The Forgotten Papers

By Jeff Harris

This is a long-lost masterpiece of the East Village, New York. It goes way back. It should not be confused with a regular book. There is no plot or running narrative, but even so, it might be the greatest book ever written about the insane asylum that is New York City. It crosses genre lines of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and is redemptive in some way that is nearly inexplicable. Wash your troubles away with "The Forgotten Papers" and get one good laugh per page—guaranteed—to boot!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483599441

Jeff Harris

Jeff Harris believes that children need stories to understand how to make tough decisions in difficult situations. He wrote Ginger’s Journey to help them think about what they would do if they were faced with that situation. Harris currently resides in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with his wife and family.

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Copyright © 2017, Jeff Harris

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-48-359944-1

Fonda Wanda, Inc

233 E. 3rd St. Suite B

New York, NY 10009

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

The Forgotten Papers

* * *

……These are the forgotten papers  that fell out of the sky.  Actually they were lost in a closet for many years.  They nearly fell on your author’s head while he was rummaging about in there. Presented here in no particular order and for no particular reason, you will need to fly along with me in this.

He just called off the marriage because when he called it on she called it off and when she called on he called off and coughed and the doctor said cough and she called it off and then he called on and the people yelled you’re next and she caught the bouquet and he caught the next stage and that was a killer stage where he called it on and she called it off and right before the wedding she knew that he didn’t want to get married and he knew the same thing about her but she called his bluff and he called hers and the minister got a headache and the wedding chapel collapsed. 

Don’t worry if some people are amongst the missing. The people that they are missing among will try to find them and show up with heroes from yesteryear and Indians from the spirit world.  I didn’t know that Abraham Lincoln once owned a horse named Dixie.  They say he caught a lot of flack for naming his horse that because of the Civil War.  This goes back to what I was saying about spending a whole life lost.  This is a fragment written from the heart of man to the heart of man, and is referenced in the Smiley-Man Chronicles in the section talking about finding alternative glee. 

Out in the business of forgiveness a broken heart waited in line for redemption.  It was a long wait.  He washed down the wait with a few thousand drinks.  Then he wanted to go out to eat, but his friend Eddy told him that an alcoholic is supposed to eat at home.  Then he was heard mumbling, Thank-you for everything and for petting me and giving me nothing but they all think I got something but I ain’t got nothing but whatever I got I’m gonna give it to them.

I sang a little song with the Lord.  It was a little-Lord song, and He never heard.  Then came in all the naked girls.  It was a little naked girl in a great big world song, and then a draft flew in and big rains.  The big rains fell outta the Lord’s veins.  People had to work themselves to the bone in this weather, and some people went insane.  Other people drugged them, but it didn’t help-it just wasted their poetic chance.  The idiots in offices in charge shuffled papers and wiped their asses with their diplomas.  Many of them were psychiatrists: licensed lunatics.  I sang a verse of this to one of them assholes in an office.  He said, man you are an asshole; I am closed on Shabbos. 

Go-About-Your-Business came into the bar, and he was a little bit ruffed up.  Had a run-in with four of five bouncers upsides the head, and he had bumps and bruises that weren’t going away for Many Moons is what they called him down in the tribe.  He had only been around the world once in this life so far, but Go-On-About-Your-Business stared at the potion chest even if it was off-limits, but they shined up like big suns as two canoes were paddling away.  Go About Business thought he would have happy thoughts and that he would not starve as long as the women walked around barely clad.  He might live out on the veranda of time.

Go About Business came in with a buttered roll and contusions.  Guys in leather pants and girls enchanted stared at him for a second, but he was wearing a big awning over his head, so the only person who could see him clearly was Ed-Who-Makes-Children-Laugh-And-Builds-Things.  Ed said that he bought a box of matzah, and when he opened it up, half of it had been eatin’ by what looked like mice, and the guy at the store wanted to take it back, but Eddy said, no, this here box is worth something from the factory, maybe a year supply of free matzah.  I bought it, he said proudly, like that was some kind of miracle.  (Ed, in fact, lived only a few blocks from the matzah factory on the Lower East Side, so he headed down there to see them).  Then go-About-Your-Business left the bar and danced in an apron in the clouds. 

Each year the animals live and love us and trust us and hope they don’t get run over, and each year we let them down and double-cross them.  The smart animals realize this and try to get further away, but there’s less and less places to hide, and the dumb animals watch more television, play with computers and think they know everything.

Something about the Crabapple Chronicles—don’t want to make a big deal about it, but there was a voice that spoke in the hollow of the Crabapple Chronicles, and that voice said, Estelle, you don’t have to be anything when you grow up if you absolutely insist on it—I ain’t even skylarking you about this—and even if men are trying to nail you all day, you still don’t have to do anything all day for them:  maybe you will and maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have kids and maybe you won’t (Estelle’s internal voice  was the voice of a gypsy fortune teller), maybe you’ll be rich and maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll own a sword and maybe you won’t. 

The crabapple chronicler was a man who collected naked pictures of black women, and he put them on his wall so that he would have good dreams at night.  And sometimes, black women would come to him and let him take care of them for a while.  Down in the lakes there lived a lot of snakes, but everyone said that he was a dove.  The chronicler had one friend left and though that friend spoke exclusively in swear words, he was also interested in talking to women.  Some women did not even seem to mind, because word had gotten out that you could fuck like a racehorse with him.

Dear Editor:

Newt Gingrich quit congress, because the perception of the American people was that he was an asshole, and even if he wasn’t an asshole, the perception of the people was that he was an asshole, so the GOP needs to change its perception by the American people and put someone in who is also an asshole but who is not perceived by the American people to be an asshole, because the American people have watched so much T.V. that they believe perception is the same thing as thinking or perhaps reception,….whatever…the GOP just knows that whether or not you’ve got a problem with reception or perception, they can clean up that problem by getting rid of that old potato and bringing on some new asshole who’s got a better chance of being received up the butt by the American people.

This is a tough old bird typewriter.  There are some good thoughts in it somewhere, but it’s going to be a very dusty day on the day that they fall out.  It’s got a little bell in it like a bird also, and it’s got a sweet little jingle to it too like maybe Santa’s coming.  St. Goodness had a meeting with St. Worry, because St. Worry could not hear nor see.  St. Worry was seen shaking his clothes and airing them out, and St. Goodness counted up all of St. Worry’s children.  The Worry had a lot of children to worry about.  St. Goodness stated that though the Saints appeared thus and so, they could also appear thusly, and that ipso facto, that was a stock that was heading south.  This made St. Worry think and smile.  Mental illness was spreading with remarkable facility throughout all the kingdoms, and people were calling it this and that, and it didn’t jive with the data anymore nor with the words used to describe it in the professional literature.  The Chi-Square was not a good statistic to describe the data, but no one could even remember what a Chi-square was, and no statistician alive could calculate one manually anymore.  What was funny now was just almost funny, because it was living next door so closely to what was tragic.  But the one great thing is that some things are just so amazingly great that no matter how much you try to mess with them and ruin them, you can’t, because they are just great to the core! That girl, Veronica, is like that.  One night she was running around with this guy who stuttered, and he’d just start stuttering, Lord lubba ducker, and that was some kind of reference to his girlfriend, but that didn’t even matter at all with regards to Veronica’s outstanding greatness.

                                                                            April 8, 1997

Parking Violations Bureau

NY, NY

To Whom It May Concern:

I am absolutely not guilty of this violation.  My car was in a zone to be moved for street cleaning from 11AM-2PM.  I arrived at my car before eleven, exactly 2 minutes before.  I have a very expensive Swiss watch that keeps perfect time.  From a half block away, I saw this officer (car #7454) writing the ticket. I started running down the street screaming for her to stop.  She completely ignored me, finished writing the ticket and put it on my car.  All she had to say was that it was 11 o’clock.  That is the exact time she put on the ticket.  I believe that my watch is a far better and more accurate watch than her watch.  I would be happy to demonstrate this in a court of law.  In addition, a friend who I was with will also testify to the accuracy of my watch.

Additionally, what kind of mean-spirited police policy is this when there is not even a few seconds grace period to allow for possible degrees of differences with regard to the accuracy of people’s time-pieces, both official police time-pieces, and civilian time-pieces.  I believe that this sort of police policy erodes New Yorker’s respect for the police and is an all-round bad (though probably profitable) thing for the city.

Sincerely,

Michael Houlihan

P.S.  I also believe that the time this officer wrote on the ticket—exactly 11 o’clock—clearly demonstrates that it was before 11 o’clock when she started writing the ticket!  As far as I am aware, no human being can start writing a fairly complicated ticket exactly at eleven o’clock or after and then finish writing that same ticket at the same time when they started!  It would almost be worth going to court over this to hear this officer’s explanation of this remarkable ability.

______________________

Eddy said he was having some wonderful dreams, and the wonderful thing about them, Jeffrey, he said, "is that they are all mine. I own them. All of these people in the neighborhood, Jeffrey, some of them are happy and some of them are sad.  But they’re all beautiful people, Jeffrey.  They’ve all got something different, something special.  Some of them are lost, they don’t know where they’re going, and that’s just where they get, lost.  You too are so beautiful, you take care of her, and you take care of him!"

Boy, Jeffrey, I am so full of alcohol today.  I’ve got huge muscles on under this shirt, like the Incredible Hulk, I can’t tell you how much I love people, Jeffrey, and when a woman really loves you, Jeffrey, she touches you.  I only touch black women, Jeffrey, and if you kiss one, well, the whole world will open up for you.

Hi!  This is Beatriz Ortega Johnson De Jesus calling and wishing you the merriest of holidays that you ever had.  Did you know that Eskimos had no wars?  Yes?  No?  I don’t know.  Maybe they had a little biddy war, but that was a long time ago.  Cro- Magnum man was pushed into Spain.  This we know, and a combination of the evidence is not good.  Einstein—not now, no how—Einstein had better blood supply, that’s all, to his brain, of course, not his pecker.  This is Beatriz Ortega Johnson De Jesus reminding you that you’re a know-it-all, and that’s how we get over on you.  Just knowing this trumps the know-it-all, making me, Beatriz Ortega Johnson De Jesus, the amazingly big know-it-all.  This is a suede cool move.  Of course, you know I am about in this so you’re still the big macher know-it-all after all.  All and nothing at all, just like the song.  This is Beatriz Ortega Johnson De Jesus signing off for now.

Chaim Ben Nukamachi married a Buddhist priestess who balanced apples on her nipples of God for money in Nepal.  She was arrested by the Suds of Time, an underground Metropol operation jointly operating with the CIA in Libya over occupied territory in the Sudan, and they tried to get her to show them her balancing act, but they only had pears.  And the reverend J.D. Hawkins recently said on the 400 Club that Congress was floating a proposal to create more jails using recycled bibles as bricks.  A few coats of white paint and they hold a nigger in there just as good as anything else they got on the market today. 

He is trying really hard not to offend anyone, but all these people get offended so easily.  They’re killing off everything before it can do anything offensive.  Up here in the country all these rednecks with $400 camouflage outfits and $1500 rifles with night-scopes go around shooting deer, and after they shoot them they strap them up on the roof of their car and take them home to show to their battered wife syndrome.  This one’s got a daughter who snuck outta the house one night, and never came back.

You know Jeffrey, I know so many people who died of cancer without ever smoking a cigarette.  I smoke three, four packs a day.  Some people just get things, Jeffrey.  But these people are so stupid, they brush their teeth like madmen, and their gums, and their tongues, and their cheeks, but then it comes to something as simple as putting a hose up their rear-end and flushing everything out, they say, hey, I can’t do that.  Well, I’m gonna tell you something, Jeffrey, up there that’s a garbage dump and even if you got a brand new trash-can and keep it lined with plastic bags, well, after a while, that thing’s gonna stink to high heaven.  So you gotta clean all that out every once in a while.  So when I mention that to people, they just look at me funny, like what are you gay or something? But you know something, Jeffrey?  I don’t care.  Fuck ‘em, that’s all!

In the van T. Jones was explaining to me about being a human being and what it meant, looking into my eyes, laughing, saying I wasn’t normal, drinking about a half a bottle of tequila, and rambling on about the Hebrews being half-breeds, and how being touched by things and suffering and about going out soon, to the river, numbers being up, you just get a certain amount of time to do your thing, most people don’t know that, and then we’re working on this telephone we’re working on, Jones explaining electricity, talking about capacitors, you know how when two people speak they have to modulate each other, encode certain things, block off certain things and leave other things in so they can relate, well, that’s what capacitors do, and then talking about the spin of energy in electricity, how wild it is, how transformers work, that energy spinning, and coils in a car, it keeps building up and up, comes in 12 volts and goes out amazing, but it loses something too, and then explaining ergs or something , like they’re waaaapppppppppp! And stuff, how he’s going to go out soon and kill himself, how he had blood all over his van, how he’s going to go get a stand-up bass and bring it over here right now for $100, things of that sort, and you know, the bass will appear, Jones is always moving things from place to place, always operating, always moving himself too, thinking ahead, always ahead, this resting here means something else will happen there, it’s all in the big picture, it’s all relative, it’s all electricity too, like the body, Einstein knew all that, of course, Jones says.

Then he’d start talking about Mingus and stuff, and all the while maybe it sets in that you’re just a part of some tremendous hustle that goes on and on and on and on, but you don’t even care ‘cause it’s so much fun!

And you’re there, and this beautiful woman is there and Jones is getting drunk and starting to sing and talking about gettin’ a hard on and feeling the warmth from her and it doesn’t even matter, and he starts talking about how the Arians are just getting their hard-ons now in history and everyone else’s number’s just up—the black man, the Jew, things of this sort.

See, Jones says, there’s these artists out there, you know, you don’t know nothing ‘bout them, but they’re all over, very sensitive artists, very feeling human beings, too sensitive even for the world today, too sweet..and they create these wonderful, sweet things, maybe they draw them, or write them, or sculpt them, or whatever, but nobody hardly gets to see them, or know about them, because they aren’t really commercial, you see, cause they aren’t really hard enough to get through to the commercial world, you know, the artists aren’t hard enough, and the things aren’t, maybe a few people get to see them, you know, touch them, you know, these sensitive artists, and lots of them get hurt and get bitter cause they don’t wise up to all this quick enough and these insensitive shit-heads step on their innocence and sweetness and even on their nice creations, and they keep putting themselves out unprotected and get hurt, ‘til up inside their head somewhere, they start getting really sad somewhere you can’t get to anymore really easily, and that’s a tragic thing, Jack, so what you got to do is you got to learn to protect your shit and protect your soul in some way that only you can figure out so that you aren’t vulnerable to all these  meat-heads walking around and that’s part of the thing you got to do Jack, if you want to live like this at all, laughing!!

Then you start to be just plain gay about the passing things, about how lots of your friends are among the missing now, that even though you may be sad, you’re still part of the great passing things, just here for a little while.  Then All-Over told me a joke that nobody gets but him but that was the very best part about that joke.  And you don’t got to worry, he says, because you might be out on the dusty driven plain somewhere passing little ole tombstones somewhere, and this kind of living with the funny joke in it that nobody quite gets but you is making everything O.K.

Pancho smoked a lot of dope, and behind that, he became the laughing man.  And when you started talking to him, you could see that he was just gonna bust out into hysterics any second on you, so it was sort of hard to have a conversation with him, because you sorta had to stick your finger into the hole in the dike while you were talking to prevent all the laughs from spilling out.  And after Pancho cleaned up his act, the funny thing was that this tendency to just burst out into hysterics never did clean up.  He just stayed that way forever, and if you ask me, that was a pretty great thing.

Some girls want you to stop every single thing that you are doing.  They want you to stop drinking first off.  Then they want you to stop smoking, and doing dope, and spending too much money, and eventually they even want you to stop fucking.  And after you stop doing all these things for them, they up and leave you because you’ve become so fucking boring.

She looked like what he was like inside: the black teeth, the killer body. 

Sugar was this stripper who every head was a separate head—you may try to put these trips on it, but it’s not.  Anyway, she searched for the kiss right out of the dark, and I bet by now she’s probably found it. But Jeez, did you see that walk by? Jesus A Fucking Christ Your Pussy! Sexy things happen around here all the time; I ain’t never gonna leave this little beach town.

The mirror man took your kiss and turned it on you again.  Then your souls got out for a second and ran back in screaming and then exploded in that kiss.  Then both of your bells rang, and people heard them ring all over the apartment.  You were trying to keep dead quiet, but everybody heard the bells ring. 

Plum was over her friend Bill’s house getting some help with her nervous breakdown, and Bill made a big dinner, but it was lamb chops and she doesn’t eat meat, but she didn’t want to make a fuss because they looked so beautiful so she cut up one of her lamb chops into little pieces and when nobody was looking, she hid the pieces under the other lamb chop. She said that’s a trick she learned when she was a little kid, so it looked like she ate, but then Peter who was also there was still hungry, and he looked over to her plate and said, boy that sure looks good, do you mind if I have that other one if you don’t want it, and Plum said, sure, and when Peter took it, they all saw the little pieces but she just shrugged like they were nothing, you know, they were just there somehow all along, and nobody said anything about them.  Plus, I guess, she was being there for her nervous breakdown and all. 

Couples of kiss came in holding on the hearts of lace

Stare-me-downs came in with their attendant clowns

Night clerks and secretive saints and simple as the touch of night, all came in

Pad carriers and color bearers and women named Cherry came

And goddesses of the give-me, tarot tokens of delight performed miracles

Puddinhead pocketeers came in hard as rocks

Lost me, pop me, pill me pioneers with sweet daddy presents presented themselves

Naked women everywhere, deliveries in the rear

(They kill you and then raise you from the dead)

Mr. Innocence comes back with his broken heart

(He is made whole by The Hole)

Between her breasts dangled a silver semaphore pointing down the tracks of love

They searched together for a place to hide from this crazy world— some quiet place to pull the covers up

Everywhere rich people were coming out of their castles throwing their wealth away to poor people everywhere:  here, they say, here it all is, come and fucking get it!!

Each little thing has its own spot, its own little piece of the dignity.  My friend, Charlie, wavering in the wind by Second Ave. shaking my hand, not asking me for money, not asking with all his might, tears in his eyes.  He says that all my buddies are on the other side.  They’re just hanging around to make you laugh and keep you honest.  You pick up a little debris and out of the blue they’ll appear and say, hey, that’s mine, what are you crazy?  Little while later you might go by and there’s that little thing, still in its same spot with his name all over it.  You can laugh all you want, he says, but once you go over to the other side, you can never fully come back around.  Not that you would really want to unless you miss your lost innocence.  You can come back, even go back home, but a little bit of you still hangs upside the other side.

It’s the dots—you can smoke it, burn it, pee on it, it don’t matter, it always makes you laugh—that’s the kind of flag we need!

She seduced him through the scriptures and then he was her slave, always scared but always excited.  When they made love, they screamed bloody murder.  Sometimes the cops were called.  More often people just hung around listening through the walls.  They changed into warm, throbbing animals.  None of your regular worries meant anything to them anymore.  They were lost in the hidden companion.

Well, I guess that’s a pretty good poem, ha, ha, ha—naked wilderness, covered up, things are hiding. But then everything falls away at once. I guess that’s a pretty good poem, huh?  Colored things with girls on them lying about in the hard cock forest all comey and gooey together, bars brimming over with horny drunks, nature giving you a good fast fuck, thousands of drinky drinks, trying to find a little spot for your own drink, yup, well, I guess that’ a pretty good poem, ha, ha, ha, please come to my house and take everything off, your body is like milk, I bet that’s a pretty good poem when it all comes down.  I know this person who is pretty intolerant and this other one who is some kind of artist who treats you like shit and then forgets they did it for pretty good poem reasons, they hate all their friends, they’ve got some pretty good poem friends strewn all over the country.  When the friends die, they won’t even go to their pretty good poem funerals.  But when you go down for somebody like that, well, all hell breaks loose around here.  If you take that horny cat into your house, he just makes a nuisance of himself, but if you give it to him every couple a hours, then, well, no worries.

The people are all here, you can come see them in first bloom.  Some of them are put upon, and some are underneath.  Each is unique in his own special way and makes no sense at all.  Gallons of scientists go round trying to figure out how they make sense, trying to make molehills out of mountains.  The Gods laugh at them.

The people are scared, scared in their face, scared unto death, the masters keep trying to make a mess of their lives.  The Gods all laugh, no one provides.

Chico says to write about him.  Tell them he did it, that in fact, tittie was coming. Chico says that when he sees me he gets all nervous.  I make him all happy on sight.  Chico wanted to know if I could put up with him if he were married, and I said never.  That made him laugh.  He said type up this conversation, my whole body’s overheated, and when I see a friend I know, I get over-excited, extremely excited, damn right I get excited, I won’t tell the landlord, see I can’t do nothing right, I told you, take me back to New York, lost his light, got to do it again.  He said why did you do that, and I said if it wasn’t for you I would have never done that.  Now I ain’t gonna say a word.  He says, I hear ya, I hear ya, man, I’m gonna read that piece of paper, I want it, I can’t read, I can’t read.  I can’t hold my feelings back no more.  When I was running and running around, I was just thinking about you, like a special piece of cake, you are my sweet cake, I would never mess with anyone like you, cause you are a sexy daddy, two sexies fightin’ against each other.

You love it, we’re piece of the rock, I’m lockin up, I’m lockin up my heart, you are too much, you are too much, terrific, you used me to get in here.  That’s it, Chico, and Jim—who’s going to shave first? See everything ain’t got hair on it. Then I started dipping into my dictionary a little bit.  You know I couldn’t stay away from you.  If you kiss me, that’d be good.

  He wanted to play with her and be your girl, let me get on out of here, Chico said, you make me nervous as shit.  You can’t write that goddamn fast, but I know you took the case into court.  You know, Chico, I just love pulling your dream, you can’t write that.  Chico start to get all serious, be my boy, be my boy, man, I believe you’re Clark Kent, I call you Chico, but you might be Clark.  Then Chico starts winking, wait a minute, let me get myself comfortable. O.K. give it to me now.

These people are on a perpetually horny high and nothing you can do will cool them down.  When you come by their house, you’ve just got to quick take off all your clothes and let them give it to you, and if you see them running around in the dark or talking in their sleep, you’ve got to quick just grab them and give it to them and make them come. 

His poems are all wishes, and vicious, and suspicious, and delicious, and he was arrested for typing while driving, but really she was arrested for typing on his thingy while he was driving, but really, your honor, we thought he was retired, but he came back, and they tasted it: the pale of love—previously so wet and vicious, yet nutritious, and your honor, he does grant wishes.  When they do that thing, well, your honor, the whole neighborhood gets very upset, and wet, they get a contact high.  They have to call in the usual suspects, take off all their clothes, examine them, have them, wrap them back up, and establish a precedent.  In the halls of justice, the hall of mirrors, the weight of the world is behind that cock, and believe me your honor, you have not been fucked until you been fucked by that cock of justice.  And when the sun comes up it’s a beautiful brand new delicious day, vicious and suspicious in every way.

Like before, planets were colliding, or asteroids were breaking apart, now things were surfacing that other people really fabulously liked for shorter periods of time.  This was an illusion to a previous rant about luck that went something like this: As I replaced the fuel filter, I saw the sun come up in the car.  I realized what a silly mess we had made of the world.  Nothing personal, but all of life seemed to becoming a big lottery.  There was no apparent reason for anything.  Nothing was lawful anymore, nothing predictable but that.  Anyone could hit at any time and only by accident.  Even when it seemed on purpose, it wasn’t.  This made for a very ludicrous and serious state of affairs all at once, because people followed those who had hit" around to try and learn their secret, and some of the people being followed exploited that.  And every time something happened, someone tried to make it happen again.  So it looked like everything was becoming really uniform and kind of boring.  But really what really was happening was the very long wait for the next stroke of luck to hit—like lightning.

Some people think that just the stock market is like this, but I think that this applies to everything."

At that point, Kevin started talking ten thousand revolutions per minute about the thoughts, the frozen thoughts, going to get some thoughts coffee, bean and thoughts, he eats a lot of beans and stuff, like it’s his mission to fill up the air constantly with thoughts.  He gets your rain by a rope and twists it and won’t let it go for a second like John.  John says, you’re just stringing me along here because I’m so polite, Kev.  I’m polite, he yells, everybody laughing.  The bar’s undulating, the fools are laughing, Kev will defend every last one of them in a darkly minute, they’re all nice people, he’ll say, even if the next second he’s saying that all of life is just a sell-out, hit by a load of shit walkin’ on a wire, never wanna stop havin fun though, can’t get laid though anymore, what am I gonna do? Think I’m gonna kill myself, ton of dog farts.

Then Kev said something about trading, how that had been going on for thousands of thoughts.  And he finished up by saying how would you like to be all of everything, don’t you read Joyce, asshole?

After he fell in love and from love, nothing could be the same after that.  Everyone knew it.  You could see them out on the street, strangers who fell, strangers living in the spirit, all smiling, all knowing, all staring, all dead, all sorrow, all brimming.  After that you are a spirit and you amble upon other spirits.  You disappear quick and they do too.  Some people who don’t know call you a ghost, but it’s not true, the lovers are spirits; the ghosts are the shells, empty things, white snow-like things.  They won’t hurt you; because they don’t know.

Once upon a spirit smiled a small boy and a girl who took each other’s tattooed bodies and tattered a song about them.  The gypsies came and stood by them and camped in the shadows of their fucking.  Embers from the fire flickered upon them and they weaved it into the clothing they wore.  That was the first time they fucked, upon your waist you could wear it well.  Deep and green with the buckles for her body.  Sailors smiled and stood real still while the ships fell upon them, they swore to the maiden goddess that they would live if only she’d sail to them and stop their brutal hearts from destroying them.  Stop me long enough to love, they’d pray, and then they would wait for the gift to drop upon them.  Only once in a lifetime it usually drops unless you are a lucky one.  Only once in a lifetime and when it drops it brings the seeds of its own destruction.  It brings the confidence that you can end all kings and make love shine up any day, it brings the friends, a million friends who want you to breath it upon them, who feed off it, far off a million miles away and come to sail and land and split you up, and rip her boy, her soul, her mouth, right out of your hands.  But you can’t do anything at all about it.  Alabaster boy running your tail between her legs in a quiet vault you watch them and wonder when.  Once in lifetime your lifetime comes or maybe you are lucky, man, God takes his pity some of the time and gives a friend a friendly hand.

Fanny was talking about her sister and said that since she’s been getting screwed so much since she’s been married, she goes into a falsetto all the time when she talks.

On the apex of the sea of possible romance, and of course all this is off, because on the open seas of romance I was standing in the bar, him telling me these things, each person trying to be brand new everyday, him pointing out to me that that boy had lost his mind one second at a time, and she pointed him out to me too, and then they said, that Bongo was on a freak that never ended and never was gonna and everybody knew it.  Suddenly these people came into the bar, frightened and paranoid, they all had on suits, they were record company executives, they were running the country, they couldn’t even make a decision about whether or not to buy a drink without conferring.  Then they went down the street to another bar that was full of people that Russel T. Tegris said were too pretty, but she didn’t mean that in a derogatory way, because she worshipped beauty, somehow they were so pretty they didn’t have to get any older, and they could just stay really paranoid and young (I don’t know what she meant by that).

Then she started talking about the image kids, how that’s a scenario in the U.S.A. since the Rough Riders, where the image is the only thing that matters.  Then she said it takes a lot to kill a man, a lot of bad shit!

She kept saying here’s the great thing about N.Y.—she kept saying yes-no to all the questions too, she said it was very complicated, and there was this lovely rosy haze she was in, because she said everyone is crazy in N.Y. and it’s not interesting, because that might hold the individual maniac back, it’s more like it creates something for everyday, a nice balance, so at least they can function and be in the breeze somehow, they try and let you be in it, kind of a pinpoint in the apex of a sea of possible romance, she went back to that.  And Catakova kept saying that everyone who lost the string kept looking for somebody who had lost the string too to give them the strength to present that kind of loss in a way that will seem cool.

Every time he got near her, he got melted eyes until they just melted permanently.  And the first time he went inside her, he fit in the most perfect way.  There was warmth everywhere.  After that when he went inside her with the melted eyes, he became very small, and he felt like his whole boy was going into her, all the way inside of her, like her baby, and he never wanted to leave the inside of her body.  The first time she came it was a long, graceful come, the kind that’s smooth and amber.  She came inside of the inside from which he was hiding, and when they looked out on the world after that, the world was very far away, and pink, and hazy. 

Then they had their secret, all after that, that place they would go back to.  Nobody could follow them to that place.  They didn’t have to look for a home anymore.

He felt that he was born right on the interface of two opposites—love and hate, right and wrong, etc.  He was the answer—he himself—what came out of him rattled on that interface, made that interface possible, and if he could get like a mirror—polished well—the opposites could see, and reflect—even off their opposites—and somehow that might help to permit them to move out of the mind’s dilemma that wound up on one edge of the opposite that could have been the opposite just as easily.

Of all and all, he’d never tell his secret things.  They’d crop up a little while, but just the tops of them, like the flowers on a plant.  All the wonders, he said, are always hidden, that’s the beauty of it, darling, he’d say to me.  And when he was gone, so too were his secrets, and even he—gone, gone, gone—was the secret thing!

At this point the narrative degenerates into a world of psychotic ramblings, and the characters take on other forms, like rubber balls and bounce off the walls, or take on other dimensions, like pieces of paper that other people eat, or glue, or they become rugs for people to walk upon or grass, things grow from out of their bodies, they breathe in colors and then, like so many dice, they just fall out of a cup.  People just stare at them now, look at them, talk about them, point and whisper, they’ve got these beings among them, and then they huddle up together somewhere and go into a long, deep sleep.  And in their dreams they’re riding in little cars and on little bicycles, and laughing.  Somebody folds them.  And then they wake up and they’re just regular people, you wouldn’t even recognize them, you wouldn’t think twice about them.  They’re warm and they’re cuddly and they have go on about your business pancakes for breakfast!

Eddy says, this guy comes to me and says paint my bedroom.. I say, no, first time I painted your whole apartment, you said, Eddy, you’re dirty, and a slob, and you called me every name in the book, now you come ask me to paint your bedroom, what kinda bullshit is that?

So you’re not going to paint it, right?

No, I’m going to paint it, let him call me what he wants!

Bessie says that Cal the black man when he talks to you he always, vroom! his hand goes right to his peter, soon as you talk to him, vroom! There it goes.  So Bessie asks Julie down the hall if that happens to her also when she talks to him.  Does he put his hand right on his peter and Julie says no, he only does that for you, Bessie. (That’s because Bessie is a hot tamale).

So anyway, you know, I’ve never seen anybody so sick, so here I am down here all by myself, and I’ve got to make all these decisions about doctors, and all, and all his help that works for him, well, they’re giving me a hard time about picking me up or something, but, you know, they can just all go and kiss my ass.  Here I am taking care of him, and they’re treatin’ me like I’m 60 years old, but you know, I’m 82.  So I’m down at Penelope Scott’s, you know, she’s my friend, she’s my doctor that I love, and she kept me waiting for four hours, but I got in there, and she said, Selma, listen, that man’s 91 years old and if it had been his time, then it would have been his time, but look at you, do you want to die took? You’ve got to eat, and take care of yourself, what are you doin’? And I looked up at her and I noticed that she had dyed her hair red—I love that woman!  And I said, you know, I love you, and she gave me a kiss.  And Leonard, well, he just stood right up in his hospital room totally naked, with his ass out and all, and he was so skinny, but he never did that before, and he just handed me his teeth, you know, he’s just so amazed that he’s livin’, and he was wigglin’ his toes and movin’ his arms, you know, he just couldn’t believe that he was still here.

There’s this whole group of people walking around looking for someone to have a nervous breakdown on top of.  They’re looking for some protection during, after, and for support.  But sometimes, they’re looking for someone to involve in their breakdown.  They need an object for their breakdown, perhaps someone to abuse in it, or someone to blame their breakdown on, someone who they can treat really horribly and then blame them for their departure or their cruelty in return.  O course, these people are not usually conscious of their motivation.  Mostly they just feel this pressing need to drop out of their current selves under the protection of others and then to change into something else.  A lot of people like this go into religious groups to accomplish this changeover. 

Other folks just can’t cope.  They need a free pass for real, a scholarship to life.  Perhaps they are too sensitive. Perhaps they see too much.  Perhaps this is really painful.  Sometime somebody just needs a big time out, a time to just go think, lay-low, experiment.  Sometimes you just love the shitty mess that you’re in.  There were some Indians who loved rubbing shit in their hair.  Maybe you are like that, and you don’t want to mess it up.  Perhaps you’re into something really important even though it’s a shitty mess and you don’t want to change your mind up on it.  And even it you wanted, you can’t find the bridge.  Perhaps this is a missing bridge, a missing piece of information that it not known by anybody, for real.  Perhaps this piece of missing information cannot even be symbolized.  So perhaps you need a little time, a little free time, and perhaps somebody comes along who really loves you and gives you that life scholarship—that is a pretty far out thing to do, a pretty fat chance to take on somebody.  That’s what my friend, Dave, wants to do for his son. 

Perhaps you’ve done some horrible things in your life.  Perhaps you adopted a little dog from the pound because they were going to put him down.  And perhaps you thought you couldn’t keep him, so you gave him up to somebody.  And perhaps you didn’t like how they were treating him in his new home.  But you didn’t take the little dog back, because you didn’t think you could take care of anybody, not even yourself.  And this psychic man, Banquo, takes one look at you and sees this whole thing on you.  And you quick, got to run and hide from this man, because these kinds of people scare you, because these people are too heavy for chickens like you.

Sometimes everything is way too much for yonder poet, all the hunters killing all the animals, the stickmen whittling away and showing up to scare everybody in a loincloth at a campfire (saw that same guy in a suit walking down 5th Ave in NYC),  (even the Nazis and the Holocaust didn’t phase him,) and somebody is trying to toughen you up, you know, because they don’t want you to be disappointed when you see how the whole thing is just going to hell, and you were such a pretty flower-baby way back when.  That same guy had a bow and arrow and he convinced himself that when he went into the woods that old buck was just begging him to shoot him to put him out of his misery, that’s how crazy these mother-fuckers are, and I’m sorry to be talking to you like this, boy, but you’re going to meet a lot of these sons-a-bitches before you’re through, so you should get yourself prepared not to lose your perspective because of these idiots, with all their talk about elevated kills and things of that sort. 

Perhaps you are fascinated with words, especially words that also mean their opposite.  Certain words in Hebrew and Arabic are like that.  Perhaps you are tinkering with cabbalistic aspects, perhaps you are fascinated by the working of the human mind, perhaps you feel as if you can’t do anything at all about anything unless somebody appoints you King.

His friend Crank was hopelessly lost and hopelessly hidden.  He took refuge behind the invisible door set up by all the gatekeepers or men in power in every single field, and then he became angrier and bitter like all men on the other side of the wall, until that became the side he preferred.  He did all sorts of things that no one saw, sang all sorts of songs that no one heard, wrote all sorts of things that no one read.  And after a while, he preferred it that way, because the only one who would hear them and see them and read them was God.  He dreamed up such wonderful dreams.  He wrote himself invisible checks and cashed them at the invisible bank.  His fate was pretty much decided.  He would always be on the other side.  He didn’t feel like beating down the door anymore at the Fuck-You-Center-For-The-Arts peddling his wares.  He didn’t want to go see the man at the Fuck-You-Record-Company, or the one at the Fuck-You-Publishers down the hall, or the owner of the Fuck-You-Gallery a little further down the street.

"I just love bein’ crazy; if there’s one thing I love it’s just loping along being crazy and laughing and crying and making funny grunts at snobby people.  I like talking about the weather and giving out free weather reports, you know: right now it’s sunny brother, but later on, oi vai iz mir! I’m really trying out all the weird things and dark things on the other side.  I am curious about the dark side, not the violent side, but the hidden side.  Sometimes people on the violent side want to hang out with me, because they think I am one of them, but I am not.  I’m just on the other side, but on the jolly side.  Really I’m into flipping over rocks and exposing all those nasty folks living under them, decoding the codes they are living in, the forked tongue with which they speak; that’s my idea of having a good time, it’s sort of like a social anthropological thing, if you could go on a dig in social anthropology.  Like if you’re sitting around listening to Mahler’s First Symphony and about the middle where it really wakes you up, that’s the background music we’re looking for in the middle of some brainstorm.

Sometimes you come into his house, and you are in a pretend place.  Boy is it fun in there.  The clock stopped, the jiggles began—lots of toys to play with, outfits to try on.  Pick him up and walk around with your toy.  Come in here and take refuge from the secret dilemma. His friend, Capo, was out on the street, in his doorway hanging, all dressed up in his pretty hats and shoes, his polka dot pants, gazing at everybody, but never catching a stare, hiding behind his paper if someone shoots one back at him, out there for years, every year.  Sometimes you see him in a car getting ready for his appearance.  Sometimes somebody’s really beautiful out there on the boulevard just drifting is all, but really exquisitely beautiful—but lost, drifting, olive-deep, throbbing, muttering something sideways, drifting.  The whole street would part for her like the Red Sea. Even the really rude would curtsy and treat her like the Queen of Glass. 

Coming around to the cold of winter, they would appear, getting ready for the struggle ahead—lonely sleep, really late last night, no touching allowed.  No one could track their steps down in the lonely lands.  Only they knew the way back out, if they could only remember it.  Oh yes, I remember it!  So beautiful! So scary! So private!  This is prime real estate that you will never get your little grubby fingers on!  You will never find your way in here!  All these people out there who think that man is a machine, a bundle of brain chemistry.  If we could just discover the chemistry, they think, we could cure his drafty ills.  All the people hiding from these men and their machine models of man: those who invented the computer in their own image, those others who think God invented man in His image.  We are hiding from the men with the plastic heads.  We are arrogant and fearful and funny all at the same time.  We just don’t want any part of you—it’s that simple.  This is another war, a better war, a smarter war, a major war, a real war. But so many casualties, so many broken hearts, so much sadness from this war.  So many wars to fight, so many battle to wage.  One thing is really clear—there is an endless need for vacations everywhere.  Our government should be giving out free vacations.  This is what is really needed today!

A man came up to me on the street wearing goggles.  He said to me, I trust your secrets; I trust your Olympic pool!

Instead of living in that nasty little room that they call reality, he flew up with the seabirds and the rocket ships, escaping enemy fire with twinkling protection.  All around him were con games, and big, fat, slick businessmen with big fat ceegars and smiles all wrapped up in American flags with their own money that they had printed up themselves with their own pictures on it.  Oh beautiful for spacious lies, for slamming waves of pain, for purple pounding fallacies, upon the barren plains…America, America, God shed some light on thee, and crown they good upsides the hood and see how free we bleed.  To be in the pea-pods with all the other Americans, layer upon layer of shining misfits on the underbelly of con-artists, and lawyers, and the constant politico-double speak, in this tattered wilderness they rode by, people peeking through the holes in their blankets, seeing something good for a change.  All the food out there was poisoned and laced with sugar and corn syrup, so they had to carry their own food supply with them all the way from Virginia.  The legal guardians of the inner core had been threatened and the proptective matrix compromised.  The religious fanatics and con artists everywhere believed their own lies.  Psychopaths zipped around freely all over the American landscape.  Even the charities began to utilize the same psychopathic business models as everyone else.  The medical profession had slipped over the edge a long time ago.  It was now nearly as big as the government.  Jones is trying to get out. He is trying to go to the moon.  Others are trying to go in.  No one will find them in there.  Some are hiding in castles, some in boxes on the street.  I am hiding in your eyes and in your body.  I have given you my bone marrow.

He was hopeless and happy and on holiday perpetually and he didn’t like doin a lot of work, so he was waitin’ for the fluff bus to pull up to his Neanderthal negligence of a brain.  He thought about bad poetry and how maybe he could make some contribution to that.  People flowed by on holiday and cut-off pants in the middle of October, pouring rain.  With the whole world turned round, he almost looked normal now.  People would say hello to him on the street, and he would make a pudding sidelong to avoid their glance.  Some people he found upsetting and some mirrored out from his upsetting ways.  Hey, they would wonder, what’s all the commotion about, not understanding at all the secret tinkerings of the Neanderthal world.  Even the littlemost notions were set in motion and lotions were the ocean of moon-glow.

Some people were always thinking about what they can squeeze out of you like you are a citrus, and your mission is to understand and forgive them and perhaps even love them and give them the hi-banana even though they’re bothering you, and you wish that they would just get out of your painting. 

I think I talked about the puddle-men and about we will not reroof no roof before its time in that other book called Fay & Eddy. That was a really obscure and horny book.  There was stuff in there, I believe, about Kathleen Love and the puddle-men who made love in puddles, and who did not even care about which portions of her love they took, as long as they were in puddles and getting dirty looks all the time.  Of course, this is just what they told the other men, also in puddles, but it was not entirely true.  Really the golden rainbow was their preferred destination, and some of them had a secret longing to be taken back by the sex gods and goddesses of their childhood.  I once sat in the back upon Kathleen’s golden back of lies, and she blew a harp body as we made love in a puddle in the back seat of my pap’s Cadillac.  Kenny Goldfarb had her too, in puddles. 

She was a woman with a million different doors.  Open one up and it would lead into another one and then another more inner door, and then another, and then to some light within, and then some smoky light, and some amber light, and then more rooms and hallways.  She led out into the whole universe and into all the stars and into all the secret undiscovered places.  You could never really quite put your finger on her, because she was so infinite, but you could put your finger right on this certain explosive spot in her body that would make her gush all over the sky.  One day she would know about the infinite and explain it to you, and one day she wouldn’t, she knew nothing.  One day she would just stare in wonder like a child and the next day she would spend wandering through the worlds. 

I think I even talked about Ruby in that other book whistling through the house, singing tangerine, tangerine! as she was walking through the halls, saying that she really finally asserted herself—telling her husband, and that in fact his mind had gotten much better.  I never thought I’d see the day he’d come home and not take a drink, but he knows it’s putting his brain to bed, ha!

T. Jones started walking though all this, and his foot got run over and he took up residence in a silo with a rocket that he was building with his own hands.  He had the specs; and it looked kind of like the Meridian Falcon, but it really was going to fly.  Anyone can make one of these, he said. The information is public—you just got to figure out how to get the parts and improvise the rest.  Here’s stage 1 and 2, over there’s the boosters, etc.  The launching pad is going to be over here.  This could have been in the Smiley-Man Chronicles, but I don’t think it was. 

"I come down here to see my ma.  I gotta lot of smilage trailing after me.  First I gotta cuss the rabbi out—he don’t like how I’m unloading my dock—taking up extra space and all.  He’s got the whole ocean but he’s gotta pull his rabbi jazz up right in my face.  So I say to get the fuck outta my face and he just walks off in a big rabbi huff.  This story makes my mom laugh after she goes ‘oh, my God.’

First I go to this and then to that drinking