RUDIMENTS 59.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 59

Making Cars

I often make no bones about things  -

(I kind of like that phrase, it's a bit of

brute honesty, maybe something I

used to hear around home; don't know)  -

but of late no matter what my personal

history and tales and stories are here

about New York City and environs

and me and my time there, and the

places I was in and the things I used

to do, I realize now that that place is

dead and gone. As I walk about there,

now, it's all I can do from laughing, or

crying, abut the horrible mishmash of

a place it's become; mostly a disheveled

version of some technocrat Hong Kong

or Singapore nation, with everyone doing

the same thing, smiling as they follow orders,

and going about rightly attired to eat and drink

their smoothies, veal and lamb dishes, perfect

veggies swaths of this or that, while vetting

each other to see, at essence, what they really

are, girl? Or boy? Yep, it's that crazy. All

the previous world is dead.

-

Now, looking at all, that's OK really, by me -

because it allows me to own it. Now it's mine,

every inclination to memory and wonder from

those 'other' days is owned by me  -  no one

else shares it, and I'm completely alone. There

are no 'Cats' or 'Annie' idiots intersecting my

old Broadway and 42nd street stories, no

free-days at the museums, no parading gilfoyles

of virginal underwear assault from endless

Victoria's Secret perversions in shop widows,

Saks and Tiffany windows put up by fey-boy

window designers in purple sway-back shoes

and pink-heart socks (I watch these things;

these guys not only work in the windows

putting up displays, but they make sure as

well that they themselves are displayed).

To each his own swankiness, and you

can have it, amen. That's a lot of what

NYC has become now. In 1967, these sorts

of endeavors would have been dark, bleak,

dreary and black  -  and probably stabbed

in the heart. Yeah man.

-

The dichotomy, the break, is so real. Long about

1968 or whatever it was, maybe '69, the whole

rolling crescendo of world orders and meanings

there came to a screeching halt. Murders and

assassinations. News reports of death and

corruption. No one, of course knew what the

heck they were talking about, but they talked

about it anyway. One good version of reality

deserved another : Rolling Stones versus Beatles,

let's say, and those lines were drawn and

they were crossed. The world or the city, let

me say, had by that time had a bit too much

of the lovey-dovey Beatlesque hippie swarm,

and their dark-shadow Rolling Stones were

about to bat heads. 'Lucy In the Sky with

Diamonds' (LSD  -  yeah. If that wasn't what

was meant, then CBS didn't mean Columbia

Broadcasting System, and NASA didn't mean

National Aeronautics and Space Administration,

and TBS wouldn't soon mean Turner Broadcasting

System  -  no matter what folderol was trotted out

about 'oh no, it was my kid's drawing from school,

of a girl, named Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.'

Want to buy a bridge?)...By contrast, we were

given the bleak-litany of negative images to 

supplant all that  -  'Jumpin' Jack Flash' by

contrast was a perfect paean to dark power.

'Born in a crossfire hurricane,' as it were. It

had an entire other complexion to itself and

better reflected rightly about that, what was

really going down, what was in the streets, 

how things were happening. 'Gas, gas, gas.'

The prime joke of it all was that whatever

powerful negative space-matter that song

held to 'better' reflect us, it was, for pity's 

sake, a playful tune written to profile Keith

Richards' gardener. Yes, gardener! That's what

any of this had come down to  - the rabble being

roused by supposed rabble-rousers singing of 

their gardeners. Jumping Jack Flash, indeed.

-

I wanted to set my hair on fire and flee.

-

For myself, I was already rolling in a thousand

words an hour encounter sessions with myself  - 

forget about EST and Alpert and Leary and

anything else. I was free-floating, un-tethered,

a cone-head helmeted only loosely by reason 

and logic in an old NASA-type attic of both

disloyalty and craziness too. Writing up this

script of and for myself, writing through my

pain of time, I was trying to get it down and

get it right.

-

About that time, another friend just disappeared.

Just call him Max. Without a shred of evidence

or anything left behind, one day he was just

no longer there. I still never know : but after 

he did make the disappearance (not quite the

opposite of 'appearance,' because obviously he

was still 'around' and leaving remnants), I found

this terribly over-written, tendentiously overdone

but also quite nearly perfect few pages of writing

he'd left behind. I couldn't shake it. It stayed.

"...my watery eyes flickering reptilian in the

fluorescent light, I stepped outside and took a

bite out of that blue September sky, and took 

a seat inside a sun-yellow cab. The Babylonian

towers locked their shiny arms above my head;

a steely embrace of concrete and glass."

-

Yes, see what I mean? It's not for nothing that

nothing gets lost : like old 42nd street, the 

storefronts are yet lined with blood and vice  -

the sort of thing today's new touristy type would 

never see. Like morphine, and Hubert's Museum.

Back then there was this guy named Herbert

Huncke, a male hustler, he plied his trade along

these streets and sold his occasional body for

dollars. Nothing twice was thought of it. He

just was  -  he was doing whatever his Herbert

Huncke destiny brought him, All those yelping

crazies around him, he was friends with them 

all too. Ginsberg, Kerouac, all those guys. It

as all a world of 60-watt bulbs, the old, round 

kind.  "Garment trucks lined the streets. The

Walk/Don't Walk signs kept flashing while

women blossomed from subway entrances,

gleaming like diamonds among the trash and

filth, a dream of nipples sweet as sugar melting

in my mouth, hardening between my fingers..."

Yeah, old Max was running on; old gone Max,

old disappeared Max, old Max. Leaving  nothing.

Leaving just me, to fend the rest for myself.

Make no bones about it.