Touchstones

F*ck Springsteen

F*ck the Beatles

F*ck Apple Records

...Screw Steve Jobs, too

 

Screw the cultural touchstones

The sixties icons...

Dylan,

Reed,

The Byrds' Brains

Claptons' rip-off blues

Hate Asbury

Summer of Stoned Love

The Diggers and Andy's Tomato Soup Whores

F*ck the seventies--

Iggy's Pop bottle

Punk's spiked hair

Seger's Main Street strippers

Burt Reynolds'  Smoking Bandits

Coppola and Scorcese's Godfather and Mean Streets

Halter tops and Platform heals

Alman's Bell Bottom Blues

 

F*ck the Eighties

Ronald's Ray Guns

Mullet hair rock Bands

Prince's Raspberry Berets

Motley Crew Cuts

Bleached teeth and bright Tees

Shopping malls and Japanese cars

Slasher movies on 16mm

 

F*ck 'em

Screw 'em

Torch the Touchstones

Live in an artless vacuum

Scrub away the past---

Sing! Sing! Sing! and Forget! Forget! Forget! 

 

 

Hickory McCracken Chronicles:

Round II

 It happens on a Brooklyn morning.

Early, before the bakers’ rise their sour dough breads. Before the cold gusts of wind die down. Before the cracked thin ice on New York sidewalks once paved by immigrant men melt under a new sun. It happens in a boxing club before the fighters arrive for their early training. Before the air fills with the smell of aspiration and sweat rolling off the dreams and shiny skin of the next Durans and Mayweathers. It is during this short hour of in between time when success and failure, young and old, light and darkness meet. It is the time when an old man struggles with his mind... he can’t remember where he placed the broom.

Manny Weinberg. Ole’ Pops they call him. Fought a thousand rounds. Trained a thousand fighters. For years now he’s run the Carney Boxing Club near the rolling and creaking L Train that goes one last stop to Coney Island. He’s always kept the club safe and clean from drugs and mobsters, and no good promoters in shiny suits who steal fighting lives with the false glitter of spoken contracts.

This morning he can’t remember where he put things at the club. The things he uses to clean up before the fighters arrive. His memory is dying in the last seconds of the last round against a fighter no one can defeat inside or outside the ring—time.

The CTE. The first stages of dementia. His mind moves from lucidness of a moment to nothingness of not knowing. Manny has seen enough lonely punch drunk fighters jab against imaginary demon shadows to realize that his memories are like the slow drops of water from a drying bottle.

He hears the rumble of the first L train of the morning. The sharp sound of the steel wheels hurt his head. He remembers now the broom is in the tall closet next to his office. He takes the broom and holds it tight and clinches the top of the handle against his chest.

Manny sweeps in short strokes along the floor and under the ring bringing along grit and dust. He feels in an odd way the rhythm of a fighter—a ghost fighter.

He thinks back to the swift days of his youth in the 1960s. When he went to Canada to fight against another swift fighter who had an Irish name and fists that could break down granite walls. Manny thinks he won the fight, or maybe he lost, or maybe he and the Irishman split the decision. His mind won’t decide.

Manny thinks of the girl he met in Canada. A young hippy with long straight hair and beautiful eyes and wanting lips. She with the beads and flowers in her hair. He with his boxing trunks and leather gloves. She the girl who believed in peace and the power of love, saw a sensitive heart inside the Brooklyn fighter. She believed she could tame him, free Manny Weinberg of Brooklyn boxing from his savage urban world and join her in a country commune.

They made love every night for a week. Manny had never been so close to being completely taken by the spirit and soul of a woman. But in the end the dance of the bloody canvas took him away from the girl he loved. He left her a good-bye note. She cried at the edge of a Canadian lake.

Last week Ole’ Pops got a letter. A letter only to be sent after the death of its author: Wanda McCracken. Manny Weinberg had a son. The boy conceived in a cabin along a Canadian lake. Wanda called the boy Hickory after the trees that swayed above their love making in the summer breeze. The boy didn’t know who his father was.

Manny checked the flights to Canada. Tomorrow….

 VII

The Nothing Man walked to the Nothing Woman, a virus in their souls

A memory of nothing, only a sense of what was

He and the vagrant young men moved along a line of sickness for a homeless meal

The Nothing Man in his rust cap

His pulled-up collar frayed at the edges

The Nothing Woman in white poured warm soup in the cold November Rain

The line of men touched their lips to the small bowls and drank from her kindness

The Nothing Man stood near...he sensed his nameless lover in the summer garden when she said Idaho...

 

"Come," she said. "Just you and me, we can float to Idaho. See the hills and valleys from above. Our spirits in eternal love. We'll sing each other's name, and listen to it echo forever young in the cold, pure air."

He laughed. "You know, I will fly to Atlantic City tomorrow with my bachelor friends. Play Taj Mahal. When I come back we will marry, and float our souls to Idaho."

 

 

 

 

 Virus VI

He wore a rust coloured cap. His wool collar was pulled up high to keep away the rain, to protect his neck from the cold. The nothing man stood in line with other nothing men where they waited for food. The shelter fed the viral young, their memories stolen in fever and weakness. All they had was a sense of what once was.

 

There was no spirit inside to hold up his soul

...no spirit to hold him above the sickness and madness

The nothing man moved one step ahead with the other nothing men. He thought he could see inside their heads. See the jangle of nonsensical thoughts. See the rancour of life scolding the deafness of weeping death. 

He saw a human face in the distance...and wondered if she was the fiance he once knew. He wondered if she too was lost in the fever, the weakness, the viral void of a nothing woman. 

He watched her in her kindness. Her white robe  made him sense what once was, what should have been. That time not so long ago, when he grew his hair long, his beard nearly touching their souls.

Like the lonely dancer in Atlantic City, he watched through the lure of a smoky window on Main Street...

 

Virus--Old Men

On a cold November night, under a growling hidden moon, two old men sit on a balcony--on old plastic chairs. With short breathes they smoke long cigarettes and drink beer from cold brown bottles. 

They've been neighbours, but not for long. Since only the last few months when they discovered what they had in common was what they once had, and lost to long nights and cold beers. The wives they divorced and the grown children they hadn't spoken to in years.

With a virus in the land, the residence allowed seniors to socialize outside. A mystery virus that spared the old, that stole the memories of the young. 

Hard drops of rain bounce off the balcony railing and land at the feet of the men. Sometimes a wind gust blows water onto their laps but spares their cigarettes and never touches the bottles of beer.

Through the blackness and the rain they see into the park. Under a bright lamppost they see a young man sitting alone on a bench. His rust coloured cap pulled low, the collar of his coat pulled up high. Every night they see him, but have never spoken of what they believe. That he is a viral young. That he is lost. That he has no memory, only a sense of what was.

One old man takes a deep drag from his cigarette and draws down a large gulp of beer. He says to the other man: "My boy's name is Ralph. Named him after his grandfather. He'd be about forty now. Last I heard he joined the navy. Haven't seen him in years."

"Sure," the other old man replies."I got a son about the same age. Don't know what he does. My daughter, last I heard she lives on the coast. I think she teaches school. I couldn't make it for her wedding day."

The men drink more beer and watch the rain turn into wet snow.

"You think that young man sitting in the park wearing the cap is all alone?" One man asks. "He sits there night after night, and winter is coming."

"Probably got the virus. Doesn't remember nothing. He probably has got lots of people, just can't recall them. They'll probably come out with a cure soon. Wouldn't worry too much about it."

"Yeah, probably."

The two neighbours feel cold and get up from the old plastic chairs. They walk like old men to the warmth of their apartment and turn on the TV. They watch a forgotten movie from when they were young and fall asleep at opposite ends of a black couch...like a long limousine.

 Virus -- In Time

This restless virus inside my soul--tricks me.

My temperature climbs, the delirium so warm, like dying inside a halo

I float in between visions of hot and cold

The sadness that tempers the joy

What comes into view, drifting through the time of spirits

My body floats in heavenly glow, everyone is whole, youth and smiles on angel faces

I keep pace with the mystical wonderment at things I begin to know

I keep pace with the dance of hellish flames 

It burns my sickly skin and tempers my slowing heart

Is this the death I wait for--between sickness and joy?

Floating like a turning mist along the spirits of heaven and hell?

The bliss and the hymn to madness?

 

I awake, the delirium gone. 

My temperature drops like fallen snow,

The air is still, I hear nothing--see the street lights between the darkness

The park bench feels cold--I can't remember my name, 

I pull up my collar

Pull down my rust coloured cap 

I take a breath from the silence

 

 

Virus-- The Prelude

I've got a friend who always sleeps till late morn',

Wipes his eyes when the sun has long risen,

When the morning doves stop cryin'

 

He's past 40, lives with his mom

His mom never with a husband; he without a father's name

Cigarette and coffee stained teeth

Her bony arthritic wrist barely lifts a cast iron pan.

 

When it's the last of the morning doves, 

she sizzles bacon for her only son,

eggs cook in the hot, fallen grease 

A cough and cigarette smoke

The man rises to the shuffle of old kitchen chairs

He sits at the table and eats in dripping silence

He rarely speaks in the late morn'

A cough and cigarette smoke, the mother wants to know her only son.

He says: "I'm going to Atlantic City. Leaving soon. Have to get to the airport."

"But you have no job? Where'd you get the money?"

"Don't worry, I got the cash."

 

The mother saw the faded tattoo on the skin of his arm.

"You don't look so good. You got a fever or something?"

"Nah, nah. I feel fine. When I get back from Atlantic City, we'll be so rich we can forget about this place."

 

He heard the honk of the car horn. Grabbed his luggage and wobbled sick down the apartment stairs.

That night a dove died. He'd never seen it before: A dead morning dove, lifeless at his feet. The music in its wings gone.

 

He got in my car. We drove to the airport with our friends in the back seat. I felt feverish, my memory beginning to fade. For a moment I couldn't recall my name/his name/a fiance's name/a jazzy song about cryin' doves.