Tales of Ordinary Madness (19 page)

so there he drove, with her and him, both very serious, she 4, he a bit older, waiting on red lights, sitting next to each other. that's all there was.

it was plenty.

NOTES OF A POTENTIAL SUICIDE

I sit by the window as the garbage men drive up. they empty the garbage cans. I listen for mine. there it is: CRASK TINKLE CRASH BLUNK BLASH! one of the gentlemen looks at the other:

“man, they got one
powerful
drinker in there!”

I lift my bottle and wait for further developments in space flight.

***

somebody puts a book by Norman Mailer on me. it is called
Christians and Cannibals.
God, he just writes on and on. there's no force, no humor. I don't understand it. just a pushing out of the word, any word, anything. is this what happens to the famous? think how lucky we are!

***

2 come by. a Jew and a German. “where we going?” I ask. they don't answer. the German is driving. he breaks all laws of driving. he has the gas down to the floor. we are in the hills then and he's skimming along the edge of the road – there a 2 thousand foot drop.

it is not nice, I think, to die by another man's hand.

we make it to the observatory. how dull. they both seem happy with it. the Jew likes zoos but it is night and the zoo is closed. there are some people who must always go somewhere.

“let's go to a movie!”

“let's go boating!”

“let's get laid!”

“screw all that stuff,” I always say, “just let me sit here.”

so people no longer ask. they just get me in a car and then I can be surprised with whatever special dullness awaits.

so the German runs up to the building. there are notches between the blocks that run up the front of the building. the German starts climbing up the notches. then he's halfway up the building, hanging over the doorway. god, how dull, I think. I wait for him to either fall down or climb down.

a teacher comes by. he is with highschool students. they are all lined-up as they walk through the doorway. the teacher looks up and sees the German.

“is that one of mine?” he asks.

“no, that one's mine,” I tell him.

they march in. the German climbs down. we walk into the building. it is the same as it was 30 years ago. the big swinging ball that hangs from a wire in the pit. everybody looks at the ball swinging.

god, I think, how dull.

then I follow the German and the Jew and they walk around and push buttons. things jiggle and move a bit. or there is an electric spark. ½ of the stuff is broken and pushing the buttons is futile. the German gets lost from us. I walk around with the Jew. he finds a machine that records tremors.

“Hey, Hank!” he hollers.

“yeh.”

“come here! now look when I count 3, both of us will leap up into the air.”

“all right.”

he weighs 200, I weigh 225.

“one, two, three!”

we leap and land. the machine scribbles some lines.

“one, two, three!”

we leap.

“now once more! one –”

“to hell with it,” I say, “let's go catch a drink!”

I walk away.

the German walks up. “let's get out of here,” he suggests.

“sure,” I say.

“some bitch repulsed me,” the German says, “it's disgusting.”

“don't worry,” I say, “she probably has shitstains in her panties.”

“but I like them that way.”

“you like to sniff it?”

“of course.”

“sorry, then, it's a bad evening for you.”

the Jew runs up. “let's go to Schwab's drugstore!” he hollers.

“o, for Christ's sake,” I say.

we get back into the car and once again the German has got to show us how close he can carry us to death. then we are out of the hills.

all the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. it is basically a fear of facing one's self, it is basically a fear of being alone. my fear is of the crowd, the ass-wild running crowd; the people who read Norman Mailer and go to baseball games and cut and water their lawns and bend over the garden with a trowel.

the German drives toward Schwab's. he wants to sniff.

***

there is a symphony orchestra back east. the conductor makes it by playing what I might call the Beginner's Melodies. these extracts from music are what please almost any beginner in the classical music field. but if a man has any sensibilities at all he can't listen to these beginning pieces more than 4 or 5 times without becoming just a bit ill. but this particular orchestra lards it on week after week, and the audience is a middle-aged audience, and where they come from and what has retarded them, I have no idea. but after hearing these simplistic and basic and somewhat sugary pieces, they really believe they have heard something new and great and profound, and they leap from their seats and scream “BRAVO! BRAVO!” just like they've heard it's done. the conductor comes out and takes bow after bow and then asks the orchestra to stand. my only thought is, does this conductor
know
he is conning them or is he also retarded?

some of the pieces I would have to put in the grammar school of music and which this conductor likes to play are, Offenbach's
La Vie Parisienne,
Ravel's
Bolero,
Rossini's overture,
La Gazza ladra,
Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker Suite
(may the devil save us!): Bizet's
Carmen
or portions thereof; Copland's
El Salon Mexico,
de Falla's
The Three-Cornered Hat Dance,
Elgar's
Pomp and Circumstance March,
Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue
(may the devil save us twice over!); and there are many others which do not come to me at the moment ...

but let this particular crowd come into contact with this basic sugar, they go harmlessly apeshit.

and driving home, you get a scene something like this. the old man about 52, owner of 3 furniture stores, feeling intelligent:

“by god, you've got to hand it to – – – –, there's a man who really knows his music! he can really make you
feel
it!”

wife:

“yes, I
always
feel so uplifted! by the way, should we eat at home or out!”

***

of course, there's no accounting for taste, or lack of it. one man's pussy is another man's handjob. I can't understand the popularity of Faulkner, baseball games, Bob Hope, Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Ibsen, the plays of Chekhov. G. B. Shaw makes me yawn all over. Tolstoy also.
War and Peace
is the biggest flop for me since Gogol's
Overcoat.
Mailer I have spoken of. Bob Dylan affects me as overacting while Donovan appears to have real style. I just don't understand. Boxing, professional football, basketball seem to move with force. the early Hemingway was good. Dos was a rough boy. Sherwood Anderson all the way. the early Saroyan. tennis and opera, you take it. new cars, to hell with them. stocking panties, ugg. rings, watches, ugg. very early Gorky. D. H. Lawrence, o.k. Celine, without a doubt. scrambled eggs, shit. Artaud when he gets hot. Ginsberg, sometimes. wrestling – what??? Jeffers, of course. on and on, you know. who's right? I am, of course. why, yes, of course.

***

when I was a boy I went to something that was called an Air Show. they had stunt fliers, air races, parachute jumps. one stunt flier, I recall, was very good. they'd put a hanky on a hook down close to the ground and he'd fly in very low in this old German fokker and pick up the hanky with a hook on one of his wings. then he'd do a barrel roll right down against the ground, almost. he had very good control of his plane. the air races were best – for kids, and maybe the others too – so many crashes. all the planes were built in different shapes, very strange-looking things. brightly colored. and they'd crash. crash after crash after crash. it was very exciting. my friend's name was Frank. he is now a superior court judge.

“hey, Hank!”

“yeah, Frank?”

“follow me.”

we went under the stands.

“you can look up the women's dresses here,” he said.

“yeah?”

“yeah, look!”

“geez!”

the stands were built of boards and you could see right up through them.

“hey, look at this one!”

“oh, boy!”

Frank went walking around.

“pssst! over here!”

I walked over. “yeah.”

“look, look! you can see the pussy!”

“where? where?”

“look, look where I'm looking!”

we stood there and looked at that thing. we looked at it a long time.

then we walked out and watched the rest of the show.

the parachute jumpers were at it. they were trying to see how close they could come to a circle drawn on the ground. they didn't seem to come very close. then one guy jumped and his chute only opened part way. he had some wind in it so he wasn't dropping as fast as a man would without a chute, and you could watch him. he seemed to be kicking, and working his hands and arms out against the strings, trying to untangle the parachute. but he wasn't solving it.

“can't anybody help him?” I asked.

Frank didn't answer. he had a camera and was taking pictures. many of the people were taking pictures of the thing. some even had movie cameras.

the man was nearing the ground, still trying to untangle the strings. then he hit. when he hit you could see him bounce up from the ground. the chute covered him. they canceled the rest of the jump. the Air Show was almost over.

it had been quite something. those crashes, the jumper and the pussy.

we rode our bicycles all the way home and talked about it.

it looked as if life were going to be quite a thing.

NOTES ON THE PEST

Pest, n. (Fr.
peste,
from L.
pestis,
a plague, a pest (whence
pestilent,
pestiferous): same root as
perdo,
to destroy (PERDITION).) A plague, pestilence, or deadly epidemic disease; anything very noxious, mischievous, or destructive; a mischievous or destructive person.

the pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how – usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep. he is also very good at catching you in the crapper about halfway through a bowel-movement. if he is at the door you can scream, “Jesus, wait a minute, what the hell, wait a minute!” but the sound of the human voice in agony only encourages the pest – his beat, his ring becomes more excited. the pest usually beats and rings. you must let him in. and when he leaves – finally – you will be ill for a week. the pest not only pisses on your soul – he is also very good at leaving his yellow water on your toilet lid. he leaves hardly enough to see; you don't know it is there until you sit down and it is too late.

unlike you, the pest has hours of time to shoot through the head. and all his ideas are contrary to yours but he never knows this because he is continually talking and even when you get a chance to disagree, the pest does not hear. he really never hears your voice. it is just a vague area of break to him, then he continues his dialogue. and while the pest continues on you wonder how he ever got his dirty little snout into your soul. the pest is also very aware of your sleeping hours and he will phone you time after time while you are asleep and his first question will be, “did I awaken you?” or he will come upon your place and all the shades will be down but he will knock and ring anyhow, wildly, wildly in orgasm. if you do not answer he will shout out, “I know that you're in there! I can see your car outside!”

these destroyers, although they have no idea of your thought process, they do sense your dislike for them, yet in another way this only encourages them. also they realize that you are a certain type of person – that is, given a choice of hurting or being hurt, you will accept the latter, pests thrive on the best slices of humanity; they know where the good meat is.

the pest is always full of dry standard nonsense that he mistakes for self-wisdom. some of his favorite remarks are:

“there is no such thing as ALL bad. you say that
all
cops are bad. well they're not. I've met some good ones. there is such a thing as a good cop.”

you never get a chance to explain to him that when a man puts that uniform on that he is the paid protector of things of the present time. he is here to see that things stay the way they are. if you like the way things are, then
all
cops are good cops. if you don't like the way things are, then all cops are bad cops. there is such as thing as ALL bad. but the pest is soaked in these addled and homespun philosophies and he will not let them go. the pest, being unable to think, attaches himself to people – grimly and finally and forever.

“we are not informed as to what is going on, we don't have the real answers. we must trust our leaders.”

this one is so damned silly that I am not even going to comment on it. in fact, thinking it over, I am not going to list any more of the pest's comments for I am beginning to get ill.

so then. well, this pest need not be a person who knows you by name or location. the pest is everywhere, always, ready to attach his poisoned stinking deathray onto you. I remember one particular time when I was lucky with the horses. I was down at Del Mar driving a new car. each night after the races I would select a new motel, and after a shower and change of clothing I would get into the car and drive along the coast looking for a good place to eat. by a good place to eat, I meant a place not too crowded that served good food. it seems like a contrary thing. I mean, if the food is good the people should be there. but like many seeming truths, this truth is not necessarily so. sometimes the crowd flocks to places that serve absolute garbage. so each night it was my pilgrimage to search out a place that served good food but that was not filled with the madding crowd. it took some time. one night I drove for an hour and thirty minutes before locating my spot. I parked the car and went in. I ordered a New York cut, french fries, so forth, and sat there over my coffee until the food arrived. the whole diner was empty; it was a marvelous night. then just with the arrival of my New York cut, the door opened and in came the pest. of course, you guessed it. there were 32 stools in the place but he HAD TO take the stool next to mine and begin conversing with the waitress over his doughnut. he was a real flat fish. his dialogue knifed into my guts. dull rotting tripe, the stench of his soul swinging through the air wrecking everything. and he gave me just
enough
elbow in the plate. the pest is
very
good with just enough elbow in the plate. I got the New York cut down and then went out and got so drunk that I missed the first three races the next day.

the pest is anywhere you work, anywhere that you are employed. I am pest-meat. I once worked in a place where this man hadn't spoken to anybody for 15 years. on my second day there he spoke to me for 35 minutes. he was completely insane. one sentence would be on one subject, the other on another entirely unrelated. which is all right except the stuff was mottled dead humorless rankeled stink. they kept him because he was a good worker. “a good day's work for a good day's pay.” there is at least one madman on every job, a pest, and they always find me. “every nut in the joint likes you,” is a sentence that I have heard on job after job. it is not encouraging.

but perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it's a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and uglinesses that we ourselves are not aware of but that everybody else is aware of. how ya gonna keep us down on the farm?

yet, still you must admire the man who takes action against the pest. the pest shrivels against direct action and soon attaches himself elsewhere. I know a man, a kind of intellectual-poet type, a lively life-filled sort who has a large sign attached to his front door. I do not remember it directly but it goes something like this (and done in a beautifully-printed hand):

to whom it may concern: please phone me for appointments when you want to see me. I will not answer unsolicited knocks upon the door. I need time to do my work. I will not allow you to murder my work. please understand that what keeps me alive will make me a better person toward and for you when we finally meet under easy and unstrained conditions.

I admired this sign. I did not take it as a snobbery or an overevaluation of self. he was a good man in good sense and had enough humor and courage to state his natural rights. I first came upon the sign by accident, and after staring at it and hearing him in there I walked to my car and drove away. the beginning of understanding is the beginning of everything and it's time some of us began. for instance, I have nothing against Love-ins so long as I AM NOT FORCED TO ATTEND. I am not even against love, but we were speaking of pests, weren't we?

even I, prime pest-meat that I am, even I once made a move against a pest. I was, at the time, working 12 hours a night, god forgive me and god forgive god, but anyhow this very pesty pest could not resist phoning me every morning about 9 a.m. I got in about 7:30 and after a couple of beers I usually managed to go to sleep. he had it timed just right. and he gave me the same old stupid drab drivel. just knowing that he had awakened me and heard my voice charged him up. he coughed and mewed and hacked and sputtered. “listen,” I finally said, “why in the hell do you keep waking me up at 9 a.m.? you know I work all night. 12 hours a night! why in the hell do you keep right on awakening me at 9 a.m.?”

“I thought,” he said, “you might be going to the track. I wanted to get you before you went to the track.”

“listen,” I said, “first post is onefortyfive p.m. and how in the hell do you think I am going to play the horses when I work 12 hours a night? how in the hell do you think I can work all that in? I have to sleep, shit, bathe, eat, fuck, buy new shoelaces, all that stuff, don't you have any sense of reality? don't you realize that when I come in from the job that they've taken every damn thing out of me? don't you realize that there's nothing left? I can't make the racetrack. I'm too weak to even scratch my ass. why the hell do you keep phoning at 9 a.m. every morning?”

as they say, his voice was husky with emotion – “I want to get you before you go to the racetrack.”

it was useless. I hung the phone up. then I got a large cardboard carton. then I took the phone and stuck it into the bottom of the large cardboard carton. then I stuffed the damn thing solidly with rags. I did it every morning when I arrived and I took the thing out when I awakened. the pest was dead. he came to see me one day.

“how come you don't answer your phone anymore?” he asked.

“I stuff the phone in a box of rags when I come home.”

“but don't you realize that when you stuff that phone into a box of rags that, symbolically, you are stuffing
me
into a box of rags?”

I looked at him and said very slowly and quietly, “that's right.”

it was never ever quite the same with us again. I heard from a friend of mine, an older man than I, very alive but not an artist (thank god) and he told me: “McClintock phones me 3 times a day. does he still phone you?”

“not any more.”

the McClintocks are the joke of the town but the McClintocks never realize that they are the McClintocks. you can always tell a McClintock. each McClintock carries a little black book filled with phone numbers. and if you have a telephone, look out. the pest will strongarm your phone, first assuring you that all the calls are local (they aren't) and then he will begin (she will begin) unloading their never-ending poison spiel into the ear of the disgusted listener, these McClintock-pest types can talk for hours, and although you try not to listen, listening can't be helped and you feel a kind of humorous sympathy for the poor person at the other agony-end of the wire.

perhaps some day the world will be constructed, reconstructed, that the pest through the generosity of decent living and clear ways will no longer be the pest. there is the theory that the pest is created by things that should not be there. bad government, bad air, fucked-up sex, a mother with a wooden arm, a father who used to goose himself with brillo pads, so forth. whether the Utopian society will ever arrive we will never know. but right now we still have these screwed-up areas of humanity to deal with – the starvation hordes, the black the white and the red, the sleeping Bombs, the love-ins, the hippies, the not-so hippies, Johnson, roaches in Albequerque, bad beer, the clap, chickenshit editorials, this this that that, and the Pest. the pest is still here. I live today not tomorrow. my Utopia means less pests NOW. and I'd sure like to hear your story. I am sure that each of us bears one or 2 McClintocks. you could probably make me laugh with your stories about the McClintockpest. god, which reminds me!!!!! I'VE NEVER HEARD A McCLINTOCK LAUGH!!!

think of that.

think of any pest you have ever known and ask yourself have they ever laughed? have you ever heard them laugh?

jesus, come to think of it, I don't laugh much myself. I can't laugh except when I am by myself. I wonder if I have been writing about myself? a pest pestered by pests. think of that. a whole pest colony twisting and sinking fang and 69-ing. 69-ing?? let's light a Chesterfield and forget the whole thing. see you in the morning. stuffed in a box of rags and petting cobra tits.

hello. I didn't wake you up, did I?

umm, I didn't think so.