Asphodel

I've been meaning these last months to write a story in which my character's life is destroyed as the indirect result of a decision to take three foundling kittens into his home. Here goes. The setting is Williamsburg, Brooklyn--birthplace of Henry Miller--in our paranoid-psychotic infrahuman modern times. The character is a sympathetic sort of guy. Will. Let's say he works in a bar, eight to four, a couple-three days a week. He has perhaps a bit of a drinking problem, maybe laced with a bit of a cocaine habit to see him through the witching hours and the after hours and the wherehavetheygone hours in between. But he's straight with the till--a good thing when you have a boss who is vigilant and absolutely ruthless--and customers like him as much for his touch with the telling of a story as for the attentive set of his face whenever he lends an ear, which is often. One sweaty morning in the summertime he comes stumbling down his bleak block after a shift and the perfunctory revel, his face a pasty setting for black-rimmed sockets and the scorched eyes they englobe. It's about six in the morning, give or take. Things are starting to come into view, and they don't look too appealing. Just the usual motley walls of blank-eyed hopelessness on either side, the usual buildings sagging under the multi-generational burden of petty failures and abnegation and stunted greed. A sunbleached Puerto Rican flag in a window here, a swank new tower carved out of the block and posted to a vacant destiny among the warrens. Just a modern cut out, a modern city setting where everything is incoherent from the bottom up, and where nothing, as Henry Miller might have put it, has ever happened. A couple doors short of his own he hears a cry for help and stops. There is a little rustle from the trash cove. This battered little building is the Pentecostal Church of Nuestro Creador y Salvador, and the thin yowling is coming from a bag of kittens put out to meet their destiny among last night's stubbed butts and fallen soldiers. Our hero knows they are before opening the bag. He hesitates in deference to habitual thoughts of sleep preceded by a quick wank, but soon resolves on a course of stooping and scooping. When he looks inside there are four kittens, four empty bottles of Old English 800, and too many cigarette butts to count. One kitten is already dead, and this one he removes. After staring at it for a long second he squats down and squeezes it through the choked ribs of a storm drain. He stands up and sees his super standing two houses down on his buildings stoop, more than slightly drunk.
Our hero makes for the house with the bag.
What you got there, jefe.
Kittens. Gatitos.
Shit. What you want with them fucks for? Nothing but trouble, you ask me. Louder than a motherfucker too. You want I'll call animal control right now. 311 that shit. Maybe sit down and have a drink while we wait. I know you like to knock back a few--I seen it in your trash.
Just let me by Joe. I've got to see to them.
A long whistle as our hero mounts the creaking stairs.
Ay ay ay, el tipo tiene problemas.
Upstairs he manages to warm the cats up on a litter of rags heated from beneath by a hot bottle. He manages to get some milk into them through the applicator of a caulking gun he'd bought only yesterday and which his boss wants him to seal some cracks with at the bar. The gun works well for this feline application. A couple rounds each and their cries fade into an adorable snooze.
It's a renewed bout of cries for more milk, more warmth, more touches, more, that brings his downstairs neighbor to the door at around one in the afternoon. She is a single woman on the far side of a slow and desperate fade to 50 and fading fast and without much of a silver lining to the looming menopausal thunderhead, in our hero's humble opinion. At first he ignores the knocking. But the kittens keep up their chorus, and the knocking goes on.
Will! What is going on up here? Will!
He comes to the door as is, that is to say in boxers filled out with a half-leavened morning baguette. He opens, and for a moment they just stand there. The kittens have cut their mewling, and his baguette has collapsed under her stony stare. A spirit or force seems to be grappling with an opposed spirit or force on the threshold, which is a threshold in name only, that is, it doesn't exist, because everything in this building is of the shoddiest, most slovenly workmanship, and what a word to use for what it was, for everything that it really was, because if there had been a threshold, if only there had been one, just the most nominal of unfinished planks or tacked down rubber runners, then the grappling of forces on that threshold might have taken a different turn or been resolved right there, which would have altered the outcome of our hero's fresh feline paternity, so that in fact we may not have settled on this particular hero or purlieu in the first place. Will in his patch of threshold-barren Williamsburg. In a sense this threshold, this void in place of a brink, is the very fulcrum of our narration.
What is it? What do you want?
I don't want anything. I just came to see about the commotion.
Commotion? I don't know what you're talking about Lynn. I've been sleeping up here.
Sleeping away the best part of the day, that's great. You have cats up here don't you?
Huh?
Cats. Where did you get them? What are they doing here?
Okay. Sure. You heard right. I found some kittens in the garbage. They were out there like any old bagful of eggshells or banana peels. Actually they had been thrown away with the aftermath of some asshole's good time. So I brought them up here to bring them around. Set them on the right path so to speak.
Huh. Her head gave a little equine toss meant to convey resolute cunning and savoir-assassiner, but which communicated little more than dumb animal opposition. Our hero knew it had to be countered with the blunt force of contempt, he knew it deep down, but he was also a superficially nice guy whose instincts had been pummeled into submission.
You sure they weren't yours in the first place?
What?
I mean if you found them with a bunch of beer bottles in the garbage, maybe you're the one who them out.
I found them a little ways down the street.
Snooping around in other people's business I see. This keeps getting better and better. You know you can't have cats in the apartment building. You know that, right? It says in the contract.
Yeah, Lynn, I know. I know. But someone had thrown them away, you know? They were out there in a garbage bag like they were, I don't know, somebody's friggin pizza crusts. One of them was already dead. But they...a cat's a cat. I mean they're alive. Do you know what I mean?
Oh sure. I heard about the dead one. All Joe saw was you shoving a cat through the sewer grate. Says he doesn't know what happened before that.
What do you mean happened before that? You better watch what you're saying Lynn. That's a lie, and it's not one that Joe would make up.
Her eyes louvered down to slits that admitted nothing but fodder for her prejudice and gave off nothing but her vile animal loathing.
What I mean, Will, is that you have to get rid of them. I mean they have to go. All of them. I'm not going to share a building with a contract breaker. I don't care how you do it. You can go ahead and do whatever kind of sick shit you had planned for them in the first place for all I care. But I don't want to hear them after tomorrow, you hear.
Our hero is speechless. The hateful cunning in his neighbor's eyes has stunned him like a blow. She remains standing there as he closes the door, very slowly.
Sanctity of contracts, Will, she says from the other side of the waferboard door. We'd all be living like animals without contracts.
He engages the cheap lock, also very slowly, and then hears no more. He must shake himself free of the notion that there is a miasma escaping her person and working its tendrilous way in tendrils across his floor. The cats strike up a howl to beat the band again.
He places a can of tuna and a splash each of cream and milk in the smoothie blender.
The electric pulse and yowl of the motor quiets them momentarily. They are also quiet, each in its turn, as they suckle their impromptu slurry through the applicator tip of the caulking gun. Now they pass out a heap after guzzling down as much as they can. Each is a furry, heaving ball no bigger than his fist. They are very warm, and very lovable, and the thought of abandoning them to the indifferent course of nature's terrorized and all but mechanized remnant makes his stomach writhe. Sanctity of contracts--phooey.

~

It's the next morning at roughly the same hour as we joined Will to begin with. He's ambling down his blighted street with a yowling box in his grip. He's got a head full of stars and exclamation marks and bubbles and scorched visions of profligacy that are burning themselves out even as they form; his wallet is larded with over $400 in tips, and his stride is the sprightlier for the minor bulge of a tight bag of the sweet white stuff he puts up his nose to feel interestedly exhilarated and interestingly exhilarating. The yowling box is where the kittens are. He'd stashed them under the bar on his shift. It wasn't ideal, but he'd been able to keep them cozy by replenishing the warming bottle from time to time. J-Bone would never have allowed it. Or he may have charged our hero a docking fee. But the risk of discovery was not great. If the cats had cried, neither he nor anyone else would have heard it. It was that kind of night.
Joe is on the stoop when Will steps up. He smells as malty as a midsummer's Milwaukee day stewing inside an isobar of stagnant brewery fumes. His eyes are red, cracked, incoherent. There are two finished 40s at his feet, pertly arranged in fact, their labels standing jauntily at attention -- the building superintendent requires everything to be in its place -- and he is begging Will for enough pesos to go buy another.
To round me out, Will. Can't stand the fucking dawn. You give me two dolla and I'll bring the darkness back. You wait and see. And what the fuck you doing with them cats for. Ain't no good going to come of it. That Lynn saying all sort of shit about you and them gatitos. I don't know nothin about that, but I do know they's, what you blancitos call it, a liability. A fucking liability is what they are. Come on, we'll get us a couple beers and I'll set you straight son.
Will gives him a two dollar bill and a pat on the shoulder.
Vaya con suerte, amigo. And to all a good night.
Will stops short on his way through the door. Hey Joe. His blotto superintendent looks up with entropic resignation the guttering goodwill of the wasted.
Yeah?
You might want to pack it in. Cops will nail you for all kinds of shit the way you're looking. And you've got all the darkness you could want down there anyway.
Joe lives in the basement in what amounts to little more than a hutch between the boiler and the caged storage area. Will has seen it, the squalor of it fit to summon memories of fictional Hindu servants who asked nothing of the world and got it. But it is his place to lay his head, and since it is offered in exchange for little more than keeping the trash bay tidy and making noises about rent around the turn of the month, it leaves him free to pursue his enthusiasm for drink with the ardor it deserves.
Upstairs Will prepares a warm welcome home slurry for the kittens. All three are variations on the common theme of creamed coffee and creosote. One is coffee-splotched creosote. Another is coffee flecked with creosote. The third is a segmented animal with alternating ringlets of coffee and creosote. This one has a brown head and a black eye. Piratical. He beds them down, whispers that they must be quiet to keep out of trouble, pops three OutSmarted's® and goes to bed. He must sleep. There are many surplus beers in his system, and his pseudo girlfriend is coming over at noon to cook him lunch.

~

Boom boom boom. The door. Noon. Time to wake up. Boom boom boom. Noon already? Shit. But why is Tricia knocking so hard?
Animal Control!
Animal Con...the dogcatcher? What do you want?
Animal Control! It's a woman. The voice is labored and brutal, as if the sound waves were having trouble getting around a glistening set of fangs.
Boom boom boom.
Animal Control! Open up in there. I'm here on a complaint.
Boom boom boom.
Come on pal. Nobody hides from a complaint to the ACU in this town. Let's go on and get this over with.
Our hero rolls out of bed with his head pickled and his reproductive apparatus shriveled. He checks the kittens on the way to the door, the cheap building rattling in its frame under his footfall. The cats are sleeping still, but their crib is thoroughly soiled by the aftermath of the tuna slurry they'd been scroffling down so greedily. The cloudsoaked day is filtering in weakly through the skylight and giving the creamy little turds a dull sheen like stage props.
Boom boom boom.
Will looks from the cats to the door and back to the cats. In a flash he's placed kits and caboodle in the oven and tottered over to open the door.
Can I help you?
I see you just woke up. The Animal Control official is built on the model of a sparkplug or a fire hydrant, with vague female traits. She is rippling with enforcement zeal. To look at her is to dread the boundless energy she will lavish on shoveling the dung of her dignified office entitles her to dish out. She is wearing thick rubber gloves and a clunky single-piece uniform. She carries an electronic dictation pad, a GPS map, a cell phone, a flashlight, riot cuffs, and a tranquilizer gun. Will can feel his balls creeping up toward some further rebate of abdominal refuge.
Yes, thanks to you. Not that you're asking. Can I help you?
You know what buddy? You better wake up to the reality of the situation you're in.
Will looks at her in consternation, then begins to rub his eyes with luxurious apathy. Okay. What might that be?
Don't get smart with me now buddy. I've had a complaint about unlicensed felines up here. That makes them a health hazard, and potentially rabid. The city takes violations of the animal code very seriously. I'm going to need to have a look around. And put a shirt on for Chrissake.
A look around? What is this? You can't just barge in here like that. Like some kind of cop. And even cops need warrants.
The official crosses the threshold and sidesteps her way into the apartment.
It's a brave new town buddy. And this isn't your fucking granddaddy's animal control unit. We've got an enhanced mandate. Power of arrest, animal or human. It's a matter of public safety. Or so I'm told.
An I-am-become-death-by-bylaw smile plays across her unrelenting face: And trust me. You don't want to get written up for getting smart with a city official. Not in today's day and age. You'd be lucky to get off on a humble. And if you don't get a shirt on soon I'll hit you with failure to comply. I don't need to be staring up at some pasty marshmallow ass man tits.
Our hero stands speechless. He simply stands there, shriveled and paralyzed by the fateful feeling that he would have done better to stay in bed. The official begins her stocktaking by rummaging through his cupboard. He looks on as though it were someone else's dignity that were being stepped over and across, unable to summon in his heart the wherewithal that dwells in a badge. Why is she looking through his cupboard?
Gotta make sure you're not running a cat factory out of this dump. A lot of litter or feed could mean a date with a commercial felony charge for being a breeder. And I hear he don't take no for an answer.
The reality of the situation is dawning on his mind like a throbbing pustule. A mounting, looming, gathering, brimful to bursting pustule, so tender, outrageous and humiliating that it impedes any willful action or movement and is waiting only for its own cathartic explosion in obedience to immutable natural laws. Will thinks and feels nothing. It is his destiny that is undergoing a mutation while groping about in the void of a world that is beyond all redemption.
The foulmouthed sparkplug is carrying a taser. The little bitch in the city's employ is prodding the pillows on his couch, her mouth writhing in mock disgust. She is dumping a box of printer paper on the laminate floor. She is inspecting his freezer and flinging his TV dinners across the room. Moving on to the refrigerator, she takes his jug of milk and pours it down the sink.

This vitamin D shit’s no good for you. This here is why you’ve got them love handles.

Behind where the milk was she finds the applicator tip of the silicone gun.

Jesus. I’m not even gonna ask.

She manages to spew forth a few more insults before chancing on the oven and pulling out the squirreled boodle with a cadaverous leer.
Why you sick fuck. I knew you were a sick fuck. You're a, what do they call it, a degenerate. Yeah, that's what you are. A fucking degenerate. What's this you've got here? A little kitten stew with shit sauce? I bet you were about to turn the dial when I showed up. I have seen a lot of stuff on this job, believe me you. But this here just takes the cake pal. You know what? I'm really glad I picked up this call this morning. It makes my day whenever I can prevent a sick fuck from acting out on whatever goes on in his perverted little head. You know what happens now asshole? Now we’re gonna take a ride down to Riker’s and…
Will stops hearing the words when he becomes aware of Trisha's delicate steps mounting the grimy flight up to the first floor landing. Before he knows what he is doing, the pustule has exploded, and Will’s destiny has mutated. He has the sparkplug functionary by the throat and the wrist of her tazing hand. The cat box squails on to the floor in an anguished flurry of writhing fur and shit.
Our hero says not a word as he marches the intruder out the door and onto the squalid landing.
Uh, what’s going on here? Is everything all right?
What the fuck?
Come on up, Trisha. Don't worry. I'll explain in a sec. There you go. Just slip past me now. All right.
Once Trisha is clear, Will flings the animal control beast down the stairs. She tumbles onto the landing with a squeal before springing to her feet and crow-hopping down the next flight and out of the building as fast as her wrenched feet will take her. From the street he can hear her yelling: You know what you just did, you sick fuck? You brought the law down on your head. Assaulting a city official, unlicensed feline ownership, preparation of banned foodstuffs, felony conspiracy to prevent the discharge of sworn duty. It'll land on you a thousand ways. And you'll never get it off.
Will says nothing. He is shaking from the exertion of his restraint. The kittens are howling, clawing in abjection at the floor and trailing a fecal slime. Trisha's is frozen in a bloodless question. For a time she says nothing. The door is closed, but our hero knows the waferboard will keep nothing out.
Will moves to pick up the kittens. Two of the three have cracked open a eyelid each. Some first mug for you to see. Taking them to the bathroom he draws warm water into the slimed sink and begins the telling. He talks as he washes.
...and that's just when you came up the stairs.
I just...wow. I can't believe you did that. I mean, I understand that you would have wanted to. But to a sworn dogcatcher...
Neither can I.
Now what? Our plan for me to cook you lunch is pretty much out the window. She's on her way to get backup right now. And she's right. You won't be able to throw those cops down the stairs. Or the charges they’ll bring.
You don’t think I can explain this to them and make them see the truth? I mean she had no right coming in like that.
Well. That's what I used to hear people say. I'm not so sure that means much unless you have a fancy lawyer. Have you been sleeping for the last 15 years, Will? Cops don’t need your truth—they’re armed with cop truth.
The cats have been soaped up and dunked and agitated and rinsed and are howling for all they're worth. Will is patting them dry slowly and methodically.
Maybe you're right at that, Tricia. But what am I to do? Run away? Come on. I'll stand these bastards down right here, once and for all. I don't fucking care what happens. It’s not right. These cats are life. Everything else -- Will is speaking woodenly, his tongue caught in indignation’s vice, and his nose has drained to reveal the waxen pallor of bridge and cartilage -- everything else is death. I’m not going to take it. A world that would take these cats away from me is not worth living in. If you want to get out of here, I don't blame you. By all means. But if not, I want you to make me lunch like you mean it. You'll been my Bonnie, and together we can go out in the hail of glory we glimpse in between dreams.
Will is smiling the rueful smile of the only-half-joking, his generation's sardonic detachment suddenly electrifies by an unlawful allegiance to life.
You can't be serious. But a look convinces her that he is. Perfectly so. Her smile shatters, she shakes her head. But there are other ways… She is backing toward the brinkless door.
It'd be good to have a witness, Trisha. Whether for the trial or to get the word out to my friends if I, you know, can't. And there is no other way. This moment will come, sooner or later, for us all. It's how we live now. My moment has come, and I'm determined exist as a free and whole man, if only in that fraction of a second between announcing my freedom and being destroyed.
She stammers that she can’t. No. Don’t tell me you really think this is going to help the cats?
I don't. They've been posted to a greater battle now, grunts in the trenches of the one truly just and truly hopeless war...look here Trisha, you don't have to be my accomplice or anything -- just squirrel yourself away in the cabinet under the sink and peek through the crack at me. It'll be your private screening.
Uh-ugh, she says, squirming at the thought of being down among the molds and the dust bunnies and the rinds and the scraps and the crumbs and the grim harvest of mouse droppings. You've lost your mind, Will. You can't stand off the law over a few kittens you found in the street. She throws up her arms. Why do I always get involved with these fanatics? Screw this. I'm going.
She picks up her groceries and goes.
Will slumps into the wall and slides down onto his heels as he watches the last of her hair trail out of view. She leaves the door open behind her. After a moment, he puts a goodly portion of the powder from the comforting knot in his jeans up his nose. The better to await what's coming. The kittens are fast asleep in his lap as he wipes his nose clean and stares at the blank beyond his open door with the lucidity of a savage.
His hackles are standing on end. His hands have seized into atavistic claws -- the better to eviscerate the words and justifications coined by the anarchic machine of law scorned -- and his heart is pumping a cold electric fire that shimmers through in the animal sweat on his skin. He wonders if they'll come by knocking or by SWATing his door in. He wonders if they'll zip through his window like commandos. He wonders if he'll be facing dogcatcher cops, or catcatcher warfighters, or mancatcher robots. He wonders if he'll get to make his eloquent and impassioned entreaty before catching one. He wonders if he'll be questioned or read his rights, hogtied or full nelsoned, cuffed, gutpunched, tasered, shot or brought to heel by God knew what other technology in the toolkit of domination. Will they be accompanied by Lynn, or by the animal control beast, or by Joe, or by all three? He wonders if he can count on J-Bone to bail him out if his nerve fails him, or if it might be more reasonable to expect the man to act on the call as a tip to loot his apartment. The man is ruthless. He wonders what his dead mother would think, or his drunk father. He wonders what his grandfather or his father before him would make of the town and the country and the time he lived in, or this cookie-cutter production and wholesale destruction of bodies and souls. Cat, dog, man, inframan, all born to be surveilled, fined, neutered, taxed or executed as the occasion warranted. He wonders if he should go quietly or if he should feign going quietly before murdering them all with the feline alacrity of the screen hero. He wonders whether to receive them in the three-point stance or the suckerpunch slouch. He wonders if he’ll see Trisha again, and under what circumstances. He wonders what she will tell people if he doesn't have a chance to speak for himself. He wonders if he is special or normal, silly or heroic, vain or insane. What does he want to be? Slippage of tense: He wondered. All these things and more he wondered, all the livelong day, the questions and wonderment and the hopped up caustic loathing by and by giving way to a blankness, a numbness, then sleep. Still they do not come. He is awoken toward evening by a scrabbling and a tripartite bout of the drizzling shits playing out on his lap.
Shit! His shift is coming up soon. He jumps up, straightens himself out, cleans and feeds the kittens, takes a shower, hops into some clothes without the stench of shit on them, bad shit, has a bump of cocaine off the bridge of his hand, good shit, and leaves for the bar, kitten crib disguised as a toolbox in tow.
Nightfall in the big city. Huge pleasure trucks pass by pumping reggaeton and raw hatred as he goes. The sewers belch and burble with unseen excrescences as he goes. The cars and people and dogs all stop and go, as he goes, according to the mechanical rhythm of the maniac. Sunset like a closing door. The day's dying rays wash the brick building a melancholy shade of tar-flecked crimson.
A few steps more and he ducks his head into the refugium of The Gamboling Stag. Only his boss is there so far. J-Bone, absolutely ruthless. Will nods his head, cuts the boss man a berth that is wide, but not too wide, and takes the toolbox down to the basement. He's long in tucking them in, making sure they’re all straddling the warming bottle and at least partially camouflaged by a ratchet set and a spool of twine. The process takes nearly 10 minutes. In his current state everything must be just so; this is the thing that makes him a good bartender. He's right with the measure, right with the crush and the drizzle, right with the foam and right with the till, as we have mentioned. The trouble of course is that if he wants to keep these qualities from tailing off, he needs to keep stoking his precision, so to speak, all night long. Which is not so much trouble so long as he can access the bathroom from time to time, in fact it adds an element of intrigue, and even on the packed nights when he cannot our hero has his ways, he sure does, he can line up a nice snorting gallery along the well, little bumps of snow on the caps of the bottles that line the speed rack, it's just a matter of taking another second or two to get the caps off, leaning in for a more intimate inspection, as it were.
The evening starts off slow, but starts gathering momentum fast. After-work whistle wetters drifting in and out, idiot kids whose faces go slacker and stupider after two beers that send them caroming off the bar to their next stochastic destination in life, a weasel-eyed kid from the hood who nurses a water as he cases the place, a couple of regulars who sail in and moor at their stools, pilgrims on the alcoholic seas tying off to tie one on, this night no different than the last. One of them has lost his job at the hard-on factory. Good old Dick Pill Bill. He orders a frugal rye, giving Will a chance to bend over and knock off the first duck in his little gallery of bumps to be. Dick Pill Bill wants to talk about the limp corporate fucks engorging themselves on his flagging pension; Will considers sharing his own drama, but there's no point airing his laundry just yet. No -- Will serves the rye and takes the money with a nod and a confidential smile. Will pours and polishes, soaks and scrubs, crushes and grates, mixes the tracks, cards the kids and shepherds all the lost souls with the same precision he lavishes on the drinks. An attentive mixologist, he cruises up and down the counter with the regularity of a pendulum, or drunks to their cups, replenishing the fount of merriment just as it begins to run dry, neglecting none, pleasing all, lending an ear when needed but with an eye cocked toward the far side of the bar just in case, rattling off the esoteric cockamamie specials as if they'd been the words to a fairytale heard in the cradle. Yes. Will is a born bartender, and the tips flow to him like drool from the mouth of an imbecile. Then he sees Trisha walk in. She's with another guy. A galootish Poindexter type in a woodblock suit that would make him look out of place at his own wake.
It takes Trisha some time to notice he's tending bar tonight. Now she sees him and flashes a broken smile and navigates the shoals between the barstools and the open alcoholic sea.
What are you doing this side of central booking? Did you gun down the entire force?
Ha. You know, I sat there for hours, and no one had the civic decency to show up. Maybe that dogcatcher was just some kind of freelancer working an angle. Maybe she's a friend of Lynn’s. They seem to be in about the same league. I don't know. The thing is, even if she wasn't the law, she could still law me. Either way, I was ready for whatever was coming. Drink?
Sure. A gin twist for me, and a Bartleby for my friend.
A Bartleby?
He'd prefer not to wet his whistle.
Good one. So why bother sidling up to the Stag? Who is that rube?
Tricia does not flinch. Can't you tell? He's an admirer.
That was quick. Thought you might have stayed in for a night or two. You know, to commemorate my blaze of glory.
A quaint thought, Will. I thought I might stay competitive as long as I was going to be on the market. Feminine charm does have a way of going into abeyance unless exercised. And hey, there was no blaze of glory. Here you are.
Here I am, yes. And here you are with that tall order of milquetoast.
Well. This little word was not uttered in challenge or under cloak of irony or as a fledgling overture of contrition. Just a bald corroboration, a neutral marker, a tick in the yes column of the world's infinite ledger of meaningless fact.
Will reaches down for a whiskey along the speed rack without moving his eyes off her perfectly frank and shameless mien. He needs a drink badly and doesn't care that he won't feel it.
And you know what Trisha? he says between two shots thrown down with mechanical efficiency. I didn't get any lunch today. I ate nothing.
But I bet you had plenty of that rhino sweetmeat to keep you going, didn't you?
Will hands her the fizz, lovingly garnished with a spiral of lemon worked into a heart.

Now it’s his turn to tick the ledger. Well.
She takes her drink and walks away.
Hey! he calls after her. That'll be eight fifty. She sits down with her piece of lumber and ignores our hero.
Try as he might, Will usually finds it difficult as hell to get drunk when he's skiing, as chasing the cocaine high is known in the mock-imaginative parlance of his times. But not tonight. Tonight he takes to the whusk with the inverted vengeance of the antihero betrayed, and on an empty stomach is able not only to overtake the giddy crystalline rush of his good time friend the rhino sweetmeat, but to leave it churning it in the wake of the incremental paralysis that comes with the rapture of deepest alcoholic inundation. Chasing the rapture, he hangs tight with regulars and casuals alike for five rounds, eight rounds, ten rounds, twelve, his tongue forming numb and muddled maledictions at the empty world from drink to drink for failing, even in this moment of ultimate betrayal, to accord him the standing of a man to be reckoned with.

He drinks with everyone and the sheer pace of it—every time he knocks one back he has another as the deputized representative of the house—is posting his beak to an inevitable appointment with the battle-scarred bartop. Tricia and her lump of cheese scamper off somewhere in that centrifugal blur. And good fucking riddance. Someone get me another drink. I mean pour yourself another drink you piece of shit. When beak slams into oak, a watchful J-Bone is there to drag him across the floor and fling him into a slime-covered booth. After some time he returns with a cold glass of water and splashes it in our hero's face, determined to suck Will's tips back into the till to make up for lost pours. J-Bone, as we know, is absolutely ruthless.
Soon Will is revived. Beak bobbing and back to guzzling with the lushest, he's telling jokes and feeling fine, spinning yarns and feeling tits, grinding up on whatever female flotsam drifts by close enough to starboard. Why starboard? Because port's out of the question the way he's listing now. All hands to starboard. Loose the nets and ready the harpoon!
The fervid gambit to defeat time by dissolving it into spirit does work in a sense. Will retreats into the furthest refuge of himself and becomes someone else. Some thing else, a pure meat machine pledged to the monomaniac desire to transcend all the perfidy of the world, if only for a moment, even if it's fake -- shit -- even if he can't remember a damn thing about it. And so the hours of the night slide into the abyss. Will does tell a dozen people about the cats and how the law intends to crush him for the audacity of his illicit feline paternity. His account is very lucid, and yet there isn’t a person in the bar who believes him. The tale inspires uproarious laughter, rounds of drinks, shots on the house, tits in his face. When he stands up on a barstool and cries that this is the last time they'll all be drinking together, and he means it, he is sprayed with beer and curses, cheers and kisses. The largest of his drinking companions pull him down, hoist him horizontal and parade him through the grimy reaches of the bar. By dawn he is looking at a tufted crack whose gate his floppy noodle is failing abjectly to crash. J-Bone is at the other end, working her head up and down, his face drawn into a blank mask. Even now he is asking Will to pay for his drinks. Ruthless. This scene is the only one that lodges in his head firmly enough for him to salvage amid the paroxysms of torment that wrack his head when he is awoken the following morning.
Boom boom boom. Police!
This is the much anticipated sound to which our poisoned hero and his floppy noodle are compelled to withdraw from the drunkard’s sodden deadwood dreams.
Boom boom boom. Open up in there you sick fuck!
But our hero prefers to stay in bed. He lays on his back, prone to his destiny. Just his luck that his final stand should be playing out in the excruciating crucible of a brutal hangover. He lodges a bottle of pepper spray under the sheets with a parched croak.
Boom boom BAM. The door belts out a hollow thunder in its skewed frame.
Last chance before we bust it down numbnuts. Open up if you know what's good for you.
Will responds from bed, his voice hoarse and brutal under the burden of Lethe’s offices discharged. Come in if you must, but I will not open for you. No, my good gathered ladies and gents, I will not rise from this bed. But it will comfort you to know, he concludes with a mountainous sigh, that there is no threshold you'd risk stubbing your toes on as you come in.
From beyond the waferboard drumskin of his front door Will can hear first the hushed shadows of words—he’s aggressive—then a guttural atavistic roar which he knows for a fact partakes of language, but whose meaning is as remote to him as if it were coming from the howling depths of the earth. The demolition of his door is hardly audible in the wake of this roar.
Soon they are over him, milling beside and at the base of his bed -- alongside and abase and around owing to the lack of space in overpriced warrens such as the one where our hero lays his head. But we digress. There are four of them. One is brandishing a greasy leaf of paper authorizing his conduct--a carte blanche graisseuse, like.
You're some kind of joker, aren't you pal? Our hero’s interrogator is pumping the stained warrant up and down like a censer.
Officer?
Don't get cute with me pal. What kind of fucking name is Rusty Krustersson?
Will clears his throat. Is that what you dropped by to ask me, officer? In that case, I would've been happy to oblige you over the phone. Could have saved you the ride out here, not to mention the bruise you're going to have on your shoulder for laying into my door like that. That's going to feel a bit tender by the time you get off your shift. Drop by my work if you want. I'll see if I can’t mix something up to take the edge off.
Eyes narrow now, nostrils flare. You smartass piece of shit -- I said what kind of a name is Rusty Krustersson?
Er, well, begging your pardon officer, I don't see what that has to do with me. I don't know what kind of name that is. I guess it sounds like a name and an emcee might use at a country fair full of old hippies. What do you think?
Brooklyn’s finest leans in real close now. Our hero's nostrils are fucked by coffee-scented malice while his eyes fix on a shred of what must be bacon wedged between teeth stained by years of Beechnut Chew.
That name, asshole, was the one stenciled on the mailbox to this dump downstairs. So if your name isn't Rusty Krustersson, then we're looking at postal felony. Right boys?
Will is considering giving in to his negative preference. He is considering rolling over and burying himself in a pillow to give these vile hangover goblins a chance to return to the denatured ethers whence they came before doing what he must. A fiendish but lazy smile is playing on his lips when it hits him. The kittens. His coffee and creosote charges were still at the fucking bar.
Mr. Krustersson -- the hateful reek was still full in his face. It was seeping into his lungs, where the exchange of opposed essences was making his blood boil -- we've had a report that you're harboring unlicensed and potentially rabid felines. Can you confirm or deny that report?
Will looks hard at the burly lads ranged round the bed. Little chance he'll get through that wall of bebadged flesh.
Sure, he says. I deny it. I deny everything, including your right to sanction or forbid life.
What's that? Then I guess you won't mind if we have a look around?
No, he thinks. Not the wall of badges and service weapons. Can’t make it through that. The wall running along his bed, on the other hand, is just a flimsy screen of gypsum, with a single stud somewhere in the middle he remembers from an abortive attempt at shelving. Our hero replies as if from the depths of a dream, his eyes glassing unseen eternities: Yeah. Look around. Go ahead boys. Just do what you have to. But I think I'll have to skip out. At this point he takes a deep breath and plunges his hand into the sheets and between his legs to withdraw the pepper spray, bear spray in fact, the good capsicum shit for the burliest of predators, and he uses it to cloud his accusers' personal atmospheres before they can say snarl a single command, and as they choke he springs out of his proneness, takes a bounce off the mattress and sails through the wall in a hail of stone dust. The bebadged burlies are gibbering and writhing. Our hero bursts up protean and apotheotic from the shards, tottering and yawing for a second before righting his course, then surges across the shabbiness that has hitherto contained him with the spray still chugging before gliding stubless across his non-stub threshold. He bounds down the stairs in fours and in sixes and emerges wild into the day. The canister still hasn't run out, it's still clouding the way of any parasite who’d dare approach as he tears down the block to recover his neglected foundlings. Lots of damns and shits and whatthefucks from the good citizenry follow him as he steams barward under power of capsicum—a does a bullet from a heroic badge-bear who has somehow cried that good anti-bear capsicum stuff out of his eyes to the point where he can lean out the window and draw a bead on our chugging hero and drop him cold, faltering memories and forking destinies and floppy noodles and forestalled feline paternity and visions of heroic opposition all.
The bullet hits him in the neck; he falls to the ground with a sound like a door slamming onto a cushion of escaping air. Whoosh. J-Bone happens to turn the corner and catch our hero expiring. He leans down and says I'll be damned. Will clutches at his boss’s sleeve with his last ounce of strength as he is having his pockets emptied. The cats, he says. The cats--
As the sibylant ‘s’ in cats trails into the death rattle, J-Bone looks our hero square in his fluttering eye. The only thing I know about those talking cats is they’re unauthorized.

Once she can be sure that our hero has no hope of recovery, his neighbor Lynn draws her curtains and pronounces the words: Good riddance.

Kinemania: A Postcard from Lisbon

September 2005: Unannounced, I drop everything and board a flight from Lisbon to New York, alienating several new Portuguese friends in the process. The idea was to rekindle a guttering relationship whose vital fuel had long since flickered out. Months before, just prior to the Yemenite installment of our loveless world-gadding, we had fallen in with a Portuguese photographer named Tiago. He held out the prospect of hospitality in his home, inviting the two of us to stay with him in Lisbon once he had completed his world circuit. He was a warm and genuine person, and his offer was taken in earnest. My relationship soured formally in the interim, and I ended up making my way to Portugal alone at the beginning of August. Tiago was not yet there. He had expected to be home around then, but had been held up in Panama in a bid to conquer a fellow wanderer's heart.

When Tiago learned that I was in Lisbon, he arranged for me to be shown real hospitality. Within a few days, I had a little sleeping nook arranged in his friend Silene's apartment. A few days after that I shared a meal of bacalao with his mother and brother, and was given the keys to his old red Peugeot. I was speaking Spanish to everyone and was making myself understood. Silene took me places, introduced me to people. She was a very generous person. I liked her, but refrained from complicating the situation with advances. After I'd been in her apartment for a couple of weeks she was called to the south of the country on a film shoot. I remember being alone in the apartment, throwing beer after beer down the hatch and sensing abysses opening up all around me. For all the hospitality, I felt only the emptiness of one aimlessly adrift.

I had maintained some sputtering contact with my ex-girlfriend through this time. She, too, was desperate and adrift. I do not know precisely what it was that drove me to re-alloy our two miseries. One day I simply packed up my things, left a note of thanks on Silene's kitchen table along with Tiago's car key, and hailed a cab to the airport. I remember the driver assuming I was a Ukrainian laborer as the car traversed the sad, sundrenched scene. As circumstance would have it, Tiago was passing through New York when I got there. He made a show of being happy to see me, but I could see that he was puzzled and genuinely hurt by my move. It was an asshole thing to do, he said, but maybe it was the right thing for you. Quite a double edge. After he returned to Portugal, it did not take long for him to sever ties with me. He used something I'd said to one of his friends in an unguarded moment of revekry as a pretext, but I'm sure it had more to do with my ugly rejection of generous hospitality. This was the inglorious apogee of my kinemania, to mint a new clinical term. It was not just a matter of potential catharsis or grace this time. This time it cost me dearly: Two friends and the respect of everyone in their circle. I have vowed to make my deficiency whole by offering unconditional hospitality whenever I can--even if it results in the same disappointment experienced by my gracious hosts in 2005.

Postcards from Egypt and Yemen

February 2005: After three months in Cairo, I board a plane to Addis Ababa, where my girlfriend and I plan to begin an overland journey to Djibouti after witnessing the bizarre spectacle of a concert given by Rita and Ziggy and the gang in tribute to what would have been Bob Marley's 60th birthday in a hardscrabble country that needs Rastafarianism like a fish needs a bicycle. I left Egypt with a sense of relief. Studying Arabic at the 4U Arabic School on Mizan Talat Harb had been rewarding, and I had enjoyed the splendors left behind by pharaohs and sultans, but in the end, the inescapable filth and poverty and petty grifting became too much. I was too aware of the sorry state of the city and its people to find refuge in the seductions of orientalism or pure language for too long. I had come to think ill of Egyptians, seeing in them some especially pernicious version of the petty scheming and frustrated passion that characterize all the world's oppressed and dispossessed in varying ways. I did not feel much better about the heirs to the architecture of dispossession I met in Cairo. Of all the Americans I knew there, only one struck me as particularly interesting. He was a gay man, of whom it was said that he took a new Egyptian lover three times a week. He had been in Egypt for a long time. I can't remember how long--eight years, twelve. He worked at an English-language daily and earned an Egyptian wage. In all his years in Egypt, he said, he had only returned to the States once. He hadn't been able to stop crying, he said, while abroad in the country of his birth. The other Americans I met were Fulbright kids doing a lot of eating and drinking on Zamalek (a rich and westerized island in the Nile), backpackers on a factory schedule, ugly girls who insisted on dressing scantily wherever they went in the 15-million person Islamic city, rich dilettante kids talking about their esoteric and exclusive tastes in music and film. I may not have been so damned interesting myself in those days.

June 2005: After three months studying Arabic in Sana'a, Yemen, I and my companion fly to Sri Lanka by way of despicable Dubai. Yemen had been fascinating. No revelations about human freedom, perhaps, but this was my second spin on the merry-go-round of exotic escapism. I would make a quip about the Arabian peninsula not being the best place to explore one's freedom, but that is hardly the point. Certainly Arab culture places constraints on behavior, but the threads of custom often exercise a lighter touch than enforcement officials. Sana'a did have its share of boys with slapsticks, but I certainly never felt as nervous around the agents of state power in Yemen as I do in today's America, where the state has begun to approximate Mussolini's Hegelian ideal: "Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." But comparing the machinery of global domination backed by H-bombs to tribal clashes in the desert gets us nowhere, and I don't want to overwhelm the margin of this postcard with an excursion into comparative parasitism. The point, I think, is that I was less in a position to appreciate what the Yemenis had to offer than I might have been some years prior or thence. Hindsight has made me wise to the problem. It was less than two years since I had undergone surgery to repair a cranial ailment. A serious matter indeed. To put it very simply, in those days I was still scared. Of death, yes, but also of winking out before I had seen what I thought was mine to see, do what I thought was mine to do, feel what certainly was mine to feel. I think that the long voyage of 2005 was ultimately an unconscious hedging maneuver. If it is my lot to be stricken down by this cranial thing, I (unconsciously) reasoned, let me first see the world. Yes, I was privileged even in my quiet desperation. My search for fulfillment followed the cheap and easy paths charted by this comparative privilege. Let it be fast, easy, exotic; let it come with enough sound and fury to keep the fear in abeyance. The fear is inside us all. But if it is not kept in abeyance by a rigorous discipline of honesty and love, the kernel of it swells into an inert mass with its own gravity, a weight that burdens every action and tarnishes every joy, a millstone that gathers unto itself more and more of the spirit's vitality, always more, until one day...actually I do not know how to conclude this sentence, having somehow scraped through the grinder with my soul intact. But I know that the body of death was hanging off me like a spare tire in those days, and was considerably tarnishing my prospects for enjoyment. And that it may have led, for a time, to the serial consumption of exotic experience as a way of shuffling my piece around the board before joining the game.

Now that the excuses are out of the way, here is Yemen's due: Enchanting from the first glimpse, it got stranger, deeper and vaster by orders of magnitude. We enrolled in the Sana'a Institute for Arabic Studies and took private lessons from dapper young teachers named Osama and 'Afif. The unfortunate John Walker Lindh had passed through the same institute before opting for more religiously flavored instruction, first in the Hadramawt and ultimately in distant Afghanistan. We made journeys to mountain villages, ten story mud buildings rising from desert oases, forlorn malarial cities on the Red Sea, and the seething crater of 'Aden. We rented a 5-story house in Sana'a for 300 dollars a month and furnished one room to live in. We adopted a kitten off the street and named it Qamr, moon. We were studying Fusha Arabic now, the official version. Sometimes I felt that I was getting a good grip on it, like when sat down to discuss life with 'Abdullah Soeid in his shop. I remember asking him if he was religious, and him answering of course, religion was the essence life, that God had made him for that purpose, and him citing a passage from the Qur'an, and me understanding everything. At other times, most times, I felt completely lost. The Arabic word for dictionary, qamus, also denotes the ocean. Indeed. I remember telling my teachers that I would return to Yemen sometime soon as I left, and honestly thinking that I would. I haven't gone back yet. Is soon over yet?

Just a note: American immigration officials never questioned me about the Yemeni residence permit pasted into passport--perhaps my Ivy League degree is worth something after all.

Postcards

March 2003: After two months exploring the other Americas, I board a plane for New York in Buenos Aires. I had quit my miserable desk job before Christmas, just after turning 24. I was saddled with hefty academic debt and had little idea what I would do with myself next. I had no gig lined up, no connections, no money. I didn't care. Somewhere in South America I had a revelation that hit me like a Buick: I had never known freedom before. For all my pretense in those days at having a better take on things than most, as if, as Bukowski puts it, I really had an angle on life, I knew it was true as soon as it was revealed to me. I'd never known the high luxury of truly, and I mean epochally unstructured time--time that was more a labyrinthine gift and mystery than the linear, carceral banality of when will life begin? that had run through all my earlier years. Nor, having emerged from the bosom of continent conquered, gridded, mechanized and plundered, had I known the unbounded texture of the lands and spaces man is meant to live in. Of course, I had known well enough how I did not want to live, but on that trip I glimpsed, for the first time, an alternative. A different way, one that I could affirm whole cloth. I drank deeply from the cup of freedom then, skittering back and forth across the gullied spine of the cordilleras as I dreamed of erasing myself from the plotted map hell-bent on mechanizing my life. The best part of the trip was a foray made into the Peruvian jungle. Buses through bandit country, jungle ferries aswing with a hundred hammocks for the passengers, dugout canoes drifting into the trackless territories that electrify the imagination in the work of a Tobias Schneebaum or a Werner Herzog. As luck would have it, the jungle was where I picked up a double case of dysentery, bacterial and amoebic, leading to an altogether less pleasant and less controllable sort of skittering. To this day, I suspect aguajina of being the culprit. Sweet, delightful, two-faced, altogether ravishing aguajina. I guess you could say the trip's highlight was also its undoing. In the wake of the trip I made vows to drink nothing but alcohol when visiting poor places. The fact, though, is that the dysentery could easily have been treated in situ. There was the matter of money of course. And yet I often wondered afterward, and sometimes still do, what might have happened if I'd stayed. My Spanish had become serviceable, and I was enjoying the warmth and passion of the Latin Americans. Here, I sensed, was a way of life closer to my own nature. But I left anyway, almost in the very moment I'd glimpsed that freedom--for New York, the world's great citadel of carceral time and gridded space. It is relatively easy to leave the mechanized grid, but things get more complicated when it comes to getting the grid out of your head.

I am not offering up South America as any kind of generally redemptive bromide here. Far from it. But the other Americas are more complicated than the narrow vastness of the norther part. They retain pre-Colombian elements, and the Andean countries in particular have not erred so far down the road of development and destruction. There are remnants of what came before in the people as well, of course. Oddly enough, many of them have chosen to resist where history would take them. I liked that then, and I like it now.

But I don't want these vignettes to trail too far into anthropological or political credos. The task I have set myself is to go back in time and catch myself in the act of leaving the various countries and regions I have known and left behind over the course of this decade, some with relief, others with difficulty. I envision it as a series of postcards forming a half-breezy, half-melancholy inventory of the places I have seen over the last seven years. A sampling of departures suggested itself as a good way, not only of saving time, but also of communicating how sadly brief and incomplete even the best of times can be. In the end, I may make the occasional sally or rejoinder that is not strictly inventory-related. Postcards do have margins, and even the best correspondents sometimes spill into the space reserved for the postal authority. I imagine the postcards will also be of clinical interest. What has driven me so far afield? What have I wanted to find? What have I wanted to flee? Have I found my home in Greece? Before going on, there is something I should clarify for those of you who read this modest blog regularly, and who may have felt sympathetic to the comments made earlier by Mr. Muss: I do not fancy myself having any sort of special angle or take on life. I am nothing but another pilgrim following my own road to our common end.

Anyway, to resume: My intention on leaving Latin America was to make a home in New York. It never quite happened that way; life never quite began there, you might say. I always found reasons to escape it, or was found by them.

Viz...

Leader of the pack

There's a curious incident I've been meaning to mention ever since it happened a couple of weeks ago. Longing for some legwork and fresh air, Penelope and I decided to make a day of it on the mountain that overlooks our town, Plomari. The mountain rises from the sea in a sheer mass and crests at about 2000 feet before trailing into a ridge that brackets our section of the island. Other than a tufting of cypresses and radio towers at the summit, the massif is covered almost entirely in olives. The better part of the natural setting here can be described like this: Looking west from Plomari, the left part of the frame is made up of tranquil Aeagean waters, and the right part by the great green mountain. Climbing it had actually been one of my first acts back in April, when freshly landed here from my winter in the Bitterroots. I will post a picture of the view to this site soon.

It took about 3 hours to hike from our house to the top, where we broke for a lunch of homemade pizza and sweet potato pie. For a while we stretched out on the pine needles, hearing birdsong interlace with the hum of the radio tower's electrical equipment as late afternoon filtered through the trees. But the idyll passed, as all things must, and we gathered our things for the walk back down. Our legs had been pretty spent on the ascent, and the way down seemed to drag on for as long as the way up. This was a good thing. Every turn in the path offered vistas that were bucolic, majestic, or both. I was profoundly happy to be standing where I was when the sun ducked behind the mountain and the colors deepened into shades of buoyant, almost painful beauty. As we picked our way down I was also pleased and disgruntled to find fistfuls of shotgun shells: Pleased because it indicated that hunting fowl and other small game is part of the Lesbian way of life, disgruntled because the hunters hadn't bothered to pick up after their fun. And I say 'fistfuls' because I fetched them up and took them home.

Dusk approached. Passing through a village called Katoxorio, we paused to ask a man doing some yard-work if he knew where we might buy a bottle of water. He said there were no shops in town, but that he'd be happy to mix us up a little batch of orange drink. He was an Englishman--a Mancunian, to judge by the accent. He made us a gift of the bug-juice, and we thanked him. As we set off again, he called out after us with a tip. Don't take the road, he said. Take the path that branches off to the left after that house there. There, you see it? Take a left that way and just keep walking. It will take you straight into Plomari.

We did fork left and follow the path. At first it was much the same as the other paths we had followed that day. Rocky footing, olive trees, stone walls, the occasional shepherd's lean-to. Suddenly the path turned into a paved road just a little wider than the wheelbase of an average car. The surface was corrugated in a herringbone pattern which led the eye down the road--and into a gorge, at what seemed to be something near a 45 degree angle. About halfway down we paused to reconsider. When we turned around to see the road looming above us, our legs would not hear of a retreat. We were committed. We tramped on until the grade bottomed out, snaked, and began to rise again--perhaps not as sharply as what we'd come down, but it was bad enough. Who on earth had the road been built for? We had plenty of time to ponder the question. Once we'd crested the rise, the road plunged back down into the gully, only to rise again. And so on, for the better part of twenty minutes. At last the pavement broke off into dirt, and the road emerged from the roller-coaster gulley to wrap around the side of the small hill between us and Plomari. We were nearly there.

Bahh! Beeeee-eh! We surveyed the slope above us and saw a herd of goats. Penelope bleated a rejoinder in goatish: Behhh! They must not have understood her idiom, and did not say anything in response. I decided to try out my own goatish. Be-e-e-e-e-e-eh! This got them. They said beeee-eee-e-e-e! I said be-e-e-e-e-e-e-eee-e! and they said beeeehh-e-e! Then they started moving, as if one of them had said, Come on guys, let's follow these guys! Or maybe, Let's get 'em! Two or three very uncomfortable minutes ensued. The goats followed after. We quickened our steps; they quickened theirs. They closed, grunting, hooves clattering. Penelope turned around to admonish them. They stopped to consider her words, but must have understood even less Greek than I do; they resumed their pursuit as soon as we started down the path. I had the very peculiar sensation that we might actually fall afoul of a goat stampede. We were considering making a run for it when we rounded a boulder and were met by a very angry little shepherd dog that saved us the ignominy of having to flee from small livestock. No bigger than a terrier, the dog snapped at our heels and proceeded to herd the goats, numbering fifty or more, into their pen. Everyone understood exactly what the little dog was saying.

I've never fancied myself a leader of men. At least I know I have what it takes to lead goats--though perhaps I should familiarize myself with the meaning of what I'm saying before I say it.

Sudden Change in the Weather

Yesterday there was a change in the weather. It happened with a slow sort of suddenness. The breeze stilled, the perpetual sea haze condensed. By mid-afternoon it had been overwhelmed, having given way inert ranks of wispy white cloud I hadn't seen on the sky here since May. Dark fell and the night was backlit by the moon. I slept deeply, dreaming of lunar revels on the sea of rains. Mare imbrium. The clouds were there still in the morning, now congealed into a more portentous shade. I stayed in until noon, sensing occasional bursts of rain flicking down onto our terrace. Sometime after noon it seemed to lift, and the kitchen was filled with light. I went out and surveyed our pergola. It was time.

The fruit was low and full. In some places it had suffered the hungry attentions of bees and wasps. I fetched a chair and shears and began to cut down the bunches, one at a time, until I had seventeen, each weighing maybe a pound. The vine originates in the southeast corner of the terrace, growing seven feet and more up a guidepole before forking into its two main branches. One of these snakes out over the main frame of the pergola, while the other has been teased over time onto an iron scaffold rising from our balcony, whose Aegean view it frames with green leaves like a maple's, and sweet, low-hanging fruit. The upper branch is the richer: From it I cut down twelve bunches, as opposed to five from lower branch that overlooks the terrace.

The haul amounted to maybe fifteen pounds, which I carried down to the bathroom in a plastic basin. After an hour or more of plucking and segregating I had a bucket full of plump purple grapes, with a healthy remainder earmarked for conversion into raisins. And then the fun began...


After washing and scrubbing our feet, Penelope and I took turns dancing in the grapes until they had lost well over half the volume they'd first displaced. To be sure of extracting as much of the juice as possible I also used a flat-bottomed colander, rocking it back and forth under my weight. The rest was easy: We poured the entire mash into two fermenters, added sugar and yeast, bunged them, and fitted the bungs with fermentation locks. I haven't a clue how it will turn out.


We are now deep into the night here, and the rain is falling in sheets. I am overcome with satisfaction at having harvested the grapes at the very moment Summer drew to a close.

Re: Ebenezer Devotion

Today an individual calling himself Mr. Ebenezer Devotion attempted to leave a comment on the previous post. While I initially deleted the comment in a fit of pique, I believe the episode deserves a recap. Since the individual in question believes that names are interchangeable, I prefer to call him Mr. Anon E. Muss. Now, Mr. Muss's comment indicated that while he was in agreement with the substance of the previous post, he was "puzzled" to encounter a hectoring, arrogant tone in it. For the benefit of this blog's tiny readership, and most of all for our devoted Mr. Muss, I would like to note that active challenges to the conspiracy of silence, however flimsy and rhetorical, will always seem arrogant to the quiescent, the ironic, the resigned. This was overwhelmingly the case, for instance, when Andrew Mayer attempted to join rhetorical battle with John Kerry--an act of courage that I do not mean to demean by pooling it with my own narrower efforts here.

Given that Mr. Muss avowedly agrees with the content, one wonders whether he might like to review the mendicant blogger's body of work in a soothing tone of humble, dispassionate tranquility. I have reservations that such a review may be impossible, but given that the mendicant blogger's work is of far greater importance than quibbles over style in the ghetto of this blog, perhaps one should be attempted. On to you, Mr. Muss.

Paean to a Vanishing Visionary, Part II

(Continued from Part I)

"Nature frequently does not announce in advance her intentions to fundamentally alter the world. Men often do -- and usually such warnings are ignored."

So. We're back. Back to retrain our sights on the sum of money still languishing in e-purgatory, waiting to be claimed or forgotten, born or miscarried, redeemed, refused, or returned as undeliverable. I mentioned in the first section of this paean that the unclaimed status of my electronically given alms was of grave concern to me. And so it obviously is. But I submit and shall argue that the matter far transcends the narrow sphere of my own interests. To the extent that the sum's status indexes the continued existence or possible passing of the principled man of letters in question, it may be appropriate to class the transaction, however miserly its actual magnitude, as being of general importance to truth, decency, and--as the man himself frequently puts it--the sanctity of a single human life. A heady billing, yes, but note that I stop short of hawking tawdry nationalist notions by asserting, for instance, that the 'fate of the nation' hinges on whether the principled man is able to resume his writing. That destiny is an illusion beyond all salvation. At this late juncture, I wonder if, far from righting the handbasket's gadarene course, our only hope lies in certain of its wary passengers being able to maintain some marginal hold on moral consciousness and empirical sobriety as the rest of us stampede into the sulphurous nether reaches without thought or care.

I mentioned in the first section that this writer, this beggar, this good and principled man, was of vanishing significance. That he is. He has nothing. Nothing at all. From the vantage of the groveling hordes spreadeagled before the altarsa of power, money and fame--yes, I mean you--he is nothing. Far from earning him acclaim or accolade, his tireless work in the service of decency and the sanctity of a single human life has made him destitute. Indeed, if his work is noticed at all as he lives out his remaining days in America's pitiless margin, it is likely to elicit only scorn and ridicule from a readership presumably hoping to cozy up to power and escape personal responsibility the handbasket's course by cutting, as it were, a plea deal. And yet it is precisely his contemptible nothingness that so qualifies him to exercise his voice as a legitimate proponent of democracy and freedom as he speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the weak and the sundry other miserable victims of the ruling class's endless pursuit of total power at home and abroad. To express it somewhat differently: Although his material circumstances are deplorable--and I do not wish to glorify his penury, merely to note it with a nod to its epistemological effect--it is the collision of this very marginality with his erudition and eloquence that makes the writing so powerful and haunting. Put differently again: Precisely because he does not feed at the corporate/state trough, his voice can be trusted. Yes, this is exactly right. It is his insignificance, exquisitely alloyed with eloquence, empathy, and intelligence, then tempered by the rigor of his intellectual commitment, that makes him trustworthy, and that places his writing in a class by itself. With only the merest handful of exceptions, no voice has been raised with as much stridency and forthright persistence as his in denouncing the events that have heralded our cowardly descent into darkness. For this reason and for others to be detailed below, his is the single most important voice in modern American letters, political or otherwise.

Here is a man who has seen very clearly how matters stand for the sucker without a trough, for the unprotected individual who has surrendered neither vision nor spirit for the soporific emoluments of comfort and prestige. Everything proceeds from this untethered perspective. I intend to use this concept, that of the unprotected individual (as both object and subject), as a lens through which to focus at somewhat greater length on a representative group of the issues that keep our principled man of letters up at night.

First things first. How do things stand with the unprotected individual? Let us refer to the ominous citation at the top of this post by way of warming up to the subject. The line is his, the mendicant blogger's, penned on the occasion of the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This act, as I think bears endless repetition, annihilated all of your liberties at their conceptual root, and with them the very last traces of the hope for human happiness that accompanied the founding of our country in that long ago. In theory, your body is now the chattel of the State, to do with as it pleases. Mr. Obama or whoever succeeds him as the parasite- and murderer-in-chief may consign you or me or anyone at all to a torture chamber in perpetuity and be held to account by precisely no one. All he must do is label you an "enemy combatant", and presto! your life is over. Habeas corpus, the principle set out nearly 800 years ago in the Magna Carta as a means of protecting individuals from the depredations of the state, is in our country a thing of the past. This is the letter of the law. No longer, in theory, do you have the right to challenge your detention at the hands of the government. From this it follows that all the other rights which you thought were yours are entirely illusory. This is what you need to know. It is indeed all you need to know. Or: If we were a citizenry that cared a damn about freedom and human life, the foregoing would be all we needed to know before springing into action to overthrow the tyrannical government that made it so. But we aren't, and it isn't, and we won't. It should be noted here that one of the very first actions taken by the present administration in January 2009 was to solidify the legal ground for tyranny prepared so diligently by the one it succeeded. For the benefit of those clinging to the vain hope of striking a plea deal with leviathan, it should also be noted that when each individual is the theoretical chattel of the state, no wall is high enough to keep you safe. No amount of money or fame will be enough to secure you in your phantom liberties. Raw power is the only thing there is, which means that only the ascendant faction is safe, and only for as long as they remain in the ascendant. Everyone else is tax chattel, cannon fodder, prison meat.

You will say I am ringing the alarm bells without empirical cause, that I am ringing them irresponsibly. Have things really come to such a dire pass? Is it really time to run for the hills? The answer is a qualified no. We are not yet a dictatorship, but the path is very short. Actually, it has been paved and signposted, and a whole bunch of sheriffs have been detailed to patrol it. The intentions have been announced, and there is nothing intrinsic to you or to me or to our polity that will prevent them from being brought to term. Now you'll argue that the detention camps and mass round-ups have not yet come. But they will--though you won't be hearing much about them. Hordes of dedicated, sadistic opportunists have worked tirelessly for years to lay the conceptual groundwork for midwifing just these horrors into being. One need not be very proficient in the art of thought-experimentation to divine what a boon another real terrorist strike or war would be to the power of the state and to the pathetic dreams of domination harbored by the subhuman functionaries who serve it. With ample exceptions for our rapacious elites, all of us stand huddled on the bleak shore that the principled mendicant blogger has seen so clearly, completely vulnerable to what the tide may bring, though it should be mentioned that even those elites may easily fall from grace, briefly to adorn the sacrificial altar of state power before they, too, are merged with the main stream of din, distr(u/a)ction, and death.

Which is all to say that we have all been warned of what lies ahead. The ruling class has made its intentions perfectly clear. They told you in broad daylight; they told it to your face. But the bitter truth is that you don't really need the principled mendicant blogger to know where we stand, and you certainly don't need me. Nor is there any need to compile detailed lists of legislation, executive orders, verdicts, conclaves, policy papers or the like. Just go out and smell the air. Talk to the people. Listen. Do you feel the fear, the loathing, the trembling?

As for the fate of the unprotected individual with the misfortune to be huddled on foreign shores that have come under the scrutiny of imperial design, God help him. Suffice it to say that in order to count himself safe from American drones and death squads (your drones and death squads), he must dwell under the umbrella of a nuclear arsenal.

The blogger in question has examined the perpetual aggrandizement of the state's powers at the expense of the individual at great length over the course of several years, and with considerably greater intellectual firepower and moral seriousness than I can muster here. Of course, there are many others who have chronicled and charted our government's assault on life, liberty and dignity. What sets the mendicant blogger in question apart is the way he has managed to cut to the root--psychological, moral, and social--of why we find ourselves in this predicament. Why have we let ourselves, as individuals, become dupes in this pawn game of totalitarian intrigue? As our mendicant blogger sees it, the key to understanding how a once free people can so utterly relinquish its liberties to leviathan, can be found in our cradle-to-grave culture of obedience and deferral to authority. I mentioned in the first section that our principled mendicant blogger is a great chaser after the true meanings of words--obedience is one of the words he has loosed his hounds on. After a lengthy pursuit, he pins it down for us thus:

"Obedience is the term used to describe the demand by a person in a superior position [...] that a person in an inferior position conduct himself in a particular manner. The essence of obedience is the demand without more: A reason may be provided, but a reason is unnecessary."

To offer a very brief paraphrase of the large attendant idea that the mendicant man of letters has developed at great length, the problem is that so many of us fail to ever become fully formed adults--as defined by the capacity for independent judgment and moral autonomy--at any point in our lives. More precisely, we import into adulthood the unhealthy dynamic that characterized our emotional lives as children, when we were blackmailed into obedience by the unspoken Damocletic threat that parental love might be withdrawn as punishment for misbehavior. As we grow up and pass through the various institutions that purport to shape us into adults (while in fact sucking our blood and feeding us lies--my line), the fear and obedience originally accorded the parent give way to fear and obedience accorded the institutional authority figure, the representatives of the state, and ultimately the state itself. The being that emerges from this long apprenticeship to fear has neither the honesty and depth of feeling of a child nor the cognitive capacity and probity of a true adult; the best-educated specimens of this genus might best be compared to cowering animal with recourse to vast reserves of bad faith, disingenuousness and sophistry--a lawyer, in other words. As luck would have it, this cowering animal's very survival mechanisms are highly convenient to the state's purposes.

Now, however inapposite this account may be in individual cases, and whatever its logical flaws--flaws which are amply acknowledged by the writer himself, who advances his arguments by way of a tentative, evolving dialectic of difference and repetition, never by slinging arrows of arrogant conceit--its utility as a heuristic device is plain to see. Nor does the argument does end there. It is precisely at the point of "phobic transfer" from parent to state where the argument folds in on itself to ensure that no one is let off the hook. A child obeys because he must. Absent the parent, the child will die. Plainly, our principled man of letters argues, an adult is not in the same position of existential peril as a child. Although he may convince himself otherwise, the adult has a choice. Up to the point of being threatened by incarceration or violence, the adult's submission to the state's imperatives should actually be understood as support. Support for the political system that nominally represents us, whether material or ideological, whether active or passive, is an individual choice. This means, very significantly, that although we as individuals may be unable to halt the vast evils being committed in our name on these and other shores, we are, in a limited sense, collectively guilty of facilitating evil by omission. Even if we are inwardly opposed to the monstrous and ongoing series of war crimes that constitute the Iraqi occupation and have claimed lives numbering more than a million, even if we are inwardly opposed to the burgeoning paranoiac police state and infinite travesty of justice at home, we share in the guilt for these outrages to the extent that we do nothing to stop them. But no! you say. I was just minding my business; I had nothing to do with it. Of course: The dropping of this accessory charge, the ideological absolution, all this is a part of the plea deal sought by the fainthearted. Let someone else take the fall. As our principled mendicant blogger puts it: Why do you support?

Measure is the final signal aspect of this writer's persona that I would like to celebrate. He knows when to laugh, when to cry, when to curse and where to refrain. He knows the time for tempest and the time for anguished silence. Measure does not mean the buffoonery of "balance" or any of the other red herrings trotted out by corporate media to throw their insouciant readers off the scent of corruption. When his writing addresses grave matters of life and death, the register of his language reflects that gravity. He knows there is no humor in false levity. Nor, when dealing with these grave and pernicious matters--that is to say, when dealing with nearly every occurrence on the national political scene--does he affect the disgusting exculpatory irony deployed to such great effect by liberal intellectuals who find it expedient to distance themselves from state excesses, but inexpedient to address the issue at its root. This sense of measure derives, I would argue, from a rightness of perspective: He takes political matters seriously in terms of actual effects on actual people. He resists the soul-shriveling mendacity inherent in the apolitical, amoral "procedural reporting" spread in journalism schools. Such reporting is the kind that allows, for instance, for the authorship of breezy, witty articles on the debates between various sinecured mediocrities as they pass war spending bills without once mentioning in these articles that the debates they are covering so breezily and so wittily in fact concern the planned destruction of thousands of human lives. By which I mean that to our prescient and principled mendicant blogger, a single human life is sacred. I know, I know. This essay is peppered with references to that purported sanctity. And as mentioned in the first installment, a lifetime of brainwashed ignorance is not undone by a single cathartic assertion. No. If it is to gain any traction in our slippery minds and (not least) on our slippery tongues, the truth must be repeated incessantly. May you reread the foregoing until the bile boils over. It is my fervent hope that you do read it, over and over again.

When I come into contact with what I believe to be the truth regarding matters of fundamental importance to the sanctity of life and to the dormant dream of man as a free, enlightened and thoroughly spiritual animal, I feel a deep obligation to make what I have felt available to others, bludgeoning them if I must, that they might partake of that truth and allow it to change their lives accordingly. Truth--as opposed to myths, lies, distortions or cognitive dissonance--has this power. Above, I identified this man's marginal status as the wellspring of his intellectual freedom, and the power of his perspective. As anyone who is familiar with the real article rather than the hollow ersatz peddled by nationalist scoundrels will know, freedom's eternal correlative is risk. In order to be able to address himself to his task with the radical cognitive and stylistic freedom that made his work exceptional, this good and principled man had to shun and be shunned by institutional safe havens. As the blog's progression through time amply illustrates, this freedom from allegiance cemented his poverty and ensured his susceptibility to the grim forces against which he so nobly marshaled a mind leavened by the word. If freedom and truth are in fact any concern of ours--if we wish to actuate these concepts as forces to counter the tide of unthinking darkness that threatens to sweep us all away--I submit that when we are touched by them, as we are in the case of this ailing mendicant blogger, this good, principled and visionary man, we also incur an obligation to sustain that freedom, most obviously by showering it with money. He is not selling you a cultural product: His existence constitutes the condition for keeping culture alive.

The thanks he gets: "I have written repeatedly on certain themes for several years now. I try to present my central ideas in new ways, to offer additional historical evidence for my contentions, and to make connections between seemingly disparate phenomena that I have not addressed earlier. But no matter what I attempt to do here, I make no headway whatsoever. It seems to me that my writing has no effect at all."

As a child in kindergarten, I recall being asked by my teacher if I had a hero. No, I said. I could think of none. Now that I am 30 years old, I may finally have one. Of course, I do think that the good man in question, the national clairvoyant toiling in the service of truth and decency without thanks or recognition, this mendicant blogger of vanishing significance, would shy away from any such designation. After all, his writing has not accomplished any of what we like to call 'real change.' The pleas and exhortations to action that were the not-quite-daily hallmarks of his blog for years have not prevented a single Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani from meeting his fate at the hands of the American death machine, nor have they restored to us the rights we thought were ours by virtue of our humanity. Nor, and this is not an index of the man's incapacity, but that of the media and of the fools for whom their product is churned out, has this good and principled man of conscience been able, notwithstanding the vast, lapidary, interlocking body of meaning and truth he has erected over these past five and a half years, to resurrect anything bearing even a chance resemblance to justice or compassion or truth in the "national debate", least of all in the liberal quarters of that debate, where questions of fundamental importance are scorned and disregarded in favor of what the writer calls "primitive tribalism". So then, you say. He is nothing, he has done nothing, he is no better than me. Why the hell should I care?

Not so fast. This good and eloquent man of principle may indeed not have caused any of the gilded parasites that hold national office to change our course toward hell in the slightest, but he is better than you and I by a country mile: On a well-nigh daily basis, he broke the conspiracy of silence surrounding America's genocidal Iraqi project; as often, he challenged the insidious power grabs by Bush, facilitated and secretly cheered by his Democratic "opposition"; his voice was among the faint few who understood and objected to the looting of the treasury and of your savings, current and potential, by the bi-partisan Wall Street clique that, in the good and principled man's own words, will make sure that "you eat shit for the rest of your life". The man was aware and gave voice to the grim fact that everything you do, whether at work or at play, is geared to the aggrandizement of state power by a labyrinthine cogwork of laws, regulations, titles, statutes, forms, schedules, rulings, ordinances, bylaws and decrees; and, conversely, that if you fail to sacrifice the allotted share of your social power for conversion into state power in every little thing you do, why, you're no better than a criminal. The man saw what there was to see and said what there was to say. And that is no mean thing in a culture that is plunging headlong into the black night of barbarism. As was to be expected, nobody listened. Here is a man whose name should be trailing reverently from the besotted lips of the world. Yet not a whisper is heard. Perhaps--damnable possibility--the truth is that we were not worthy of him. Neither the zombie politic in general, nor you nor I in particular, were worthy of him. Such are the heroes of a people who so badly need them, but deserve them so little.

I had trouble keeping my tenses straight while writing the foregoing. Forgive me, but let me explain. It's not merely a matter of deficient mental faculty. The trouble is that the ailing man of principle's invaluable blog may be a thing of the past, as may the man behind it. The last time he wrote publicly was to explain his recent dearth of production, hinting at numerous grave ailments for which he has no recourse to ongoing care. If, some months from now, the online broker tells me the money was never claimed, I shall have my answer. The seed was stillborn, and the hero we did not deserve is dead. But his injunction still stands: Wake up, be adults, and for God's sake, be serious.

I will leave off by quoting the man, whose name is Arthur Silber, at greater length. I had been toying with the idea of not revealing his name at all, on principle, but I imagine Silber himself would not want it that way.

On where we stand:
"The significant point is that the aftermath of 9/11 would not have been so devastating, and this intellectual paralysis would not have persisted until now, unless a number of factors had already existed: the constantly diminishing concern with liberty and individual rights on the part of so many Americans, the dependence on government for more benefits of all kinds, for more controls and, above all, for perfect safety, the general deterioration and extremely aggressive anti-intellectualism of our culture and the inability to conduct a serious discussion about any subject at all, the decline of our media into obsolescence and irrelevance on all matters of importance -- and then, added to all this, the determined, unrelenting efforts by the Bush administration to achieve their ignoble aims by whatever means necessary.
"In this sense, what we are now experiencing is the perfect cultural storm, and the perfect cultural nightmare: a storm which can easily destroy what remains of liberty here at home, and simultaneously lead to world war, a war which might kill a significant portion of mankind.
"For these reasons, and as I have detailed in many other essays here, I do think that we live in a uniquely and profoundly dangerous time in historic terms. This particular combination of factors has never existed in America before. When an administration is known to assault individual rights on a continuing basis, when our government seeks to place itself and all its actions beyond the reach of all law and all restraints, when the United States engages in abuse and torture across the world, when we attack another country on the basis of lies when that other nation never threatened us -- when all of this is known and is out in the open, and when the American public utters barely one word of protest and doesn't object to a degree which need concern the administration at all -- then the stage is set for the ultimate catastrophe."

On those who stand on high:
"Anyone who craves such power is irredeemably corrupt. Our history over the last hundred years demonstrates that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. They all feed off the system -- and they all feed off us. None of them wants to dismantle the system that supports and makes possible the lives to which they have become accustomed. For them, the system is life itself. In this kind of system -- in our kind of system -- there is no longer any battle over fundamental principles. The only struggles are over who controls the levers of state power. The only struggles are over who will rule. As a result, they will fight each other over derivative issues, but only to the extent they believe this will aid in their own ascension to power. The system itself is sacrosanct."

Finally, two tangentially relevant passages by other writers:
"During all the years that I have been writing I have steeled myself to the idea that I would not really be accepted, at least to my own countrymen, until after my death. Many times, in writing, I have looked over my own shoulder from beyond the grave, more alive to the reactions of those to come than to those of my contemporaries. A good part of my life has, in a way, been lived in the future. With regard to all that vitally concerns me I am really a dead man, alive only to a very few who, like myself, could not wait for the world to catch up with them. I do not say this out of pride or vanity, but with humility not untouched with sadness."
- Henry Miller in The Colossus of Maroussi (1939)

"The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came from Europe to look us over in the early part of the [19th] century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected, notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially, he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces, Trolloppes, and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted St.-Simonien and political economist, Michel Chevalier. Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John Adams, has called attention to Chevalier's observation that the American people have "the morale of an army on the march." The more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little there is in what our publicists are fond of calling "the American psychology" that it does not exactly account for [...].
"An army on the march has no philosophy. It views itself as a creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a pretty strict official understanding against its doing so; "theirs not to reason why." Emotionalizing conduct is another matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquettes, flags, music, uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie. In every relation to "the reason of the thing," however -- in the ability and eagerness, as Plato puts it, "to see things as they are" -- the mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile."
- Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, the State (1935)