AUDIO
#4
Percy,
The cast of characters at the Grind grows more intriguing every day. When I look for the ethos you proudly represented— idealism, radicalism, redeemed by a penchant for free love, I’m disappointed. But when I meet a girl like Dana, who comes close, I weep for what holds her back. Dana is twenty-four; she works nights and weekends. She has a face that isn’t quite nondescript; small, delicate features, blue eyes that bulge when she tries to force a point; cornstalk blonde hair; thin, girlish posture, with a voice that screams working class but has its own kind of sub-bourgeois refinement. Dana, I don’t believe, has ever had a serious boyfriend. What is she passionate about? Her ideals involve what girls (she never says, for some reason, “women”) can do, what hierarchies of patriarchy have taken away from her and her friends, and how personally important all her battles are. It’s correct in part; all major societies in recent memory have been patriarchies. But I get lost because there’s no space in her ideologies for anyone of the male gender. My motives with Dana aren’t entirely pure; she may represent an archetype, but she has some attractiveness, and I wouldn’t mind gallivanting around with her. Dana watches what I say for openings, to try and thwart me. She usually succeeds, because I’m careless and throw names around that I don’t know much about; I will reference “Judith Butler” or “Susan Sontag” with only a minimum of expertise where they are concerned. It’s not that she knows much about Butler or Sontag either, but somehow she can guess when I’m fibbing. And she’s always diddling and futzing with her Blackberry. It seems to me that girls with their Blackberries have no use for guys; the way they hold them, caress them, and dandle them takes the place of the male apparatus. It’s a new phenomenon, and please forgive my filthiness; girls in their 20s who have no aptitude for or interest in sexual intercourse. Dana has assumed to me the preciousness of a synecdoche. There is something in her that I see replicated on every street, in every park. Now that the Fugazi Fighters are on board again (and they seem to like Dana very much, probably out of prurience, because their eyes are too young to detect the celibacy traces that I do), the Grind is a veritable melting pot of syndromes, complexes, and neuroses.
This is all, I know, brutish, and if I’m failing to see divinity in a female of the species, let me be castigated for it. And yes, I can sense you will accuse me (quite rightly) of ephemeral interests, of depicting shrewish realities that will nonetheless not endure. It’s true, there is nothing enduring at the Grind, except all those human foibles, my own included (and I have been known recently to raise my voice to obnoxious pitches), which are as ineluctable as tides, and as quick to efface whatever sandcastles human beings have happened to build between eating, shitting, pissing, procreating, marrying, divorcing, working for purely mercenary interests or otherwise. In any case, because I know you will recoil in horror from the frankness of this missive, I hope you will not bear a grudge when I tell you that truth consonance alone is an eternal value, and I am attempting to speak with as much candor as the fraught circumstances allow…
Fond Regards,
Adam
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#5
Percy,
Denny showed up last night at the Grind. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and he displayed more joie de vive than usual. It may be because he was in possession of a large canister of Percocets. He gave me one, and I popped it when I came home. I rode out the high while staring up at the Utilities skyscraper across the street. Denny, who happens to be seven years older than me, is having some success with his painting business; he makes enough to live and obtain some luxuries, like the little Olde City trust-funders that act out bang and blame routines. Denny sometimes even writes to their mothers to let them know the mischief their daughters are up to. While we were wrapped up in our tete a tete, old Bennie Holmes come out of Frank’s across the street. He used to be a bouncer there, and was part of a group of street poets who I had to deal with when I was younger. Bennie’s putting on weight, getting jowls, and his own version of joie de vive involves consuming cheap beers until he has no choice but to spend twenty minutes in the bathroom. Those poets were always accusing me of friendlessness, rampant homosexuality, trust-funder decadence, dilettantism, amateurishness, incompetence, meanness, cowardice, brazenness, kikishness, and lack of self-awareness. As these are the traits that more or less distinguish them, it was a good lesson for me in the infinite human capacity for projection, just like every woman for you represented a new paradise, a new divinity, something in your soul that was being answered. The funny thing about Bennie and his friends is that their density can admit no weakness. Even now, as they hobble along dejectedly, they will tell you that they are, in effect, the greatest poets in the world, and always have been. The procession you call the Triumph of Life passes by them unexamined; no one has what they have. Denny, of course, has no idea about these guys, what travesties they’ve made of themselves. He painted the house of some rich poetess and was surprised when I hadn’t heard of her. And let’s face it; anyone willing to give out Percocets in 2010 must be descended from the angels. Highness is next to Godliness; because the normal level of consciousness these days is so abysmal.
Something I have been observing about the human race: as belonging to groups of one sort or another is an inescapable reality, why is it that each group claims greater necessity than every other group? There are about fifteen groups that think of me distinctly as “not one of us,” and each one claims a different form of predominance. The whole crux of human group formations is to foster the illusion of standing on a mountain over everyone else, to develop equations whereby the mountain has already been scaled, conquered. That’s certainly the case with Bennie and his street poet friends, who could claim at least some hegemony until I showed up. Since poetry has a pretty meager audience, and these poets are only marginally poets to begin with, you would think that after ten years these guys would realize that they happen to be standing on a reverse mountain— but this is poetry, they say, the most important art-form, and we are the poets, which makes us that little bit more important than everyone else. Apparently, poor Bennie can’t even control his farts anymore. It seems like a fair comeuppance for the farts he’s foisted on his few listeners. I apologize, as ever, for my Swiftian brutishness, but the scatological has its own predominance in 2010, and I’m riding ephemeral waves into ineffable permanence….
Fond Regards,
Adam
