From website gregglory.com
A/VOI/D/ANCES (Avoidances)
Note: This is only the first half of the novel. It has never been completely typed up in electronic format.--Gregg G. Brown
1
Enough of the epigrammatic method! I want whole parlorfuls of space and black living in my words. What can't I say? I gives myselves permissions. The inside of my eyeballs is black ink, with sparkles. Sparklers were always a hot favorite of mine when I was little enough to feel burns convincingly, with sufficient newness and ignorance to BREATHE it in. Tommy saw this movie the other day and praised how it was "easy on the eyes" and how Kevin's girl "Arete will cry" and other armfuls of predictability that spout from the limitations of the humane condition that wouldn't want to stop its predictability, since that would put a halter on its humanness, since to be human is to be limited and predictable and always to cry.
2
Looking forward to a movie tonight. Let my eyes melt out of me all soft and slow and communally. Nothing like sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers you don't know and letting the world times 10 flash towards you. Waiting calm as a bus for this roman candle bunch of brightlight experience to bomb out at your face and catch you blam headon without blinking. Actually looking forward to such an event. THAT is America (as conceived and foundered by Vespucci). Together we plan that careful derangement of our senses; place A here, B at a where we haven't imagined, C in the D spot and etc. to the skies.... Rimbaud on vacation in the uninvented wilderness of lives. Movie TOnight.
3
A diary's a personal matter, like a colostomy. Write your guts out in a little clear bag free from the neighbors' polite curious fingers. Close the small smell away in a vacuum of prose, litter it with roses or exploding ears--- decorations purely for the benefit of "oneself" (as per Edwardian Eng.). Run off at the mouth until your blue bright pen legs dissolve. But a Journal, well, that's a different bag of beans entirely. A Journal's an impersonal thing, takes in the clear clinking observations of a "man of the world"--- good money for mental transactions of all sorts. A something separate and detachable from the perceiver that does not lose its appropriateness as a result of this separation. Like a good shot at a marble game, it is universally appreciable.
4
Namedropping hack. Sonofabitch, don't come back. Needley knives in a reservoir of hate. Watch you don't pick up skins by the bottleful too late. Nothing squints at you if you don't squint back. Cramming my blank blond face with a pocketful of pies. Kitchen squares comfort me back home, I remember when... all things were good and wallpaper STAYED nailed down with glue. Precepts and disgruntlements fall away from the center under this tremendous reality-weight: the simple COLOR everything has, the pattern of lights that pervades the land and-- heigh ho silvvvver!-- makes a marble cake out of what used to be nothing but a singleshaded floury stew. It's not all bad that some things drain away out of you and into what could be called a puddle of disappearingness. Something good and hard like dried up icecream could come out of it eventually. The healthy blender and its good strong daze of drinks is sitting out its time in the corner of the counter tonight. Tomato globes pulp up into a harmless acidy jazz; carrots turn to orange liquid jewels and shot-glassfuls of health. Everything in sight is just Grist for the Mill! It thinks to itself, this blender, it hums and it moans: "Nothing can escape my bent prop of desire." Whirr.
5
Industrious, narrow-headed fuck: my brother. Jack, you spatula of a man, singeing your ears against all doors of no connection to you or desire to BE connected to you: Jack Smack. That's what we all used to call you, white veins spilling all magic at the causeway in your head. You had all the ideas, all the big plans and the sheer gall of carry through. Dark as an oilspot, leaning in the dark against the mustang you lifted from some rich friend of yours-- spent weeks wheedling your way up next to him to get inside of his pulse; you were sneaky as a chocolate addiction, Jack. Dark and leaning, you spilt out with your leather tongue all ways to get all liquor out of the stores with or without ID. Your hands on the glass restless and dirty, scratchy a bit and a bit nervous to get a hold of some round green cheap whiskey bottle tucked in the fadeaway colors of your jacket while calmly and without hesitation you purchased a pack of gum or some stupid crackers we would all push together in warmth and forgetfulness to eat with the dissolved portions of our tongues. No flavor but the aftertaste hangover sensation of chewed and puked caraway seeds. And the car under us snapping away behind our ambitionless and real thoughts like a flag; a fast car always, and always returned with the right sort of apologies to keep us free and almost without blame. A full tank of gas and an aureate sense of coolness and "we'll let you join" and a palmful of good heavy pot that you had somehow otherwise rippedoff anyway composed the musical of you apologies-- innumerable and delicious in a crooning way. Like a dog after a flea you wouldn't stop at your highanded acting and histrionics until the poor bastard had screamed your own blamelessness at you in a voice even Eisenhower couldn't ignore. But damn those dark rides lit my heart up, all butane and inexhaustible and BURNING.
6
Nobody likes me. If only I could remember some unasked kindness, something with give in it that had not been asked for, begged for, in a hundred private ways. My rat bait glistening sugar white and sightless mental cues sent up for the world to see as regular and grey as weather balloons over Alaska.
My first cruelty chugged out of me at spitball speed, landing on this girl's nose like a fat fly. She had a tintype face, darting forward with its rasp red cheeks and thin steel halfdollar size eyeglasses.
"Whatcha reading?" her voice all cream and strong flavored as au gratin spuds.
"Nothing," I said. "School." And put down the book like laying out a formaldehyde butterfly.
She walked around slow, all right angles and poise. Some rag weeds splashed out of her hands in a tiny grenade-gasp of green; she shoved a dandelion bud onto the cigarette curb and began a careful dissection of its powers.
"This is how it grows out from a vase shape into that big puffhead it gets on it. See?"
She showed me a clean sideview executed with her milky nails.
"This is what feeds it," opening the long mauve stem identically. "The sun comes up in this tube all liquid."
"How's it get liquid?" No girl would catch me learning something from her.
"Oh. Simple chemistry, I guess."
There was a pause, she turned to me her cartwheel eyes and flashpowder face in a mellow triangle of attention. Looking at her, feeling my clothes on me close, guarding my breathing, taping me down by situation and name, I suddenly felt as diminished and distant inside of myself as a radio football game clucking from a blind transistor behind the solid iron barbecue sinking in the grass out back. I took my hands off of the burning curved tusk of curb. I put them away, placing them carefully in the cold dirt at my hips.
I was finished talking for that day.
Smiling to see me so strange and disentangled, she put a weedleaf loop around her bouquet of weeds and tied it. The knot made a little wavy M out of the leaf. I watched without humming as she changed the station channel in her skull and uncrossed her legs to walk towards a dog that had been chasing itself in dogstyle figureeights ever since lunchtime.
7
"Somebody in the office has a loose left nut."
"What do you mean?"
"I heard Farley is considering dismissal of someone in this office for psychiatric reasons."
"Kind of illegal, isn't it?"
"Not when it can get done under retirement regulations."
"Oh."
8
I was stuck, when a very little kid, with all this rain and stuff coming down on my head in the middle popping blister of the night. The house had long since dark been silenced for the tin-scratch passage of chipmunks. The black with white white speckles roof had avoided its responsibilities all day. Dry, slick-looking slant of giant midnight noface cards put on a house to make a house, the contents of which are unknowable and insane as all whispers the whisperer keeps glued to his palm in the feigned act of communication. When a house is dry the roof is merely shirking. Pretending to be jaded and suave for sheeted asphalt, the roof simpers its way upwards to an antenna pinnicle, trying to look like its shedding or cupping the pour-away sky. The roof lay temperate, discursive. The sky burned blue.
Certainly there was nothing like it for a boy, sitting in that room I more or less owned and treated like my favorite haven-- which it was when the rain came plastering down the skysides in droves. Ice cube room of cool thoughts and a lazy boy' breezy ways. Sifting mintshaded and submersed in the sumac afternoon, I watched the cieling reflecetions of the terribly GROWN green summer trees retreat to a window corona in the corner and darken a hue. The one pure rainbow of the hot applepie season, which let me dream waking as in a huge hammock-suspension, (slow sway, wait, slow sway), had disappeared to a crown stab of light cresting the baywindow, its myriad square and mercury panes. Pretty soon the whole room was in this iodine cotton. It hurt me to breathe more than a dixiecup suss of air. The house shored itself up in one tremendous, slow creak.
Outside, the clouds cragged black. The horizon and disappeared in a blemish of lightlessness--- sad sunk vapors and nigardlyness heavy with the effort to weep. Some tree cracks off in the distance. Limb of my limb, I close my own boy-soul completely and start to darken down to sleep.
Shadow of water, first brush of rain encapsulating the house. I took my isolation to me like a glove, new clean linen fresh on my heart. Aorta pulmenator, let me breathe water. Roof at last accomplished in the duty of its fear: resistence. Rain, rain.
9
Yeah, I know you. You're the most sucecessful new products manager at U. S. Chemical & Co. You're the man the president calls by a nickname. I know you. You're the man starting maybe to think about things that nobody told you how to think about before. Maybe things are starting to slack at your empty desk; wives and houses you ventured to think you could rely on by the efforts of onesided love (on their part) are beginning to catch the backwind scent of free thin-leaved meadows hazardous with wildflowers and stinkweeds untamed by pesticides or grief. Yoiu're the man with more green in his wallet than his head; your sense of style is totally contingent upon results. You wear new shoes more often than you need to, slick leather hand-sewn and tatooed by experts, knowing the mild rise in esteem that will result. You're the man whose linen collar has started to pinch on fat; excesses nof all flavors are turning your jugular to sludge. You're the man that lets himself smilew on the sly everytime he hears the word Fuck. You're the man whoi jangles spoites on his keyring and rolls small victories into a foil ball that he keeps under his bed, a frosted metallic ball he fondles at night. I know you. You with the 5 o'clock shadow that is never shaved, never has aq reason to be shaved. I know you. I am the cockroach that watches from all four corners simultaneously. I see you early, loitering in a low light, working up excuses against going into the office that day, whispering fiercely to yourself, stalking the kitchen in a loose robe like Cicero. I see you late at night, gathering my ashtray crumbs from a ceiling vantage, knuckling your unwashed face like a forestfire, trying to rub sleep into your eyes. I am the nag itch that crawls between you armpit hairs, making you sweat. I am the young boy in a navy windbreaker who sits alone in the cross aisle, following your drunkenness with mimic flamboyance. I am as safe as death. And I see you coming down on the path train, voice loud with Miller or Schlitz, lips full of clumsy German syllables, slouched alongside your red buddies, smelling worse than whores, coming down off the sharp New York City Burn and ether, dotted with convention cardboard and totems, sliding blankly into Jersey City and the great southern regions of your despair.
10
Trapped in my America, I try to tap my way out of it. Can a desperate enough man rhyme his way out of his troubles? Evocci! What's past is past is past is past. The dead grave is dull buried. Don't dust clean the homerun electroplate pallate. Let lost loves lie laquered in the leaflayers. Moldy mootings, behold! I unpack my pick like a whole cathouse of whores--- to blink my words down by typeface and nail. Tap. Tap. Trinkets tripped down to the low level once. Dig, then, shoulder & bone; harsh with spades picket the earth until up come the trinkets, grim with rust, glad with time--- alive!
11
After my domestic time confined to the inabilities of a wife, my first, I poured my peering, dangling eye into a battered box of hobbies. Took up fishing first off, placed my blank white cap as raucously aslant as politics. Smunch it down comfy, then fold my body into the snowpea shell of canoe. Placid glass stretching out in an even denial of gravity, everywhere around the prow of the canoe wounding itself in a mercury boil and then healing itself with equal speed by a process I could not even guess at. The sharp, low stern took care of itself; I do not recall having ever looked back.
12
"Mmmm. I like that. What is it?"
"Keep your hands in your pockets. It's perfume."
"I know that. But what kind?"
"You don't have a wife, and I have a year's supply."
"You just kissed goodbye to christmas, honey."
"I'm palpitatin'."
"Why you snyde bitch...."
"Pardon?"
"When do you get off for lunch?"
13
Perhaps it is typical, indicitive, or "symnptomatic" of this concave era. In such an era there is only one creature which it is profitable to imitate: the Ant-Lion. his roars are silent; feathery chalk marks on the sidewalk. In digging his retreat he creates as reflection of his world. Dusty bowl haven that puts ants on the skids. He eats anything, late trains, lost change, the past. He is perfectly protected, being the lowest point on a low curve. His jaws are hidden and are the color of dust; his body breathes the dark. He occupies the position of greatest strenght and assaertion in the bend of a bow, the point of greatest pressure.
"And are you... ah." She smiled at me above her glass.
"Ain't scared." The restaurant was filled with tables the size of chackerboards and the clotted smell of pasta. "What are you getting at, anyway?"
She put her wineglass down, a flamingo cresent stain.
"Nothing." Her smile widened. "I just thought...."
She doodled wavy circles on the tablecloth with her fingernail. Her chest was high and quick; packed snow. Without ruffles, her clean straight outfit traced her figure in solid dark blue, a deep living shadow. She leaned, her hard breasts a delayed accentuation.
"All right, all right." I smiled at her smile. "Waiter!"
Folding cash and rising to go, the delicate, depressed shell of her wineglass spilled, a Cyranosian nosebleed. Moments later it rolled drunkenly, in indirect spirals, and kbroke on the floor.
"Watch out for your heel," I warned, extending a silk elbow.
14
There is in all of this a confusion of motion. Today I ate no curds, nor weighed my appetite to some fabulous pre-fixed notion of a "proper" amount to eat. I had three eggs, done easy, four and one half slices of toast (two buttered, one un, one and a half cream cheesed in lieu of a bagel), no orange juice, no coffee, only a small pale cylinder of apple juice, no milk, and one cup of Grandmeir's weak stomach formula tea.
4 a.m.
Sat in the dark for two hours after this. Imagined the look of the juice as it lit up my intestines with a long slow track of cold. Like squeezing a mountain cloud out of its liquor--- you can feel the rock-cold under your skin really clearly. Then the small rat-scratch as the toast squeaks down. All this only imagined in the awake dark. The tea nothing in you but an alert burn of liquid. You can sort of feel your body turn mohogany as you swallow. Your legs double under the simple kitchen chair easily, feet hissing mocasssin-quiet over the cold linoleum. Your eyes feel like they're bursting forward out of you in dumb moony circles of apprehension. And even as you think this you know that it is so.
For a couple of hours I squinted into the pitch air and pretended that I could make out the moon-shines of hard objects lying about. But that was only a lie. There has been a heavy storm in this area for the last three days. I wouldn't be surprised if someone walked down from the sky right now to inform me that the wet clouds had been knuckled like a Welsh miner's coal-black fist over the roof of the house the entire time. I just wish he'd been here this morning so that I could've seen the silver words come streaking milky and free from his glow-lips myself. I could've used some of that at that time. Goodnight, myself, bad night.
It is now exactly 11:35 p.m.
15
Factually speaking, Christ is dead. Whenever you get down to cases with Mormons or whoever, they always come up with some slick line or other about the eternity of spirit or blabber about miracles of the divine incarnate, etc. But the fleeced fact remains: a body is a body is liable to die. Just look at that red protoplasm humping the clean woodsy hills at Rome. That is the surviving corpus of the divine being, waiting like a UFO addict to be reinhabited from above? More merciful to settle the whole business in your mind as a delicate sort of decapitation and leave it at that. Otherwise, it seems to me, you're just making the whole Hill of Skulls scene into a quilty, bobwire-ringed madcap. Or something like that.
Oh Hell, just drop it. I never should have stuck my head back into that tight octagon of a church (delapidated woodframe made snug against ghosts or wind or otherwise in the long ago of my childhood: plaster pillars out front-- four-- weaved collection basket and everything; sunday school takes place in the secret indoctrination rooms of the basement). Never even should have lowered the volume of the TV. It's only Wedensday. Got to shake my fur ears clear to the mourning wax, now.
Gave them all of the change in my pockets, though; guess there's nothing so bad about me, when you lay a perspective like that on it. Nope. Nothing at all. I even kind of walked lighter with the loss of weight and the absence of the bell-sound of the coins chirping along my thigh.
Just drop it down.
16
"Drive slower."
"People always have been telling me that."
"To drive slower?"
"Drive slower. Talk nicer. Wipe your feet. Brush teeth. Smile bigger. Negate absolutly. Keep your sheets clean. Everything."
"Well, just slow down anyway."
"I just did."
17
Why something bad always happen anyhow? Can't understand the insistant dialectic of it. Anyhow, let me attempt to describe to you a human being, since these are always the raw material that evil does its testing-out on. I may be one day persuaded that there is a polite difference between badness and evil, but so far as I can now discern, they taste about the same.
Face: clean shaven, apparent age (40s) hiding in the soft wrinkles by his eyes, and evading most other inspection in the rise of premature blue chalk veins on his inner elbows (mostly the left one). Occupation: once born, he put in a turn as son to loving parents, coterminal with this he was lawncutter, paperboy, poolcleaner, dogwalker, briarclipper, pale slave to his daddy's quarters, everything, in fact, except a producer of liberty footballs from a pregnant T-shirt hunchbacking his stomach like a polyester bullfrog about to belch praise of mud-nature's beautiful, dark ways. Hands: ladylike continuations of the slip-smooth wrists until age fourteen, when the thumbs began to bulk up and gain a hard angle at the first knuckle, since then, only a kind of sandpaper texture has been added; presently, they relax in his lap, and like the tongues of bored and perfect twins, they redden and move only at the instigation of the hope of finding some more absolutely febrile and tensionless position to abandon the world in. Now they fondle a sudden cigarette, whose instant miracle marble appearance is to be wondered at. Now they allow this cigarette (unlit) to lie parallel along a leg. The hands look as if they have gathered and dispersed innumerable toothpicks an infinite number of times, and each time the direction and width of the grain of the individual sliver was measured and remembered and became part of an infinite catalog of details that are not asked by any deliberation of the mind to be remembered or cataloged, but are so treated because the nature of the hands themselves is such that they are unable to forget anything that exists or grows on a level so delicate and nonchalant as the minor details of the toothpicks or slivers exist or grow.
And this is what the mirror was beginning to tell me when my sly eyes slipped tragically off the rainbow bevel edge. The Disneyland colors of that edge, seperate, psychadelic, absolute---conjoined in the air around me, mixing infinitely, without number, or even concern, at all.
You would've though it was raining haloes. It was that bright.
18
Caught again in the onyx undertow of timesurge. I thrash a prehostoric, emotional set of cilia madly to stay afloat. When I graduated to a car and summer freedom, I would go every day instantly as if drawn, and sit by water. Myriad others, slouched in their identical iron filings, were pointed towards the sun as well, watching it bounce, steel and magnetic, on the ocean's surface.
A man, his shadow, and the sun will make a triangle on level ground. An abrupt, wavy shadow moved along the beach in the hot yellow afternoon. It was only one dumb gull, but it made me think of the triangle that had so often put me in the mood of threat ands fire. Haphazard driftwood cut up the long plank of sand that composed the beach with assorted shapes and temnts of shadow. The surf curled green above itself and white above itself and white and green over the sparkle slice of beach below the tidemark. Everything felt completely seperate from myself, whittled from a pinelike material I could never touch, never have touched, never known by any other medium than that of detached sight. The air attached itself to everything in a clear moist syrup, dipped each object in glycerin silence, the air itself clinging and whole and without center.
"Busy?"
"Not much," I replied.
It was Vanyon. His spadeshaped head thrust along above the triple rolled chokegrey collar of his turtleneck shirt. The tan line of his acvtive, broad jaw worked parallel with the blade horizon, sometimes above the limit of the ocean, sometimes beneath.
"Did you hear about Jess?" he said, his hand flashing along his chin in a beard-mime stroke.
"Jess? No."
And I didn't, either.
19
The rug had snakes on it. Bluetwisting around the round edge along in closed Ss through a deepred sea. Filigree tendrils splashed out of the head or arms maybe the sides of all the snakes at all times, bent, bending irradiating the blood waters on all sides. The round rug. The inescapable rug. Living room empty daylight lingering family discussion rug. Everyone sit down cross-legged, in premonition of the sixties. Catch your teeth if you say something shocking, bad words will rot you make you rotten inside out. Better to save them shocks until your collapsing guts crush them into pearls.
Rounding his lips, my dad did excrete his cast of peril to swine. Moving is a big step, and you're all old enogh to have a vote ignored in this matter. A young mortgage is assumed. Cut off your presnets present friends by their omphaloses. Adrift until you cranny up to new little livers of your complexion. Secrete your tender barnacles up against some lovely bud. Chicago is a far fall from Eden, Conneticut.
Deep down in the undersea, a sheaf of rose coral began to agitate.
20
"Not today."
"And next week is definately out."
"I hear he left his keys in his Jaguar with the door unlocked."
"Pure assholism."
"100 proof."
21
I've been seeing this person with hazel-nut hair floating in front of me all day today; straight hair cut just above the shoulder, all I see disappearing just around the corners I am about to take. This is starting to bother me.
22
Today I tried to kill myself. The world floated under me from the sixth or seventh story of Tommy's cheap apartment. The low road, mellowed with fading light, the vivid lawn, two maple trees like balls, and even the bent edge of the turned down sea lifted themselves towards me and pulled themselves away like the view of yourself that you get from those trapezoid shoplifter mirrors that condense the large zone of store activity into a breakfast dish small enough for the pensioned K-Mart detective to eat with his eyes.
Perhaps under the careless gaze of birdwatchers, I watched the whole world, bizzarre and flambouyant, revolve its soft meltcolor balloon panoply beneath me. The high building, as steady behind me as my granite hands grabbing it, bolstered my wilting back away from the nightmarish vision of such a profoundly flimsy target for my dense despair to smash itself on. For all I knew, it could be a trampoline waiting in ambient coils to fling me back to my original state, so whimsically did the entire sight swirl with a thought. My tight hands, invisible to me then, were webbed with the dew of a miserable morn.
23
Per haps I disturb the world with better prose now, now that the red tick in my chest is silence and no longer delivers irritations to the far limbs of dirt-flesh, the corpus of being that closes in like cellulite around the encapsulating capillaries that mark the outreaches of my systems. Maybe I do write better: opinionless and clear. But somehow there seems to be less humanity in it, fewer clues, a smaller number of crumbs leaking back from the guilty palms to define the night residences of hunger, the place where the harmless man who likes apple pies and quiet lies down. It seems more like lying than effusion can ever give the impression of being. In the morning, I find myself littered with nails, and rolling over on odd chunks of plaster when I wake up to finish the last movie set I was building. My hands creep into craft. I paint a square sky, angle the camera, and know that the illusion will hold. This is my world. I, who am able to belch the universe and then apologize demurely for the feat! And no one will read this. And still I confine my soul to adjectives and outrageous African masks.
24
Assuming an auditor, I think I should let you in on one of my high-school productions, Hinkley-style. In the long afternoons, smoking, tapping my teeth with my tongue, I would hum and bellow to myself, watching the sun collapse against the stoop.
Arthur, Arthur
Except we die by dole
there's no conclusion-- like
the last elipsis dot
that wanders off the page....
Save we're pushed,
who would punch the clock?
Arthur, Arthur
my dear boy clear of poison
I ask you.
Life, life
in your young bones and leathered limbs,
what wasn't there to love?
Your new eyes could bubble Os
at the promise of a kitten.
Arthur, Arthur
first, disappointment in your parents
sank its wry sugar in your teeth.
Why,
they couldn't cook a sausage rope
without the blessings of the pope.
Remember guilt embodied
in too-many, too-hot, tummy-burning pies
you forced down you
like stew?
The way
your father beat jazz rhytm
with the hammer of his palm, and you
kept time his time
through the polyester of your pants.
Hemopheliac, back to the medical center.
Miricle rides in hospital cars
whizzed you by to learn
"the art of sewing."
Who knew that a window pane
wasn't a sideways pool? You never guessed
as you reached your gold hand to petal
the butterfly stroke.
Arthur, Arthur
with age you got intelligence,
a quiet, bleating presence
that held you hand away from stoves
and mocked you like a senate.
Arthur, Arthur
you were too wise to wither
by any less than
impulse.
Who can be a Caesar
in his own realm of thought?
Arthur,
Arthur
your dumb, mum lips
held themselves to blister
against the rising heat
of the shiskabobbing secrets
that trembled your blood globes.
You only whispered:
"Life, life
the morning was too honest--
you knew you grew
too narrow-eyed for innocence,
too cynical for pause.
Life, life
your thumb-notched gauge repeats
the rhythm, and the beat
pulses in me like a prayer.
Life, life
life, you die."
25
"He tried to kill himself."
"Really? How do you know?"
"Tommy."
"How does he know?
"When someone misatakes your window for the bathroom... well."
"Really? But why?"
"Wrong glands. Who knows?"
"Ix nay. Here he comes."
"Hi!" In stereo.
26
Hallucinations were never a hobby of mine. Why can't somebody just cut out all of this stuff that occurs between blinks? Dark blinks eventually extending into dreamless sleep like drowning in black coffee that induces, not hyperactivity, but hyper-unconsciouness. I will sacrifice my grace to a stifflegged zombie waltz at any moment necessary to achieve this goal.
The cap of hair, doll-straight, is floating before me even now. Does sheer memory exert this pressure in my bubble of consciouness? Short lines of sunlight bounce back, taking on the hazel-nut tone of the hair. I'm trying to get this straight. Just the facts. Bending so that the glimmer will catch me headon, I figure out from my hunch that the hazel-nut person is short, about 4' 6". Running down the hallway still in the convict stripes of my pyjanas (I've horrible taste), I see the miniature figure, tense and angled and a little bit see-through, disappear through an ochre opening at the back wall like a watercolor. I have been so lax in my general observations, and so intent on the frail outline of hair, that I could not describe the clothes the figure wore, or even tell if it was wearing gloves.
27
Doubled over with an uncompleted thought, gestures crippled to a fist. At an advanced age, when the effort to explain ourselves seems too large and uneconomical compared to the constant and immeadiate dynamic readjustment of our indwelling minds to the minutie of environments both internal and external, our bodies begin to darken towards rest. Introspection becomes a reexamination of specific sensations by a different mind. This different mind is our own; the sensations start at the base of the spine, or the periphery of a hand's orbit intersecting an apple's rough circumference. We become closed globes of emotional algae exposed to a fertile heat. The apoplectic nuclei divide in swarms, but are like a divorced man and wife forced to continue sleeping in the same bed. Subtle machetes and edges begin to appear, the sewing scissors glisten with a strange attraction. Rest becomes a function of applied will and valium. Restless fingers of the same hand click on the clock in opposing rhythms. Every object becomes symbolic of the self's struggle. Every sound transformed to a significant whisper. The paced step stings with unpunctured secrets. the lindentree outside is contemplating an unspoken algebra.
Suicide is a pocketwatch that never leaves the vest.
An internal phenominon.
Experiment without outlet.
28
I bundled some acorns in my hungry fist. They rattled with the polished knock of dice. Dillitantish and demure, I searched the warping, late July house for a nutcracker, my slight spindled silver one with dead dad's initials alarmingly carved in lightning italics by the big hooked teeth. Overturned blue cushions wobbled on the carpet behind me in jumping senile squares of an oddly fabric ocean; curving my limp neck in a starboard gaze, my gallopping eye espied a soft gleam beneath a motley hummock of unwashed stuff-- lecherous laundry hunkering itself up to a hateful height, like a startled cat, on the mirrored, wave-shaped bureau top. Without displacing one strangled sock, or oscillating any rolled-back anemone sweatshirt sleeves, I took possession of the cragged and winsome instrument that would relieve my lank desire.
With a smooth crack I entered the tan brains of the acorn.
It was my enemy; it was a solitary face time had worn away. I was murder the color of a dead leaf.
My neck felt scaly, on the inside, and I let the chrome-sullen nuctcracker fall with an aghast clatter onto the puling pool breau. I was amazed that it did not sink immeadiately into the dank and inky depths it so solemnly reflected. suprised, no spectral squid lifted a twisted tantacle to claim the bloody, pulped prize. and I was so sure that some dwindled double of that movie-screen malficient lurked in those deep, slyly harboring drawers. Ah, well, shattered again.
It was then that I discovered, in querelous mid-hover above a jock-strap, that the hazel-nut head of hair had appeared again. A moldy organ laboured somewhere behind the crafty scenery. Hollow hootings betrayed the cinematic hope of a happy ending. It did not shine, glimmer timerously, or otherwise distract me from a careful attention to its few features. Detaching itself placidly from the rainbow pile of clothes and "things," like a whipped puff of cotton candy from a kid's sticky chin, a child-body materialized in personable curves from the side of the dresser. Navy blue short coat with identical ankle-length slacks. It was like watching a polite puppet being unpacked from his circus trunk, free swing of escaped knees and elbows, a glued moment at the shoe (soft scuffed loafers), then bouyancy and a pleasant bounce out the door. I gave heated chase, although slow as a pearl suspendede in shampoo.
emerging from the slick, ammoniac doorway (I had just painted), I saw the hazel-nut hair shrimp slope off to the right; towards the sharpened kitchen instruments, I surmused. I reached the kitchen panting, enormous with anger, curious, abrupt and unbalanced as a parade float in headwinds. Staring from an unentangled height, I watched the hazel-nut hair person, snagged by a corner current, rubbing his stomach in closed strokes; a tilted back was all that confronted me, a circulating arm, the small face, as always, averted and blurred.
I floated forward, nakedly crushing early lilies, no doubt, and knelt as near as I could. I probably had some avid idea of bending back his countenance, like a gauze, to see what was really there. I looked directly, craning for the view and a solid purchse on the wickedly slick linoleum, into the immobile, shifting, docile, vivid reddish smear of its face. I licked my lips. I found I could not speak a word, so instead, in the fixed silence, I motioned, fish-mouthed, in semaphore pantomime whisper, tacitly, void into void, Who are you?
29
I have decided to burn my journal. I will.
30
7:22 a.m. The damn alarm.
Toast. Coffee. Jam, raspberry. Colorless orange. No cigarette.
7:50 Twenty minute ride to work. Thick traffic.
8:20 Settled in at desk. Review boxing mat specifications.
Morning Shirley. Good morning, sir.
South to Newark. Tour the plant facilities with Al from NW Chem. He likes the new compression molds. He is equivocal about buying my mats. We do not eat lunch.
11:54. Glanced at my watch.
Office gossip about the girl in purchasing. The virtu of Mr. Aldington's manhood is in doubt. Everybody thinks the oriole on the windowsill is beautiful and misplaced.
Boss Irene shakes me gently awake above the rubber washer ring diagrams. Caught napping.
3:10. A long smoke. No rings. Lucky Strike.
Caught napping. Secretary bundles me into car.
Night, Shirley, thanks. Goodnight, sir.
5:20. A long day.
Swanson veal and macaroni. Flatter curls than previously. Not as good anymore. Pepsi, refridgerated. Two cigarettes.
Mahler, Vivaldi. Half of a Wagner opera.
1:15. Can't sleep. Smoke a Marlboro and fall into useless dream.
31
ONE.
1. Camera opens with a 6 foot square of ceiling. White. 32".
2. Cut to side view of undulating male torso. Breathing in and out. It looks like nothing so much as a wave, a seismograph, an alpha brainscan pattern of sleep. 10".
3. Cut to ceiling as before. 32".
4. Cut to man lying on pallette pushed against the walll. His face is turned away from the camera and towards the wall. The wall is a uniform, blinding white. 40".
5. Cut to close up of wall. White. 5".
6. Cut to close up of left hand. It is red and hard, but not "beaten" by weather or other effects. It rests on top of hip above green cotton blanket. It is caught in a slash of hot light from the single 6-pane window. 5".
7. Sideview as before. 2".
8. Cut to left hand. It moves, the fingers curling under themselves begginning with the pinky and eventually ending up looking like a tense red crab. 25".
9. Cut to right hand buried under blanket, its thick outline is just barely discernable. 10".
10. Cut to close up of wall. The lowest corner of the window is visible in upper left hand. 3".
11. Cut to 6 foot square of ceiling as before. 2".
12. Cut to right hand as before. 2".
13. Right hand moves towards the left, pauses at groin with scratching motion.s. 12".
14. Cut to close up of wall as before, with corner of window visible. 3".
15. A flush of rain begins to fall against the lighted windowpane. One of those rare sunlit rains. 10".
16. Cut to ceiling as before. 3".
17. Cut to man lying on pallet. He faces ceiling squarely. Man yawns with eyes closed. 7".
18. Cut to ceiling as before. 2".
19. Cut to left hand. Left hand moves right until it is above the right hand. It claps right hand through blanket above crotch. 20".
20. Cut to close up of window. The rain is mysterious and constant in the whitening light of a clear high sky. 7".
21. Cut to ceiling as before. White. 32".
FADE TO A PERFECTLY CLEAR FRAME. INTENSE WHITE FLOOD.
32
7:44 a.m. Wkoe & rose.
The blue suit today. The grey striped tie.
8:15. Doughnut shop. A chocolate eclair. Jasmine tea.
8:36. Stumble to desk. Chgrined greetings.
Work straight through until noon. Anderson affair ready to bve presented and finalized at board meeting.
12:11. Pick nose. Blood ruins grey tie. The toilet swirled red.
No lunch.
Work straight until four0thirty. Experimental rubbertree hybrid too expensive to develop further. A red herring.
4:446. Marked loss of appetite.
No dinner.
7:22. Papers littered with the deaths of gangsters. Three middle aged men and a twelve year old gunned down at La Italiana's.
8ish. Shower. Shave. Tepid water.
Make a pot of tea and watch NBC straight through Johnny Carson.
Obituary page is smeared. But I count four deaths in my county.
1:00. Exactly.
Sleep.
33
TWO.
The Pattern.
1. Camera opens with a close up of a pair of shoes. They are work boot style, untied. They lie in a "V", one on top of the other, untied, at the side of the pallet. The green pallet acts as a smoothly crenelated backdrop. 32".
2. Left hand, red and worn, invades the frame. Picks up and removes left shoe. 15".
3. Left foot enters frame, with shoe on. 5".
4. Right hand picks up right shoe and removes it from frame. 7".
5. Left leg from knee down moves until it makes a diagonal from top right of frame to bottom left. The green blanket wriggles for a few moments. 15".
6. Right foot, with shoe, enters frame. 3".
7. Right and left legs below knees turn to face camera directly. They make a straight pair of verticles in dungarees. 10."
8. Legs rock slightly as the man stands up. The backdrop blanket flurries and is still. 5".
9. Cut to shot of floor. Dull green, textured carpet from 6 foot height. 15".
10. Cut to shot of far corner in direction of B. Edge of shelves visible on right side. 10".
11. Move slowly from A to B. Shelves enlarge, names of books are indistinct, but a painted plaster camel is visibke with its miniature monolithic storage hump fake-gem encrusted. Stop. Man reaches out, grabbing an old, framed photograph. Cannot see what it is of, only that it is old. It quickly moves out of frame and we see only the "W" of his two elbows as he holds the photograph. 58".
12. Stop at B. Tight shot of corner. 3".
13. Cut to shot of floor. The corner is visible at top of frame. The carpet is mostly shadowdark from the man's body. 5".
14. Cut to view of far corner in direction of point A. 3".
15. Move slowly from B towards A. Stop at C. 7".
16. Cut to shot of floor. First three inches of shoes are visible. Shadow. 5".
17. Cut to shot of D corner. 3".
18. Move slowly from C to D. 7".
19. Cut to shot of floor and corner as before. 5".
20. Cut to view of far corner in the direction of E. 3".
21. Move slowly from D to E. 3".
22. Cut to shot of floor and corner as before. 5".
23. Cut to view of far corner in direction of D. 3".
24. Move slowly from E towards D. Stop at C. 7".
25. Cut to shot of floor, with shoes, as before. No shadow. 5".
26. Cut to shot of A corner. Pallet is visible in lower lefthand portion of the frame. 3".
27. Move slowly from C to A. 7".
28. Cut to shot of floor. Green bent blanket blends into the texture of the carpet in the upper lefthand. 5".
29. Same as 10.
30. Same as 11, except photograph is not picked up.
31. Same as 12.
32. Same as 13.
33. Same as 14.
34. Same as 15.
35. Same as 16.
36. Same as 17.
37. Same as 18.
38. Same as 19.
39. Same as 20.
40. Same as 21.
41. Same as 22.
42. Same as 23.
43. Same as 24.
44. Same as 25.
45. Same as 26.
46. Same as 27.
47. Same as 28.
48. Same as 29.
49. Repeat series 29 through 48.
50. Same as 49.
51. Same as 50.
52. Same as 51.
53. Same as 52.
54. Same as 53.
55. Same as 54.
56. Same as 55.
57. Same as 56.
58. Repeat series 49 through 57.
59. Cut to shot of legs from blue knees down as before. Man has finished deterministic, X-shaped pacing. Style for negation perhaps. 10".
60. Cut to shot of wall with window in upper lefthand corner. Strong light. 5".
61. Cut to a shot of the window. The rain is still falling. Hold for 32 mins. 32".
FADE TO BLACK.
34
4:50 a.m. Insomniac habitat intact. Slight inexpressible giddiness.
5:10. Refer feels cool in my lungs. Throat impossibly clogged.
6:01. Swallowed hailstones. 1/2 gallon of ice and hot tea alternately completely ineffective.
6:36. Red-rimmed dawn.
6:37. A literal minute has passed. Unbelievable.
6:40. Rosy shower.
6:55. Skipped breakfast. Mixed handful of afterdinner mints.
7:25. Curved around park. Tossed mints to late geese sleeping on lawn.
8:04. Work. Even beat Shirley in.
8:06. Start coffee machine.
8:15. Coffee thick and sugary, bitter molassass in my neck.
9:45. Sell Al 20,000 high-quality rubber mats by phone before consciousness has chance to hit him.
10:12. Irene hands me one of her personal Stogies, which I decline to smoke, circling my adamsapple with an explanitory finger. Jittery, relieved.
10:16. General congratulations. I cough my thanks. Irene hands me the day off.
10:22. Slight smile. Exit.
11:10. Arrive doctor's. Nurse/receptionist wrinkles her lips under her balanced Dutch cap. "Sit."
11:17. My third National Geographic.
11:34. Whit stockinged girl escorts me to exam room. Ammonia, closed cabinets. Fairly tight ass.
11:42. Half the metal table's paper scrapped. Doctor enters.
11:52. Warnings and expostulations.
11:53. Scribbled prescription, expulsion.
11:56. Imprecations and a bill. Her hat is tilted towards sinking.
12:27. Vichy soise. View of blue sky and concrete. Decide to jump in ocean.
1:14. Pay my way onto beach. It is very hot and dented by previous feet. Blond toddler wobbles by on waterwings.
1:17. On the dot. I confront the ice mystery of the sea.
1:48. tall iced OJ. My stomach bleats. The gaudy stand drops square shade over goose pimples and raised hairs.
2:09. Uncontrollable erection as I depart the arotic beach, tan sands and all.
2:18. Shiver through intersection "mishap." 16-wheeler missed hissing front fender by three inches.
4:44. Nothing. Extract myself from a naked nap on the tilting chair to make a drink.
6 p.m. The Cocktail Hour.
7:30. M*A*S*H is on.
7:50. A pleasant numbness. I humm "We Shall Overcome," and poretend my hands are a harmonica.
8:06. The TV makes me dizzy.
8:28. Piss wildly, half a foot wide of the toilet. Never used to strike me as funny.
10:41. Larengitis. Somehow, it figures.
12:03. Four shots of Niquil and silence.
35
THREE.
1. Camera opens with a 6 foot square of white wall. There is a loud knock from an unidetifiable source; the wall, the door, the window, a bird, a stranger, a thrown rock, a tense pipe shaking. 32".
2. Cut to back view of male torso. A square window is visible beyond this figure. Rain. 32".
3. Cut to close up of left hand. It curls languidly into a fist. Fist slowly knocks against left thigh. 32".
4. Cut to view of back as before. Man turns to left. 32".
5. Cut to close up of wall. 32".
6. Cut to close up oif feet, the described shoes, etc. as before. 32".
7. Cut to view of door; it is of plain, straight grain, darkly lined. 32".
8. Move slowly to close up of door. Stop. 32".
9. Cut to close up sideview of torso facing door. 32".
10. Cut to close up of doorknob, a dull brass glow. A red hand enters frame and closes around knob, making its distorted reflections seem fiery. 32".
11. Cut to close up of door. It opens, unfolds. An empty white hallway is visible. 32".
12. Cut to close up of 6 foot square of hallway. Depthless white. 32".
13. Cut to righthand view down hallway. It recedes, infinite, undistinguished, doorless. 32".
12.
