, even if it only Asahi Super Dry.

She wondered aloud to herself: where is the one thing that makes my face light up?

One of those things no one is supposed to know: how many people fall in love on buses. Pressed together as the rattletrap swerves. This kind of information is anti-capitalist anti-progress propaganda. Thus, we squirrel it away here. (Inspector: this is just another story about a woman who stayed much too long.)

Black beret black beret black beret.

A story ought to provide something lacking in the reader's daily life. Most commonly, a happy ending.

The woman decided not to worry anymore about whether or not she had wasted her entire life. She moved to Laos.

2011-05-16T20:30:00.006+09:00

Here it must be said that so long as one considered the universe as the complete expression of total fullness, it could inspire nothing but banality and rhetoric, but if one thought of it as something made from very little, a poor thing scratched together on the edge of nothingness, it excited sympathy and encouragement, or at least a benevolent curiosity as to whatever might come of it.

-- Italo Calvino, "Nothing and Not Much", The Complete Cosmicomics

Red Blanket

2011-05-16T18:03:00.003+09:00

(India, 2011)

Yes, God speaks to me.

Only very infrequently. Every other year or so.

God speaks to many politicians more often than that. It does not mean they are insane.

In any case, it does not keep them from being re-elected.

Why does God talk so much to politicians? Shouldn’t God be spending time elsewhere? How about encouraging teachers and nurses?

It is possible God is a politician. Perhaps God is an elected representative and we have all been hoodwinked into overlooking the fact.

We might vote.

God can hardly be blamed for being pompous. God likes the elevated tone.

Most of the things God says to me are appropriately grand.

About twenty years ago, God told me: You are here to be a witness. You must learn to write and to pray.

Almost ten years ago, God said: Choose the right rebellions.

(It’s not necessary for God to speak to me very often. Since I never finish what God tells me to do.)

The last time God spoke to me, the words were very ordinary.

God said: You will be wrapped in a red blanket.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? Like I’m going to be the victim of a traffic accident.

Or, more ominously, a monastic order.

I didn’t understand at all, but I kept my eyes peeled for that red blanket.

It’s conspicuous how uninterested God is in practical matters. Evidently six days of that was enough.

God never gives me suggestions about how to pay off my student loans. God doesn’t tell me to get a job. God doesn’t even show up occasionally to shout, “For godsakes keep it in your pants!”

It is possible that God is a bad influence.

One afternoon a man arrived and wrapped me in a blanket. “I want to give you something,” he said.

Except it was a brown blanket. No red in it at all. Very definitely brown.

I felt disappointed, but also somewhat relieved.

If it had been a red blanket, I would have felt compelled to marry him. I would have had to move to Chile. Which is an expensive country. And learn Spanish.

Chile is a long way away. I am frightened enough trying to speak my own language.

Also I am already married.

On the other hand, I was tempted to put some red dye in a bucket and shove that blanket in.

Isn’t that what it means to be the master of your own destiny?

The Chilean was an extraordinarily good kisser.

It’s true that he was somewhat scrawny. No flesh on him at all except for his lips, his cock and his ass.

What more does a person need!

The blanket was just a plain brown blanket but it was a hundred percent pure wool.

It was beautiful, the way he wrapped it around me. Like I was someone in particular.

Most men – you know how it is. They get off with whatever is there to get off with. Vaseline, suntan oil, spit. Yours truly.

Not so the Chilean. It was somewhat unnerving, the way we had sex.

I was visible the whole time.

Actually there was something quite odd about the Chilean.

Of course these men are nearly all odd. That’s why they’re my lovers.

I mean something really peculiar.

Shocking, even.

The Chilean said, I love you. He kept on saying it. He looked me right in the eye when he said it. I love you.

He was a trick. I was a trick.

I love you. He wouldn’t take it back or modify it.

He glared at me. He held my face in his hands and he forced me take it. I love you.

He taunted me with it. I love you.

I love you.

But I was looking for a red blanket.

ALL HE COULD: 8 Micro Essays

2011-05-14T01:36:00.004+09:00

Fishing

I’ve never driven a car, slept with a woman, fired a gun. I’ve never gambled. I dislike violent sports. In eighth grade I faked an interest in Marlboros and girls, hoping to get into Danny’s pants. That’s it.

In spite of these disqualifications, I discover that, just like every other thirty-eight year old man, I want to drink beer at the lake with the guys and go fishing.

I hardly know any lakes, guys or fish.

What’s this fish fantasy doing here? Or is it just part of the male equipment?

OK, so there are homo undertones. Like, I can see right up the shorts of the guy rowing the canoe. Skinnydipping abounds.

Also, in my fantasy, despite all the bluster about having world-class rods and tackle, and despite all the beer cans rolling around the bottom of the boat, no actual fish are harmed.

6 Dalai Lamas

The 3^rd Dalai Lama was an innovator, the 4^th was born in Mongolia, the 5^th was great, the 13^th embraced modernity, the 14^th is what hope we have left.

There were, however, six or seven lifetimes in the middle that didn’t add up to much of anything. The 6^th liked to sleep around, the 7^th was controversial, 8 through 12 didn’t live very long and, even if one did live for awhile, he was completely useless.

Somehow it makes me feel better to know the lives of the Dalai Lamas are not so unlike my days. A clear-sighted one may be followed by three of uselessness. Some are obviously false, others hardly get started. Five repetitions of upright behavior are bound to provoke an orgy.

On the other hand, after stumbling for centuries, a light may suddenly appear. Is it possible the stunted misspent days and lives fulfill some odd purpose of their own?

Even the Dalai Lama is not sure. The Great 14^th admits he cannot make sense of the six or seven lifetimes in the middle. “I never dream of them,” he says.

Heather.

If only another Buddha was available, like the buddhas of the past, to illumine the strange events which led to the strange shapes of the present.

For example, what karma gave rise to this: a beautiful and devious woman with one foot winds up briefly married to a former Beatle?

Gay Fashion.

2008 was the year it was fashionable to get slapped in the head. Fashionable in Amsterdam anyway – likely it was a year earlier in Paris and later in the provinces.

In 2008 I thought it was just deplorable, while happily sucking cock, to be all the time slapped in the head. It was a sign of something, entirely bad, about how gay men treated each other, rendering straight people’s homophobia completely superfluous, since we were so good at destroying each other and ourselves.

Now 2011 has come around and I discover that I’ve gotten all nostalgic for being slapped in the head. Nobody slaps me in the head anymore! Am I doing something wrong? Don’t they care? Do they think I’m made of porcelain or something?

Now the fashion is to spit into each other’s mouths. (Or maybe that was last year?) And, of course, double anal.

Double anal! The sheer sound of it: surely someone somewhere has already introduced a cocktail called Double Anal.

In a few years will I be all dewy-eyed and nostalgic for double anal? I can’t imagine.

Oh, why can’t they bring back getting slapped in the head?

List.

“Sex is not on top of my list,” he says.

Well. It wouldn’t be on top of my list either, if only somebody would help me to dislodge it.

Premise.

It’s like the premise of a sci-fi story, except it’s our actual planet. Such a peculiar idea, as a writer might come across when he’d already exhausted time travel and telepathy and talking heads in jars.

Not a bad idea for a story really, though it may seem unlikely and even a bit bizarre: this world where everything changes when you accept it.

All He Could.

If only she had a thousand bodies, she wished, so that she could appear wherever he was, douse herself with gasoline and set herself ablaze each time he told an acquaintance, “I did everything I could.”

Story.

Multiple miniscule escape vehicles. Bomb shelter. Back staircase. Backpack propeller. Didn’t work for those other people.

Failure is no obstacle for us. Secret passage. Secret chamber. Secret hideout from the Indians. Secret hideout for the Indians.

Into the escape pod. Up the last tree to the very top.

Then what?

There is another tree, from Heaven, growing toward us. From the very top of the first tree, we can just barely reach it. . .

Proceeding then gingerly upwards we may at last reach the sturdy trunk of the tree, the roots of which lie buried deep in Heaven.

Let no one infer from this that Heaven is upside down. Of course not. Heaven is right side up. We are upside down. Thus that infernal ringing, forever in your ears.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Jeanette Winterson

2011-05-13T01:46:00.000+09:00

Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places

Random House, 1998

The best sentence in this book is: “It is right to kneel and the view is good.”

This is followed very closely by: “In my head I had a white rabbit called Ezra who bit people who ignored me.”

I read this book when it first came out, then reread it a dozen years later. How lovely it is! Sometimes I am unconvinced by what actually happens in the stories – several dart too quickly to romance for my taste – but then I should admit I don’t care very much what happens.

It’s the way Winterson uses the form of the story to look around at the world that enchants me. Most of all, I love this book for the strength and surprise of its sentences, many of which are suitable for engraving on stone.

I suspect that, if you fed this book into a computer, the ‘readability statistics’ would claim that it was written on a third grade level. The sentences are short and direct and apparently straightforward. The “simple” sentences make the complex ideas and images contained within them even more startling and effective. I shouldn’t pretend I know how this is done – she is a magician.

Every story collection buries the weaker numbers in the second half. It’s universal. This is the only collection I have ever read where I liked the later stories -- “Green Man”, “Newton”, “A Green Square” – even better than those that came before. What a lovely surprise!

How satisfying it is to move from one sturdy sentence to the next and be so often surprised. It is like being carried in a wheelbarrow to look around at wonders: “I stared at them, standing side by side, in an aquarium of content. Whatever they had, I didn’t have it, and it wasn’t cod.”

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Life of a Good-for-Nothing

2011-05-13T01:41:00.001+09:00

Joseph Von Eichendorff, Life of a Good-for-Nothing

Translated by F.G. Nichols

Hesperus, 2002

This is the kind of book where, when the hero gets bored and impatient, he climbs a tree.

Maybe you can resist books like that. I can’t.

No one ever falls asleep in this book without being transported to a new location or surrounded by flowers. A man lost in the forest comes upon a trio of woodwinds. That’s just how it works. It’s all an exercise in divine providence – everyone the hero meets is going precisely where he needs to go.

Life of a Good-for-Nothing was written in 1826 by Eichendorff, a lyric poet and novelist. It is said to be a perfect example of German Romanticism. Of course, you shouldn’t read it for that reason. Read it because it is an extraordinarily good time. In just a hundred pages there are so many adventures and rewards – there is even an argument with a parrot!

A sentence from the first page gives the feeling of the whole: “I was secretly delighted when to right and left I saw all my old friends and acquaintances going out to work, to dig and plough, as they had done the day before and the day before that and the day before that, while I was free to wander off into the world. In my pride and happiness I called out ‘Farewell!’ to all the wretched people around, but nobody took much notice.”

The translation reads beautifully and is studded with delights:

“The gardener scolded me for my laziness, and I was discontented, and the tip of my nose seemed to get in the way when I looked out upon God’s wide world.”(10)

More on noses:“I consider your delicately pointed nose, and regard you as a genius on vacation.” (77)

Despair, in this book, is extreme. And lasts approximately twenty-five seconds. “I firmly resolved to turn my back for ever on the treacherous land of Italy, with its crazy painters, its oranges and its chambermaids.” (82)

And, my favorite: “Tollkeeper, we haven’t much time, so please be so good as to get all your astonishment done with as quickly as possible.” (100)

I’d never heard of this book when I found it in a bookshop in the Himalayan foothills and it fairly flew off the shelf to me. Good fortune! What a gem it is, and a balm. One last suggestion: I think anyone who loved this book must hurry to read Gyula Krudy’s Sunflower.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Drukpa Kunley

2011-04-30T15:51:00.002+09:00

The Divine Madman: The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley
Translated by Keith Dowman

Like most saints, Drukpa Kunley heals the sick, comforts the aged, casts out demons, directs the confused, and chastises the wrongheaded. Unlike most saints, Drukpa Kunley does all of these things with his penis, his Thunderbolt with a capital ‘T’.

The book is a collection of anecdotes divided into eight chapters and was originally written in the Sixties by a Bhutanese monk named Geshe Chaphu. (Oddly, the author information is buried on page 31 with no indication that this was the author’s wish.)

Although I am generally an avid devourer of supplemental information, the introduction by Keith Dowman is the most peculiarly condescending that I have ever read. He is convinced that the reader, far less spiritual than himself, could never possibly understand the book. Because the book talks about “the lama’s thick penis” we are sure to read it as if it were Penthouse Letters.

Since life is short and uncertain, go ahead and skip all the introductory material. At least save it for last.

Drukpa Kunley was a 15th and 16th century exemplar of “crazy wisdom” – the use of outrageous behavior to awaken people to spiritual truth. In the mid-Nineties, when I was a student at America’s only Buddhist college, the phrase “crazy wisdom” was used a lot – generally, it seemed to me, to excuse the addicted and abusive behavior of authority figures.

As well as being great fun, this biography is invaluable for the view it gives of a true crazy wisdom figure. Perhaps it will even help people to discern if their current guru is really a great master or just a garden-variety jerk with a spiritual set of excuses.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Robert Walser

2011-04-30T15:43:00.003+09:00

Robert Walser, The Assistant
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
Penguin, 2007

“Wherever there are children there will be injustice,” writes Robert Walser, who was himself one of eight. For me, the most powerful part of The Assistant is the way Walser delineates the status of the four children in the house where the protagonist, Joseph Marti, has gone to work as the assistant to a doomed inventor.

Boys are always ranked higher than girls. Silvi, the less charming and pretty of the daughters, is tyrannized and reprimanded in a way that makes her even more peevish. Marti attempts to intervene, and accomplishes nothing, and the reader seethes along with him – at least until the next scene floats along, in the peculiar and addictive day-dreaming style of Robert Walser.

Like much of Walser’s writing, The Assistant spends a lot of time contemplating the varieties of failure. Failure is shown to be ordinary and grinding, but it can also be seen – at least while it is still underway and not yet complete – as a peculiar kind of luck.

Joseph Marti is offended when he is told he has been “a little neglected by life” – and yet much of the beauty he so abundantly perceives seems inseparable from his status as a person overlooked and left out. What important person would ever have the time or impetus to wander as Marti does, both in nature and in the mind?

When Marti’s pretentious boss, a masterpiece of bluster, has fallen apart, his unimportant and unattached assistant is free and unharmed, no worse off than he had been before, with “genuine faith in my little bit of strength.”

In my opinion, readers new to Walser should start with one of the volumes of short fiction, followed by Walser’s first novel, The Tanners, but The Assistant, too, is well worth reading, full of the pleasure in so many small, real, passing things. It is a good and quiet book, which follows the parting advice of the lady of the house: “Always be a little humble, but not too much.”

VOCATIONS: 9 Micro Essays

2011-04-19T12:31:00.003+09:00

Envy.

Why is it so seldom acknowledged that one is disliked more for one’s good fortune than one’s bad behavior?

It is easier to be forgiven for a bitter quarrel than for a tour of Europe. It is more charming to vomit on someone than to tell them you have received a scholarship.

If I really wanted my acquaintances to be happy, I’d buy them all a round of drinks. I’d call my husband a motherfucker and he’d call me a gimp-legged slut.

How I Think.

Some people think in pictures. Others, I am astonished to learn, have feelings in their body. I think in words: my thoughts arrive typed, and punctuated. Of course, my thoughts may not make any sense -- but they are, virtually always, extensively punctuated. My life, therefore, is like drowning in fortune cookie fortunes, handcuffed to one of those wingnuts who absolutely believe what their cookie is saying to them. (I also think extensively using italics.)

Not even.

Save your life in secret, taking care to be so surreptitious that even you yourself don’t notice. Schemes for one’s own revival must be conducted as cunningly as the pursuit of addiction -- until you find yourself in an entirely different part of town, one where you’re not at all sure you belong.

Plant small unpredictable acts in the day like exploding seeds. Don’t tell anyone where you are going. Not even yourself.

Beggars

I specialize. To those who are like me, I give. Because my leg is crippled, I give to those with crippled legs, to the amputees and to the maimed, to the men who crawl like crabs across the street.

According to this logic, I should also give money to anyone who is spectacularly neurotic.

But that would be very expensive.

Safe-to-Death.

People plan their lives like they are multiply handicapped octogenarians and everything must be just safe-to-death. And the interesting thing is how they strap this all to morality, like the very worst sin in the Bible is to live in your brother’s spare bedroom.

Therefore, she must work forever at the job she hates, take no vacations and no risks. She must always be available to her family. (Who could not care less.) Should they think of her, they should be able to find her, double-locked within her carpetted paid-for home, all her medical exams up to date, her skin and mind untouched, available and unchanged, already more or less embalmed.

One Hand.

I just remembered that in India the left hand is the one designated, not only for ass-wiping, but also for “sexual caresses”. And I would like to know: does anyone actually abide by that?

Like, are there pious young Brahmins just incredibly adept at beating off with their left hand?

Are there wives who shout, “I don’t give a damn what the rulebook says! Either you use both hands or you’re gonna have to make your own tea and curry, buddy!”

Possibility.

One of those things that almost never occurs to me:

the chance that I might possibly be doing it right.

Daddy.

Not at all uncommon. Somewhere around hour four, after fucking and sucking, after slaps and spanks and spitting, after hours of porno dialogue, this word: daddy.

Then he wants to be held, for fingers through his hair, for delicate kisses and to be told, over and again, that he is loved. Until he begins to whimper and then, uncontrollably, to sob.

Prior to this I was unaware perversity could achieve such profound and beautiful purposes.

Vocations.

No one seriously questions his right to drink himself to death. In fact, it is considered extremely rude even to mention the fact. We must accept it as his vocation: an intensely focused self-directed practice of anesthesiology.

Therefore, I too have rights to exercise. A vocation. Though it seems clear the world would receive more benefit if I were doing dishes or working coatcheck.

I cannot fill a page with the same elegance with which he empties a tumbler full of gin. Nonetheless. If he may drink, then I may write.

Notecards are my vestments. This is my job.

When I am dead – what could be simpler? Light a fire. First, the body. Then, the cards.

Eternal Marriage

2011-04-15T12:40:00.000+09:00

Her husband died and she buried him; he was reborn and she cleaned his diapers, raised and remarried him, and, although she’d taken care to teach him better table manners this time around, and she admitted there were advantages to having a man thirty years her junior, she found that, overall, he was every bit as irritating as he had been for centuries.

How long had they been married now? 9000 years, approximately? (Not that she ever got an anniversary present.) There’d been a lovey-dovey period presumably, sometime around the dawn of Mesopotamia – her memory got fuzzy that far back – but that was ancient history now and so she was determined, one way or another, to be done with him for good.

She stood in her dressing room arranging the curls of her bottle-red hair. A tricky business: to have a drastically younger husband and not appear grotesque. Still, she had to admit that she did very well. After all, she still had her figure and he was already losing his hair.

Long-term relationships are always complicated, she thought and she sighed as she painted her lips. (She was one of those ladies who recognize no upper age limit for fire engine flaming red.) It wasn’t as if she could simply kill him and feel refreshed.

She’d killed him a number of times already. She’d poisoned him most often, but she’d also shot him point-blank. Intrigued by new technologies, she made use of them whenever possible: her husband had the distinction of being one of the very first men to be run over by a car. She killed him whenever she could – it hardly seemed to discourage him.

For his part, he rarely killed her outright. He much preferred to grind her down to nothing over a period of eighty or a hundred years.

Nine thousand years of marriage. Nearly since the dawn of agriculture. And could he be depended upon to make his own lunch or brush his teeth twice a day? Of course not! She still had to listen to him bite his spoon as he ate his soup and he NEVER did what he said he was going to do, even if she let fifteen hundred years pass without a comment. “I’ll have a scribe prepare the papyrus – I mean, I’ll send an email! Gawd! Why are you always such a nag?”

And penises! In nearly ten thousand years he had not yet gotten over his pride and astonishment at possessing one. (Why was he always a man? Why was she always a woman? Why couldn’t they be lesbians now and then? Why couldn’t she have a dick for a change? These things were mysterious.) Penises! If he had a small one – well, that was unfortunate. Mostly because she had to endlessly reassure him about it. And if he had a big one – well, she had be continuously impressed and carry on like a porno starlet and it was even more difficult than usual to convince he really ought to, you know, seek full-time employment.

Her husband might be tall or short, he might be white or brown or black, but it was always easy to recognize him, because he was continuously whining. Time and again, his complaints outlasted his body. He’d had a sore neck for centuries; he’d been constipated for millennia – but god forbid there was a morning when she couldn’t prepare his breakfast because she was, for example, dying of cancer. He’d stare at her as she lay in bed, feeling put out, feeling sorry for himself, and she’d have to explain all over again that she, too, was mortal.

Since killing him was only a temporary measure, she had no choice but to attempt to actually communicate with him. She was meticulous about means and timing, determined that, this time, she was finally going to get her point across.

In the past she’d tried the letter on the table, the earnest midnight talk, the long car ride with power locks. This time she chose a dinner table confrontation – except that, instead of his dinner, he found only a single candle and his wife of 9000 years in a green velveteen dressing gown with her red hair down. Looking absolutely stunning, in her own opinion.

“Chinese or Italian?” he said, when he saw no dinner on the table.

“What?” she said, caught off guard.

“If we’re ordering out. But no, I can’t have tomato sauce – my stomach has been awful lately. And absolutely nothing with green peppers!”

“I want to be finished,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“I don’t want to be married anymore.”

“You mean – we can see other people?” he said hopefully. He liked to have affairs, even though, time after time, he wound up with the same bendy-twisty dimwit who’d been doing yoga since the narcissists first invented it and was getting more obnoxious with each passing century.

“I mean I want to be finished! I don’t want to be married anymore! I don’t want to see you again until the universe collapses into a single point! If possible, not even then! Next time around, find your own Big Bang!”

For once, her words appeared to have an effect on him. He was 28 years old; he appeared not a day over 4.

He said, “Do you remember when we went to see that counselor? She said you should be more supportive of my self-esteem.”

A moment later he’d forgotten all about it. Of course he had. He was convinced they’d be together forever. Why not? They had a routine. A routine seemed to him an entirely commendable thing. Why should he go to the trouble now of having to meet a new person, fuss over her and act interested, the trouble of having to explain, again, that he was not to be disturbed until after he’d read his paper, cleared his sinuses and applied antifungal cream. That his bathwater must not be too hot because his skin was very, very sensitive!

A bleak hopelessness overcame her. Perhaps she was one of those people doomed to die married, lifetime after lifetime. Doomed to perform the same routines beside a husband who always pretended everything was okey-dokey, except his perennial ill-health, a man with a capacity to ignore or overlook absolutely anything, no matter how dire or grueling it was, or for how long it went on. Recently he’d alluded to “the nice time we had hiking” and she realized with horror that he was talking about the six lifetimes they’d spent as nomads in the Caucuses and not because it was such a good time, but simply because he refused to ask for directions.

Still, she could not help trying. It was her curse, her ailment. (Her health was uniformly excellent.) He suffered from constipation; she suffered from hopefulness. She was the sort of woman who believed in self-improvement. Over the years she had availed herself of every type of education, training and discipline. (Except for yoga.) All of which she had enjoyed, none of which had solved her central problem: marriage.

Now she contented herself with non-credit classes at the local community college. Web design, handwriting analysis, and so on. Then several of her friends wanted her to sign up with them for a class called Remembering Your Past Lives.

She refused outright and would not explain. “That’s a lot of hogwash!” she said. Probably they thought she was an evangelical. Imagine if her friends found out that the husband she complained about was the same husband she’d been married to for 9000 years! Certainly they wouldn’t look at her the same way.

If only it was possible to take a class called Forgetting Your Past Lives. She’d start by forgetting her past lives, then do her best to forget the present one. On the other hand, she figured it would be even more pathetic to be one of those amnesiacs who say, “Maybe if I’m patient he’ll change!” and then wait long enough for the Pyramids to fall into ruin.

She tried everything. And failed. And still she could not stop herself from trying. She couldn’t any more stop trying than her husband could get his bowels to function.

Enlightenment – that was an option. Thankfully it no longer required standing on one foot in the hot sun or starving oneself to death time and again. Now the only asceticism required was to prayerfully occupy the same space with hypersensitive egomaniacs who considered themselves extremely spiritual until one recognized, accepted and confessed that one was also, oneself, a hypersensitive egomaniac, after which, along with 84,000 exorbitantly expensive weekend workshops, the seed of neurosis was finally totally completely utterly exhausted.

Better still – he could become enlightened! But that would take much too long. After all, her spiritual development was light-years ahead of his. Of course it was. She was so unselfish.

She had heard theories that if she just totally accepted him and loved him exactly as he was, he would gradually subside and finally just evaporate. She’d tried it several times but always there came a moment, as he sat behind the water buffalo thwacking it with a stick, or on the sofa fiddling with the remote control, when he said, “Well! I’m glad to see you admit I’m right about a few things for a change!” and it pissed her off so bad she gave up the endeavor.

For her next attempt – which she was determined would be the last – she filled the house with flowers. 9000 calla lilies would have been ideal she thought, but, since her shopping allowance was miserly, she made do with just a few lilies and some half-decent mums and a mass of carnations.

This time she wore all shimmering black, which was slimming, and also looked fantastic with her hair, which she wore up in an intricate braid, as she’d seen several empresses do. She looked absolutely stunning. After all, if she was going to break up with a man, it was only fair that he should have the opportunity to feel really terrifically sorry.

The symbolism of the flowers was dual. First, she wished to symbolize her own revival, that of a woman in springtime. She was very nearly young, in her own estimation. Soon she would be dead; youth was the next thing after that.

As for the rest of the symbolism: even a man as dense as her husband was bound to recognize a funeral when he saw one.

Whereas her own sensibility was thoroughly continental, his was deplorably Midwestern and had been since the Midwest was primeval forest. She knew he’d be home at 5:15, for dinner at 5:30, and so she placed herself in front of the bank of flowers – white on black, an unforgettable figure –

adopted a fierce expression and assumed the pose she’d decided upon after many consultations with her mirror: arms down, out slightly from her sides, palms open in the mudra of both generosity and relinquishment, her chin and bosom elevated, a mature and intensely desirable woman, proud and fearsome even amid the grief of loss. Grief, in this case, being very helpfully non-existent.

She heard the knob turn and saw his dull face at the door. She knew exactly what to say.

“My allergies!” he cried.

“The time has come--” she began.

“I bet we don’t even have any antihistamines,” he said and fled up the staircase. She heard him fumbling amid boxes. He was making a total mess of the medicine cabinet, which she’d spent all morning putting in order.

She hadn’t made supper. She assumed he’d be too grief-stricken to eat. Since that wasn’t the case, she microwaved a packet of frozen Beef Stroganoff and poured it over minute rice.

At the dinner table he was sullen and aggrieved. Dumb as he was, he’d figured out that it was entirely deliberate when she made the minute rice without quite enough water. He mixed the slightly hard kernels with the slightly frozen beef and hoped somehow that things would still work out.

“Barry, it’s over between us. Finished, ended, kaput.”

He looked somewhat put out, as if he had handed her a book and she had lost his place in it.

“I accept that, Marjorie.” he said. But then he wanted to know – was this when she ran off with the cattle rustler, the goat herder, the milkman? (Try as she might, every man she ever had an affair with had an intimate connection to livestock.) Was this when she went off to stay with her mother or grandmother, with her daughter or granddaughter?

Then a more cheerful light appeared in his eye. Was this when he screwed

his secretary the yoga instructor?

his babysitter the yoga instructor?

his sister-in-law the yoga instructor?

“I want to break up!” Marjorie shouted. “I want a divorce!” Actually spelling the word, she thought, would be tacky. Also, she’d have to do it at least three times before he got it.

She was so frustrated that she forgot everything she wanted to say and just stood there helpless, dismayed that he still had not gone away.

Because she didn’t say anything, he whispered, “This is when you say I’m a sorry excuse for a man with no backbone and no ambition who never really satisfied you anyway.” He looked slightly downcast but was trying, still, to be helpful. After all, he’d heard these words so many times they had entirely lost their sting; they might as well have been the sweet-nothings of true love.

He added that he only asked that she be gone for no more than ten days and that she leave a few dinners prepared in the freezer, including Shrimp Scampi, if possible.

“NO!” she shouted at him. “I want to break up with you permanently! I never want to see you again!”

He cocked his head to the side. (No, it was not cute and hadn’t been since before the fall of Troy.) “Is there such a thing as ‘permanently’?” he asked.

“Well if there isn’t we are going to have to create one!” she shouted. But now she’d lost track of everything and suspected, furthermore, that her hair and make-up were in serious disarray.

“I love you just the way you are,” he said, and, even after 9000 years, even considering how often they’d been through this before, she wasn’t sure if he really meant it, or if he was just hoping that if he loved and accepted her exactly as she was, she would slowly begin to evaporate and finally just disappear.

Guttersnipe Reviews: Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish

2011-04-07T17:16:00.002+09:00

Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish

Stanley Frye

Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1981

I’ve read several collections of jataka tales (or Buddhist past-life stories) and this one is by far the most exuberant. ‘Zany’ is a better word.

Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish is a translation of a Mongolian scripture, and is very similar to its better-known Tibetan predecessor, The Ocean of Stories.

What a waste it would be to leave this work of scholarship to scholars – this fabulous book is a mine for storytellers, artists and dreamers. Fans of Calvino, Kafka, Rushdie, Borges or Lem will be right at home with these stories, which are often time-jumping shape-shifting mind-bending exercises in sheer exuberance. The stories sprint from life to life, and pile up transformations with a speed that might make Ovid gasp.

From “In Praise of the Blessings of the Monk”:

“Going on, they came to a woman tending a large copper kettle. First she poured water into it, then kindled a fire beneath it. When the water began to boil she removed her clothing and jumped into the kettle. Her hair fell out, her flesh cooked, and as the water boiled harder, her bones were seperated from her flesh and were scattered to the winds. The bones then turned into a man who tried to eat the flesh from the kettle. Standing behind the monk and watching, Majestic Being felt his hair rise in terror. When he asked who the person was who was eating the flesh, the teacher replied: “When the time comes, I shall tell you.”

There’s more than one king sleeping with a lioness and more than one queen laying eggs. The names alone are intoxicating: there’s a monk named Excellent Honey, a king named Mirror-Face and (my personal favorite) Prince Stump, who does quite well until he looks into a mirror and decides he’d rather be dead than so totally unfortunate-looking. . .

Or how about the story “A Householder Without Organs”, in which a son is born without “eyes, ears, nose, tongue, hands, or feet” and the writer goes on to question why the one small part he does possess is so terribly significant!

Published by the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India, this book is well-worth tracking down. The Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish is as fun as scriptures get.

Maybe It's Norbu?

2011-03-23T13:38:00.002+09:00

After dark I returned to my room at the monastery guesthouse. I was pleased with myself because I’d finally remembered to buy milk powder. Moving the curtain aside, I thought I’d put the powder on the windowsill beside the coffee – but found that I could not, because that space was currently occupied by an extremely impressive spider.

The big spindly black spiders I knew already – they were harmless, though it was best not to bother them, because then they started jumping and big spiders splayed out on the walls were infinitely preferable, in my opinion, to big spiders jumping.

This however was not a spider I knew. It was big, brown and stocky – it looked like the sort of spider who took being a spider very seriously indeed.

I’m sure I bowed to it, as I always do when I meet someone for the first time and feel a little bit afraid. I then shuffled, respectfully, backwards out of my room.

The monastery café was closed but the lights were still on in the kitchen. The cook was there getting stoned with three bald middle-aged backpackers who felt they were extremely cool. During the day they were incredibly spiritual. At night they were hipsters.

The four of them looked at me as if I were their ancient mother, whom they resented, and who was now about to chastise them.

“Hi guys!” I said, as goofy as I could, so as not to seem like narc or a granny. “One quick question! Big brown spider, kinda stocky. Not the big black spindly kind. Is it OK?”

The stoned cook and the stoned bald backpackers all looked at me and said, “OK!”

And I realized my level of trust in their ability to classify arachnids was distinctly underwhelming. So, more serious now, I repeated my description directly to the cook, who likewise made his face serious, and cocked his head to the side, and said, “Maybe it’s Norbu?”

So, because I am a longterm student of Tibetan Buddhism, because I’ve been to Dharamsala many times and consider myself, more or less, up with the program, I immediately assumed (as anyone would) that Norbu (which I knew to be a common name) was one of the monks here, who’d been extremely bad, and thus was currently incarnated as a stocky brown spider in Room #5.

I stood there for a moment, trying to decide whether this piece of information resolved my question or not.

Then, one of the bald hipster backpackers, looking at me with withering disdain, because I was so un-cool, unlike himself, said, “Norbu means lucky.”

I laughed and smiled and accepted, finally, that the spider and I were on our own and it was up to us to get along.

I returned to my room and moved the curtain aside very gently. The big brown stocky spider was still there, perched beside the instant coffee.

“Goodnight, Norbu,” I said. Then I moved my chair to the opposite side of the room and said my usual prayers: to benefit all sentient beings or, at least, not to hurt them.

Guttersnipe Reviews: The Story of Tibet

2011-03-21T17:33:00.002+09:00

Thomas Laird

The Story of Tibet

Atlantic Books, 2006

Anyone with an interest in Tibet should read this book -- even if they typically find history books dull or daunting. Not only does it offer a clear overview of Tibetan history – a subject notoriously difficult to untangle – it does two other things that are entirely fascinating.

First, of all the books I’ve read by and about the Dalai Lama, this one gives the clearest view of what he’s actually like as a person. Despite his elevated status, the Dalai Lama is stunningly matter-of-fact. His stories about crashing cars in the Norbulingka or going to meet Mao are unforgettable, as is his willingness to tell the truth about the times in his life he has felt fear or anger or even hopelessness.

When Thomas Laird asks, on page 322, if the Dalai’s Lama’s dettachment means he does not suffer as much, the Dalai Lama gets irritated and snaps, “Dettachment does not mean that I am like a rock.” Indeed, the man found in this book is nothing like a rock and nothing like a god, but he remains extraordinary. Over and over as I read this book, I thought, “My mind is like a matchbox; the Dalai Lama’s mind is like a ballpark.”

The other reason to buy and read this book – in my opinion the number one reason – is the unparalled view it gives of how the sacred may intervene and interact with human history. The Dalai Lama believes “the Tibetan case is unique because there is a connection to a mysterious level of sorts”. That belief is central to his discussions with Thomas Laird, who loves to challenge him, to ask, basically, “How could you possibly believe that?!” Mr. Laird pushes the Dalai Lama; he’s even willing to be a little rude – and the answers he receives may blow your mind!

On page 191, Laird writes, “As he had said to me earlier about conventional and unconventional perceptions of reality, ‘Both are true.’ Or at the very least, both are possible, and it is impossible to pin reality down any further than that..” Conventional historians may scoff at such a statement – or else despair – but Laird beautifully accomodates both views, the Dalai Lama’s sacred vision and his own disbelief, producing in the process a history book like no other.

Guttersnipe Reviews: Flann O'Brien

2011-03-21T17:31:00.001+09:00

Flann O’Brien

The Third Policeman

Plann O’Brien couldn’t publish this book and so he gave up, told his friends the manuscript was lost, and drank. After his death The Third Policeman was finally published – and found to be strange and hilarious. Above all, the book is a work of non-stop madcap invention, with seldom fewer than three perfectly crazy theories to a page. As a visit to a bicycle-obsessed Hell does not provide sufficient scope for O’Brien’s ingenuity, he introduces a mad philosopher, de Selby, who devotes himself to useful activies such as diluting water.

I hope Flann O’Brien devotees will excuse me for saying this book could be introduced as “Alice in Wonderland – in Hell”, a book which tests how far nonsense can go – extraordinarily far, it turns out – to eternity in an elevator.

This is not the first time I’ve wished I had a time machine, so that I could go back in time and say, “Sir, the book you’ve written is brilliant. Please don’t give up. But, please, sir, drink less!” (In Dublin I met a Flann O’Brien scholar at the Writers’ Museum who told me, when I said I wanted to go to all the places associated with the great man, “Aw, you couldn’t possibly! You’d die of alcohol poisoning!”)

Readers new to Flann O’Brien should start with his masterpiece “At Swim, Two Birds”, but this book, too long neglected, should follow immediately after.

Guttersnipe Reviews: Jonathan Swift

2011-03-21T17:29:00.001+09:00

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

It staggers me that a man could see this much of human nature, admit he saw it, write it down, publish it, and be allowed to die of old age. How did he ever get away with it? Our 21^st century satirists seem cowardly in comparison. Who would dare suggest now, as Swift does, that we solve the bickering of Congressmen by sawing their brains apart and swapping halves with brains across the aisle? Attractive idea!

For Swift, fantasy is a scalpel disguised as a diversion. Constructing elaborate fantasies allows him to confront the human truths we hide in plain sight. He seldom allows us to forget that our bodies, like our institutions, are a filthy stinking mess. Would a popular writer of the 21^st century be allowed to be so scatalogical? How many readers today, who proudly consider themselves tolerant and open-minded, would put up with descriptions like that of the dog’s death on page 170?

The introduction and notes, by Robert Demaria Jr, are unusually helpful and graceful. There are often beautiful definitions from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and thus one’s reading is littered with small satisfactions, like discovering that “new fangled” is a very old word.

It’s bizarre that we somehow managed to turn the first part of this book into a charming children’s story. Maybe we just don’t know what else to do with it – just as a tank is parked in a town square so that children can play on it.

Guttersnipe Reviews: Julio Cortazar

2011-03-21T17:26:00.002+09:00

Julio Cortazar

Blow-Up and Other Stories

I read many collections of short stories and I often find that they are like pop albums: a few catchy numbers up front followed by fillers, repeats and instrumental versions. But every one of these stories is entirely interesting, including “The Distances” which I admit I didn’t understand at all, even the second time through.

Many of these stories exist in the territory of terror and awe, but the three I liked best were all occasions of sustained compassion, and each revolved around a death. “At Your Service” is about a paid mourner who ends up grieving for real. “The Gates of Heaven” is about the death of a dancing girl. The novella “The Pursuer”, based on the last days of Charlie Parker, is so convincing that I fell for it hook, line and sinker and believed I was reading an actual memoir, that he must have actually sat in a Paris hotel room with a ranting naked Charlie Parker. This novella is also a meditation on genius, which unfortunately does absolutely nothing to exempt one from ordinary misery.

If you enjoy this, make sure you read ‘Cronopios and Famas’, Cortazar’s playful eccentric book of tiny stories and prose poems – there’s nothing like it.

Automatic Miracle Area

2011-03-18T15:24:00.001+09:00

for Gelek

1. Tap / 1.

I live downstairs behind the green metal door with the painted number 5. I live beside the oasis, the outdoor faucet. At 4:30 the monks come: the young monks scrub their armpits, the old monks hack up phlegm. As the sun rises, the manager brushes his buck teeth, the cook washes his hands. The Nepali man with the tea stand down the hill comes with two big plastic jugs to fill. The foreigners scrub their faces, apply creams. The nakpa’s teenage son arranges his bushy hair. His mother washes the dishes first and laundry when there’s time.

Interspersed with these are the dogs, who lap the puddle underneath, and the cats, who lick drops directly from the tap. When the monkeys see me looking they act entirely offended and bare their teeth.

When there is plenty of water – what harmony! But for the last week there has been barely a trickle and it is a constant hassle. The manager quarrels with the chaiwallah when he comes to fill his jugs. (Turned away, he sneaks back ten minutes later when the manager isn’t looking.) The monks are grubby. The French lady is astonished when ordered not to do her laundry. She points to the sky. “But the sun is perfect!”

2. Bully.

At breakfast the manager asks my help. “The water man does not listen to Tibetans. 500 rupees we pay him. Every day he says the water is coming. Maybe he will listen to an American.” The water man isn’t answering his phone, so we go into town looking for him. He’s not in his usual spot, on the bench by the bus stand and he’s not in his favorite chai shop either. We find him in a back alley, trying to wedge a rock under the wheel of his bike so it won’t roll away.

He won’t look at us. He is an old man almost, a bully caught off his guard. His tilak is so smudged it may be last week’s blessing he hasn’t washed off. Maybe his house doesn’t have water either.

What a pleasure it is to be invited to be a loud and boorish American. How naturally it comes to me! I am the product of a long line of bullies.

In truth I permit myself only just a tincture of my father. I rely mostly on my aggrieved professor voice.

They are trying to run a business, sir! They are losing money! Guests leave because they cannot shower! They paid you the money, now you fix the water!

He only looks at me when I say the word money, as though that were his name.

How easily, how naturally I bully him. Imagine being frightened by me – a gremlin so obviously contrived!

Thirty minutes later he is at the guesthouse fixing the pipes. I do not know whether to feel proud or ashamed. I have to admit it was fun.

A few days later, however, there is no water at all.

3. Uprising Day.

The last time I was in Dharamsala for Uprising Day, I was eighteen years old. The Dalai Lama stood in front of his temple and called for full independence. Now it is a far more dignified and official event -- and the Dalai Lama asks for far less.

The performance of the Tibetan National Band and Color Guard is impeccable, as are their traditional costumes. The bagpipes do not sound a false note. His Holiness sits surrounded by dignitaries: the members of the Tibetan parliament, several U.S. senators, and a goodwill delegation composed of Chinese people residing in a number of countries, not including China.

The members of the Tibetan parliament, in preparation for the day when they must lead the country alone, give long and emphatic speeches. To no effect: it is as if they are transparent. His Holiness holds a transcript of each speech and, as each official speaks, he reads silently along. The audience watches him read.

4. Nothing.

After the official speeches, I stand on the roof of the temple in the brilliant sun, looking at the jagged edges of the Dhauladars. Down below a crowd fills the street, waving flags and crying out for the freedom of Tibet. Headbands, handmade signs and Indian policemen. Here are the young people. Someone is shouting into a megaphone. “Free Tibet” someone screams, but it is nothing like the phrase found so often in the gift shop, it is a horrible piercing shriek, as a mother would wail for her stolen child.

The official request – painted on banners at the entrance of the temple – is for ‘genuine autonomy within China’. This crowd however is perfectly aware: they will be receiving nothing.

5. Exile World.

The TCV School in Gobalpur has created a six page newspaper, Exile World, and they’re passing it out to people as they leave the temple. The lead article is absolutely standard praise for the Dalai Lama – except for the last sentence which comes out of nowhere, like a man with a gun from around a dark corner: “For all the global compassion and sympathy the Dalai Lama has won, his lasting legacy may be one of sad, crestfallen failure.”

6. Insomnia / 1.

Every third or fourth night, I cannot sleep. A wrathful insomnia: as if my bed and body seethed with biting ants. All day I spend walking the kora, taking notes, chatting companionably with backpackers and tea men, closing my eyes with a smile and a prayer.

Only to wake up thirty minutes later saturated with lust or rage or terror. A middle-aged man who has burnt his bridges, living out of a bag in a two dollar room, with more paperbacks than articles of clothing, with little stacks of index cards lined up like soldiers.

7. Notes for Maitreya Buddha / 1.

I am not a Buddha but I will be someday. Probably around the time the Sun is swallowing the Earth. (By which point I also hope to have paid off my student loans.) Even though my buddhahood is not necessarily imminent, I nonetheless have some ideas about what the Buddha would do if he or she showed up today.

DAY ONE: Flowers raining from heaven, celestial musicians, free food, etc. DAY TWO: The Buddha never makes rules arbitrarily but only because a problem has arisen. Two days would be plenty to show the need for a new set of rules to facilitate mindfulness while using electronic devices, cell phones and the Internet.

Since the monks didn’t spend all night texting each other and downloading porn, they are well-rested on DAY THREE during which the Buddha attempts to take a shower and is informed of the water shortage. Also, the power has gone off a few times. He notes the absence of animals, the effects of erosion. Remembers how, back in the day, he sometimes wished for a shawl this time of year – whereas now he needs anti-perspirant.

The Buddha hears the hum of suffering from the Earth. And on DAY FOUR the Buddha sets resolutely to work.

8. Monks to Watch Out For.

Raw and broken after a sleepless night, I sit hopeless by the window until I see Vanessa marching up the hill with an absolutely gorgeous monk she’s picked up somewhere. Before I know it, I’m standing outside and grinning back at them. When I tell the monk how much I love Dharamsala, he makes a pronouncement which lunges at me through the air and covers me all at once and all over, like a luminous web.

The monk pronounces his words loudly and exactly, as if I am a lost and befuddled traveler who must be told things very clearly, who must have it all spelled out for him.

The monk announces:

“This is the God-King Place!
This is the Automatic Miracle Area!”

Against my will, I am lit up. This is one vastly charismatic monk, I think. And also appalling gorgeous. Somebody really ought to put up a sign at the Post Office: Monks To Watch Out For.

9. Display.

While the Dalai Lama speaks, a little girl plays with a diaphanous blue shawl and gives a fashion show to those in the audience who have tired of the talk on selflessness.

10. Renunciation.

As a suicide bomber believes the dynamite strapped to his chest will transport him to heaven, so I believe that everything in my life would be really all right, if I only I were better-looking.

How unnerving, therefore, to feel the muscle melting off me, the end of the official One Thing I Have Got Going For Me. A stay in rural India, away from a gym, involves a voluntary renunciation of sexual currency. A quite terrifying prospect for the variety of fool that I am.

11. Monks to Watch Out For / 2

As I lock my door, Vanessa and her monk walk past. We walk to town together as though by previous arrangement. I am a little jealous of Vanessa. Just as an apple-picker knows in a glance that the fruit is still too green, or else too spotted and misshapen to be worth bothering with, spiritual people nearly always stare right through me.

How pleased I am therefore, when the monk at once begins seriously to address me, to speak about necessity of dharma and the real chance of enlightenment. He stands very close: tenderness blasts from of his eyes. He’s a nonstop talker and several times I nearly step off the edge of the crumbling cliffside road. More dangerous, I catch myself paying more attention to his mouth, adorned with an adorable goatee, than to what he is actually saying. This monk has the full lips of an incorrigible seducer.

He begins to speak about the problem of love affairs between monks and foreign women. It’s natural, of course, for differences to attract each other. The foreign women are sometimes very beautiful. And monks – monks are simply more attractive than other men. It’s a side-effect of spiritual practice, a problem and a fact.

As the monk speaks about clinging to the dharma, I find myself veering from the path – both physically and otherwise. If possible I ought to excuse myself briefly, step aside, and slap myself firmly upside the head.

12. Penalty.

I have forgotten the exact penalty for having sex with a monk. I remember, however, that it involves fire and molten lead and lasts for hundreds of thousands of years.

13. Loneliness Departing.

Exhilarating, yes – but also dangerous. I understand terribly well.

You are both lucky and endangered, when you have been alone in a windowless room for a very long time and suddenly there is a knock at the door and you open it to find a stranger with a smile you think you couldn’t possibly deserve but which begins nonetheless begins at once to warm and cheer you.

A vulnerable place. The mother of true love and a thousand catastrophic bad decisions.

14. Gelek / 1.

Nearly twenty years ago, a monk named Gelek lived in a crumbling meditation house beside the stupa of Trijiang Rinpoche. It was a much more basic place than it is now. A simple stupa crumbling in the rain; very basic huts constructed from mud and a few sheets of plastic or corrugated tin.

The monk Gelek was a particularly bad carpenter, it seemed, because nearly every time I walked past his house he was repairing a wall or section of roof that had collapsed. It wasn’t his fault really. The monsoon was well-underway and his mud house was just that – mud.

Just the same, Gelek always greeted me tenderly and often brought me inside for a cup of tea and a biscuit. Gelek, it seemed to me then, had a special power. As soon as he appeared, I felt myself warm and comfortable – even if we were both standing soaked in the pouring rain.

Drinking tea in his dripping house, my troubles vanished. Not in some vague way, but utterly and at once, as if he had lifted them off me, as though my troubles were suitcases, as though they could simply be taken from me.

Gelek had this effect on nearly everyone and was adored by many people at the nearby retreat center. The foreign nuns especially adored him. They suspected he might be a great saint in disguise.

Gelek was, I realize now, perilously close to being a “pet monk”, a situation I’m sure the Buddha warns about, somewhere in the sutras.

15. Possessiveness.

By the third day of the Dalai Lama’s teaching, I’m pretty sure the security guard and I have each other figured out. Because we always grin at each other and he always checks twice for any weapons I may have, concealed against my skin inside my belt.

Wouldn’t he get a black eye if he patted another guy’s junk so thoroughly and repeatedly?

As for me, I am always careful to stand in his line. As I wait, I suck a mint. I’ve even started to think of him as “my guard”.

16. Eagle Scouts

Sometimes it all seems very spiritual, this Tibetan stuff. Other times, it seems like the Eagle Scout School of Buddhism, at least the way the foreigners practice it. Like if you collect all your badges you will receive enlightenment or, at very least, a lucrative gig on the Buddhist circuit.

All day I hear: I have done this many prostrations, this many mandalas, this many offering bowls. I did Vajrasattva. I did Vajrasattva twice. I have received teachings from So-and-so Rinpoche. I had a private audience. I think it’s fair for me to call him a friend. He came to my house. My geomancy is totally perfect; I don’t need to have a puja or anything.

Doubtless it would be easier to like these people if they didn’t always talk about how utterly they have been transformed. My life has turned 360 degrees! They’re spinning in circles, these people.

And the initiations! Even a person who seems entirely decent may abruptly lean across the lunch table and announce, “You couldn’t possibly think of a deity whose initiation I have not received!”

Because I am a wimp and a fraud, I nod right along, very impressed, wishing that I, too, was so spiritual that a rinpoche would come and eat pizza at my house.

Meanwhile an evil voice whispers: Does this man with all his prostrations and initiations seem one bit nicer than a guy who has completed 37 screens of Tetris?

17. Gelek / 2.

I was gone for a few months and when I came back the foreign nuns whispered about Gelek, “He disrobed.” They said this with infinite disapproval, as if he had been waggling his private parts in front of schoolchildren.

A German woman had fallen in love with him apparently. She threatened to kill herself if he didn’t marry her.

The nuns talked about what a waste it was. Such an auspicious rebirth! Such a golden opportunity to practice dharma! And he’d thrown it all away for some woman.

I saw Gelek once after that and he did seem much sadder, as if his light had been somehow taken from him. The foreign nuns thought it was just a tragedy.

At no point did anyone suggest that we had all played a part in the loss of his vocation, by making a pet monk of him.

18. Old Cow.

The old white cow with the green tarp on its back stands by the side of the street and thinks, “Maybe if I stand very still and concentrate, this will all go away.”

19. Second Chances.

The terrifyingly handsome monk, his full lips framed by his goatee, would like to know why I spent so much time in Dharamsala, years ago. When I admit I wanted to be a monk, he is very pleased.

“You can still be monk! It is not too late!”

“It is definitely too late.”

“Do you have a family?”

I don’t know the answer to that question, so I just let it hang there.

He says it’s good to have monks with experience of the world. They speak in ways that people understand. He looks ready to throw his maroon shawl around me and give me vows on the spot.

I hurriedly change the subject. This is ridiculous. If we keep talking like this I am going to start crying and not be able to stop.

20. Insomnia / 2

In the night when I cannot sleep my lovers return to me in a cloud stinking of the baths: sweat, steam, spunk, bleach, amyl. They return not tenderly but in a sort of stampede. I desire them as much as ever but they remain out of reach.

One night in three or four the habit of voracity bears down on me. The men I loved are there, as well as plenty of others I hardly noticed at the time: the shoe salesman, the policeman, the gym attendant in Bangalore. The automatic Turk, the Italian boy with 144 entirely different faces, the Czech who, when he was not receiving enough attention, would thump his cock against the wall. (A strategy that was invariably successful.)

A rancorous hankering United Nations of lust. The bitter habit of hunger. Lovers return to me.

Sleep is out of the question.

21. Notes for Maitreya Buddha / 2.

The monks may feel somewhat put out when the Buddha cancels the mandala workshop, as well as the ongoing showdown between the philosophical schools of Cittamatra and Madhyamika. The tantric initiations, as well, are indefinitely postponed.

One brave monk questions the Buddha. Why these disruptions of tradition? And the Buddha says, “Even tantra is not fast enough if you have no water.”

Seeking always to remedy suffering and its causes, the Buddha focuses his attention on the devastated Earth. The miniscule likelihood of success does not dismay him. This is the Buddha after all, who teach the dharma to courtesans and mass murderers. It might even be said that the Buddha has a certain fondness for what are generally seen as hopeless causes.

Morality and immorality are now imbued with an awareness of atmospheric carbon levels. “The abhorrence of the body is no longer suitable to this day and age,” says the Buddha. “Abhor plastic, which looks good but is actually filthy, which is impermanent, but not nearly impermanent enough.”

Just as a doctor focuses first on the most urgent problem, the Buddha focuses his attention first upon the devastated earth. The forest dwelling monks defend their forest. The Buddha proclaims that there is no dharma separate from the dharma of the earth.

22. Tap / 2.

It had been a day which could not possibly go well. After all, in Tokyo a day which began horrendously was dependably horrendous throughout.

All night the dogs had barked, dogs inside and out. At dawn I crawled from bed feeling like a crumpled scrap geriatric venom. Imagine Madame Minh, age 106.

Yet, as I watched the sunset, I found myself full of happiness, astonished by a day which, entirely against my will, had turned out to be full of joy and wonder.

How was it possible? Perhaps the gorgeous monk was right and there were special properties to this, the God-King place, the automatic miracle area.

I tried to think of when things had begun to change. I remembered: the young blonde man with the enormous beard was brushing his teeth. He tried to turn on the outdoor tap. An entirely superstitious act, it seemed to me. Since we had been dry for days.

But this time water came out.

A Spontaneous Asylum

2011-03-07T15:32:00.001+09:00

(notes from a monastery guesthouse on the edge of McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India.)

Here at the monastery there is a one-eyed orange tomcat who teaches me the dharma. I met him two years ago, when he was a one-eyed kitten. Presumably we have spent many lifetimes together. One of us is always the stupid one; the other is the cat.

A few nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and needed to piss. But to get to the toilet I had to go down the hall, down the stairs, outside, up more stairs and around the corner.

I can piss off of the porch, I thought – who’s going to know?

Next morning, first thing, the one-eyed tabby is at my door. Soon as I open it, he darts in, ducks under the bed and pisses. Gives me a little meow, exits.

Karma, according to this cat, means you do not get away with anything.

Another thing: Why do I always have be the stupid one? When do I get to be the cat?

Beside the dumpster, on the way to Dharamkot, someone has thrown away a bag of tsampa. The monkeys are shovelling it into their mouths, so that they all appear to have white tsampa beards, and to be wearing white gloves.

Perhaps he is mad, I thought, when I saw the man at the next table. That or a drunk. But, no, the Danish gentleman, with his ravaged face and blonde mop of hair, has simply taken on the quality of everything here at the monastery guesthouse – sturdy disrepair.

Everything that was broken when I was here years ago is still broken – but it is not any more broken. It all still works, basically, in a makeshift way. You just have to remember to turn on the faucet using the knob on the floor.

The cook offers the Danish man an umbrella. He appears offended, “You know how I feel about umbrellas! It just rains! It is a natural process! No interference is required!”

The extent to which everyone in the monastery guesthouse is half-cracked is – remarkable. Astonishing, nearly. It is as if we all spontaneously decided to come together and create a lunatic asylum.

I’ve gotten quite full of myself actually, since I just move my lips a lot and write compulsively on three-by-five cards. Whereas most everyone else here talks to themselves out loud. This distinction makes me pleased with myself. I’m almost too sane to be here, I think.

Then I correct myself.

For example, at the other end of the hall, there’s a French woman with spiky blonde hair. She sashays when she walks and sings to herself and whenever she’s even slightly pleased with someone she pretends to kiss them, twice on each cheek.

This was how she acted when the guesthouse manager came by yesterday with butter tea and thick chapati to celebrate Tibetan New Year. How lovely it was that they included us, the riff-raff foreigners paying two bucks a night.

Ten minutes later the guesthouse manager came back and made clear he’d like to get those kisses for real. When she refused, he offered her ten rupees.

“He thought I make a living from my body!” she said, delighted and aghast.

“He only offered you ten rupees!” I said.

The knot in my chest says I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I ought to be doing. I don’t know how. I am wasting my time, I have always been wasting my time. Twenty years have passed and I have learned nothing.

(Hailstorm! I hear the woman say o-leh, o-leh and now it turns to pouring rain and the dogs come running home.)

I know what to do. What I really want is some kind of guarantee that I will always be fed and loved. That there will be beauty and someone will notice. But that guarantee will never be forthcoming.

But I know what to do.

The dilapidated Danish gentleman used to be a junkie. He smiles radiantly out of his ravaged face. “Thirty-five years. Now, I have been clean two years, ten months and some days.” He is here at the monastery guesthouse completing a hundred thousand prostations; I hear him sometimes in the room above mine, sliding repeatedly across the floor.

I admit to him that I sometimes feel like a lost cause.

“Never a lost cause!” he says. “I am here to learn, that’s what I always say to people. If I was a buddha I wouldn’t be here!”

We sit and discuss addiction, two experts in the field. I ask the same question I always ask.

“No,” he says. (I always get the same answer.) “You can do nothing. Nothing! He has to do it himself.”

The man with one foot is not quite crippled enough to succeed as a crippled beggar. So he has chosen to expand operations and don the clothes of a holy man. His saffron robes are very fresh, he’s got rudraksha beads, and his beard is a work in process.

He completes the ensemble with a rainbow colored umbrella, which he holds tilted coquettishly as he begs on the side of the road in the rain.

Hey, baba!

Almost twenty years ago, I lived in a retreat center above McLeod Ganj and wanted to be a monk. There were two of us, actually. Two promising aspirants. Ingo went ahead and became a monk. I decided I’d go back to Denver first. In a few days I had a job as a towel boy in a sex club. I’d get blue airmail letters from Ingo sometimes, news of Sera monastery, while I was busy at the Swim Club, breaking local and regional records for promiscuity.

For fifteen years I hadn’t been back to the retreat center. Then yesterday I went back. I stood in the garden looking at the stupa and I shook.

10.

“We lie to ourselves!” says Venerable Robina. “We lie to ourselves so much it becomes the automatic way we perceive the world. We act as if we aren’t supposed to change. Like death is something that shouldn’t happen, or not until we are 97. It’s all a lie we tell ourselves!”

Venerable Rita is sitting in the audience. Ani Rita, the knife-throwing nun, whom I adored for years. She used to tell a story about being a cook in Switzerland: she got so angry she was about to throw her chopping knife across the room at a man who’d pissed her off. She talked about how lucky she was to not have thrown that knife.

Because Rita is a helluva tough lady, I’m telling you. Anyone she’d thrown a knife at would not have survived.

Ani Rita taught me to sing Guru Puja, to offer water bowls, to make prostrations. She was always kind and funny and never the least bit impressed with me. “You look like an ironing board,” she’d say. Or, when I came back to the center after a few months, “Didn’t expect to see you again!”

One day at lunch, many years ago, I heard a young woman blubbering as spoke to Rita. “Ani Rita,” she said. “I had a terrible vision! I had a vision that I’m going to die in one year!”

“In one year?” Ani Rita said. “Are you kidding me? You could die tonight!”

11.

I decided I wouldn’t say anything to Ani Rita. It was enough for me just to see her. I didn’t need to go up to her, try to remind her who I was, say oh you meant the world to me when I was 19, 20, 21, say aw shucks.

As Ani Rita was arranging her robes to sit down, she looked across the crowd gathered for the free teaching.

She recognized me at once. She grinned, mimed her surprise and pleasure. I beamed at her, for a second. Then it was too much for me. I pinned my chin to my chest and cried.

Ani Rita had to leave before the talk was finished. She was running a retreat for people about to be ordained. I didn’t get a chance to speak to her.

12.

My first evening back at the monastery guesthouse, I glanced up to see a monk peering into my window. I opened the door to say hello. He was was wearing an orange cap. His face was young and wrinkly and bright. He was holding a balloon animal. It was yellow and black.

I said I was surprised. “Surprised!” he said.

He asked where I was from. I said, “America, I guess. Japan, too.”

“America!” he repeated. “Japan!”

He shook my hand and, because my hand was cold, he went on shaking it. First my right hand, then my left. He warmed my hands in his own. Then he thanked me and charged off, still grinning and holding his toy.

The Dalai Lama says that everyone should have fun at Tibetan New Year. Even monks.

I stood there at the door, feeling as though a row of candles had been lit within me. I didn’t feel cold at all anymore, not even in this cement cell with its rusty metal door.

How convenient this happened the very first day, I thought. Now all I have to do is tell people this story -- and anyone who is ever going to understand, will understand. Of course I had to burn my bridges and come back here again. It was the only possible decision, if I wanted to go on living.

The monk was holding a balloon animal. A honeybee.

Special Promotion

2011-03-04T22:35:00.000+09:00

As a special incentive to passengers, travel on the Delhi Metro now includes the opportunity to be groped by a uniformed member of the Indian army. Personally, I find myself exploring the city as never before. I say “opportunity” but in fact it is a “requirement”, after passing through a metal detector (to ensure you have no weapons which might involuntarily discharge during the groping process) to step onto a small platform, upon which you will be touched, both tenderly and comprehensively. This so-called requirement is in fact a courtesy, so that no one need be embarrassed by how ravenously they yearn to be touched -- and especially by a uniformed member of the Indian Army!

It should be noted that the price of a ticket entitles the passenger to be groped only once per journey. If, for example, after receiving the caresses to which your ticket entitles you, you act as if you’ve forgotten something, exit back through the metal detector, pretend to study the map and then present yourself, all smiles, again – the attention you receive will be entirely perfunctory and unsatisfying.

Considering the evident success of this promotion – the trains are packed at nearly every hour of the day -- it can only be hoped that the Delhi Municipal Transit Corporation will further expand the promotion, and give us all even more reason to travel. How nice it would be to receive, for example, after groping, a big hug. Oh, to feel oneself held in the capable ever-ready arms of the Indian Army! For that matter, why not a small kiss? Or even a lingering one. . .

The official stated reason for this promotion is: terrorism. And it is certainly true that, after traumatic events, we find ourselves, more than ever, in need of simple human affection. What better way to re-establish well-being than through warm and intimate touch? In my opinion, monetary concerns may also be at the forefront, but, then again, I admit I do not particularly care, as long as I myself am receiving attention which is first-rate and professional, from someone in a uniform.

Objections are bound to arise. Considering that, currently, men are groped by men, and women by women, the system appears to be egregiously biased in favor of those seeking same-sex encounters. It may be, however, that other requests will be honored. I myself have not tried.