Pudding River - An Excerpt

     

       The flash came and was gone in an instant. In cracks and booms, the pissing sky clapped strobes, shaking the ground, the thunder an airborne earthquake. In the pop of light, briefly, the streaking rain was given a frame between the high rise buildings, like grainy television, a feast of the senses for those who cared. And beyond the concrete dune of the Waterfront Park surged the river, bloody, mud brown, suffocating with oily slicks of weekend getaway boats, sighing with the heaving of the wake. The meekest moon, a daily deity, shrugged at the sun behind the thunderclouds and was silent, burnt out, invisible, extinguished by the storm.

        The hobo bacchanal had only just wound down underneath the West end of the Burnside Bridge, with Abe and Jim having spoken their final spooky missives to their shadows, in the silhouettes of the Old Town brick, to each other, to the lost pedestrians who’d stumbled post-saloon jaunt toward their camp. They weren’t supposed to be here, this makeshift bridge shelter. Abe and Jim, that is. Or anyone else. But it was raining, and someone from the crew’d come upon a few three-quarter-gone fifths of booze somewhere near the bowels of the Belmont boulevards earlier in the day.

Little victories were grounds for big celebrations. Big celebrations sometimes brought along big trouble, but tonight’s good cheer was harmless, fun.

        Abe, the Wordsmith they called him, had rationed the booze out to the crew when the sun fell low over the West hills to Beaverton and the Pacific beyond earlier in the evening. The second-hand nightcap would supplement bellies full of malt liquor, discarded donuts and the last gooey droplets from the free honey packets Abe’d stolen from a sidewalk coffee stand. Give them the highs before the inevitable crashing lows. Let them hearts dance around a while before they drop into their boots to rest, and moan to rise another day. It’s always easier to fall than fly.

       Then the thunder’d sent its sonic boom to explode in the concrete acoustics of the bridge encampment, a blast as raucous as the silence only the deaf know, and it’d sent those just laid down to slumber into a jolting panic, the tatters of their sleeping bags now assaulted by diagonal rain in the dawn of the new day Northwest.

       There were about 10 of them here, homeless, resting, living under the cloak of the bridge when no one was looking. The blast from the lightning and thunder shook them from their sleep, a violent alarm clock with no snooze button. Even Abe and Jim, who’d laid down to sleep just minutes before, were shocked into a blinking stupor by the force. They’d been awake the longest, drunkest the longest, and horizontal the shortest amount of time, and were therefore most susceptible to being startled.

       The rest of the crew — Scribbler, Barbie, Light Lion, Olaf, Dolly, a few fringe types — erected themselves at 90 degree angles from their cardboard mattresses, newspaper sheets, beer-box pillows, frightened, but quickly assessed the source of the disturbance, and commenced to rest again.

This was not a raid. No one had to leave. They were safe amongst each other.

Abe shrieked into the clamor with a wheeze.

       Since Baloney Joe’s had closed years earlier, the little crew had migrated west, first closer to Chinatown, into the fledgling bosom of the Pearl, where the alleys still held the stain of the Skid Row urinations, where warehouses and bodegas were now boutique dress shops and rustic cafes. Thanks to the corralling of the unsightly street folk away from incoming Californians, it didn’t take long for Abe, Jim and the crew to retreat back toward the river, into the open arms of the Grotto, as they’d settled on calling it.

       To be accurate, there was no crew. No doctrine espousing rules and regulations, no unspoken gang credo or any tangible sense of obligation to each other — outside of the vague, silent bond between Abe and Jim. The rest of them lingered in the background, like extras in a scene filmed on a busy street in the East Village, staggering, following, listening. Earpieces for Abe’s many rants.

Jim did not speak. Could, but didn’t. He gestured with thoughtful, bushy eyebrows, grayed by the soot of a wicked world, by a life spent lurking in the dumpster. He was a tall, silent sage, big booted, hairy-eared with a big Roman nose and eyes green like the Doug Fir forests he loved to walk through en route on one of his aimless, months-long hikes. Walking Jim, they called him. When they called Jim that, he just smirked. His was a temperament not easily rattled.

       Abe and Jim’d come up with the name “the Grotto,” Abe vocalizing it, Jim nodding. Firstly, it was a moniker by which they’d hoped to lure in women to keep them warm, the famous Grotto of the Playboy Mansion serving as the blueprint for such a decree. Conjuring nicknames was a vehicle by which they could suspend their disbelief; pretend their situations were temporary and that the realities they’d endured for the last seven — eight, nine, 10 — years were just a hiccup, a stumble on overgrown roots in the sidewalk, with quick recovery, slight embarrassment, but in the end a keep on keepin’ on.

The Grotto was one of maybe six locales wherein the crew would inhabit for hours at a time, sometimes days when the weather was bad.

       The weather was always bad, and there was no better place to escape it than the Grotto. Shelter’s required too much intimacy, too many forms, too much coddling.

It admitted defeat.

       Abe’s pride, a bottomless reservoir fueled by idiot savant cynicism and a hive’s worth of honey, kept him from joining the ranks of what he viewed as the “petit bourgeoisie of the New Order”—ye of the pristine wave of Portland outcasts. The armchair hobos. The affluent teenaged gutter punks slumming it to stick it to their parents.

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       Abe was called Abe Wordsmith on account of his pontificating nature. He’d been a paratrooper in the 82^nd Airborne during Vietnam, in the 3^rd Brigade, or so he’d like to tell folks whenever they became entwined in one of his long-winded lyrical vomitings. Per Abe, his role in the Tet Offensive — including combat duties in the Huế-Phu Bai area of the I Corps sector, later to Saigon and into the Iron Triangle, where his bravery resulted in the saving of untold numbers of civilian lives on nothing but three hours sleep in a week — was crucial. With the crooked accent of his United States Army Veterans cap worn like a badge of honor, Abe’s disposition erupted like the ‘chutes of his Army days, flapping in a stuttered wind, like popcorn rattling in the bottom of a pot, his intrigues, observations, lectures and pop quizzes, his knowledge of 1940s German vocal ensembles, of General Custer and physics bursting in fantastic tics and winks, woohoos! and lemme tell ya somethings. All of it betrayed, or rather masked, a central truth.

       No one knew for sure what Abe was trying to say.

       Abe looked like and spoke precisely like Gregory Corso, was mistaken for him all the time, both toothless New Yorkers built on Brooklyn visions, able to stir the stoic world into a tart cocktail. Abe was a cultured old-time wino, brimming with equal parts thoughtful playfulness and downright crass sexual innuendo. He was bewitched by women, but had abandoned the physical and emotional mechanics to convey anything more than invitations to the Grotto, or somewhere closer — “and bring yuh sistuh!” he’d say — or inquiring the birthdates of those females walking by in the parks where Abe went to socialize. He knew his astrological signs by heart, and would gift a brusque reading in the time it took for them to put a skip in their steps past his warbled advance.

       With no women around to jam his senses into a jelly, something inside Abe shifted, tectonic-like. His heart and brain aligned, causing tremors, defying anatomy’s geographical laws. His libido would vanish, or hide, or sleep, and the sun would again rise over the horizons of his ribcage to illuminate, brighten, provide the life to him. And he shared it with whoever was within earshot.

       “I want you tuh look up ‘that sky and you tell me why dat sky’ suh blue,” sayeth Abe to a young man walking his bike through the branchy shade of Laurelhurst Park on a marshmallow sky day.

       With no answer, Abe clawed in:

       “Well first you must know what blue sky laws are,” he’d begin. “And drinking the elixuh from the land of the sky blue water. Minnesota, something for everyone. Everyman. The tale of two cities…”

       And like that, Abe was ignored, if not pitied entirely. His responses were Rimbaud on Ritalin, cracking at the seams, poetic and nonsensical and rambling, and fatally insightful.

       “Terse ennui,” Abe would call the lethargy of the people he’d encounter. It irritated him, the plight of the populace flocking to live in “Cementville,” looming on the synthetic banks of the Pudding River — his term of everlasting endearment to the serpent Willamette — like the scummy run-off eastern cesspool of the North River and its asphyxiating view of the sky scrapers of the New York City he remembered from youth.

       It was all a mess. And he’d figure it out in his own way at some point. He was making friends in people like Jim, acquaintances in pen pals who’d stuck around long enough to listen to his sermons of insanity. Every day a new beginning. Every night a nuisance.

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       “Big bold dares! Baudelaire I dare say, in repose by posing bypass alley!” rumbled Abe, clacking a whittled walking stick twice-a-step down the maudlin cobblestone walks of Fifth Avenue, trucker hat pulled low over his brow, tonguing his toothless gums, his lower jaw tucked tight to the top like an old witch. Pedestrian commuters hold their stony glares straight ahead, pretending not to see, hear, smell Abe. Not to notice him at all. Forget he exists, or pretend – or worse, wish – he didn’t. He is a Northwest fog, rolling in to cloud the earth, but destined to recede, to disappear. Young women wearing Debbie Gibson fedoras and too much makeup fidget to find their headphones, to block out the noise. Old women feign window shopping in the touristy gift shops and wintry café displays. The Abe in the reflection of the windows is less threatening, somehow illusory. Street cleaners operate the trash tongs to pinch billions of cigarette butts and haul them in the garbage can, working around Abe’s clackety clamor, around his feet, apparently undisturbed by his presence, unyielding to his fantastically frantic orations. He is a piece of the landscaping of the busy metropolis, a tree, a stoplight, a sidewalk. A garbage can. The application of a distraction – digging for change in a pocket, becoming suddenly hyper-aware and curious in the headline of a passing news periodical, looking straight up the side of a tall high rise to watch the window-washers work - suffices as an excuse for passersby not to have to acknowledge Abe’s existence. We do not hear, see, smell, touch that with which we are unaware.

       “Since when du duh buses charge for du bus ride? Dis here’s Fareless Sqwayuh I told um! Not a drop to duh bastehds will I in good conscience bequeath, for ‘twas, twat Tet Offensive tenure gave me light. Duh poowell table pwurple language is evident! Jus’ think widout duh words tuh read! The ear’s a fool!”

       On and on, the words escaped Abe’s squished face, to him hymns of wanderlust, of wizardly words for a decaying world. To everyone else, it was the white noise pulsing just beyond the fringes of a ham radio – something that was there. A person in the world…

Excerpts of Excerpts from the Nocturnal Dialogue

There were always blacker things tumbling in the orbits of the multiverse, unspeakable biologies wrenching in the shadows of the liquid moons of unobservable dark space, where stars aren’t even called stars but are articulated being to being (or force to force) instead by the dispersing of white-hot light glowing inside you, calligraphing in the cephalopod dialect of light and color, of covert cloudiness and with the punctuation of disappearance in inky silence. Where black holes are never seen, rather felt, because maculas and irises are unknown freedoms of vision in a cosmic know-nothing void where “seeing” is not even a sense but some kind of unbelievable dream. Where the aimless paths of asteroids foist murderous intent with no discernible brains at all, for the cosmos boils and burps with algorithms and equations of faith and fate that all our cleverest scientists, clairvoyants, physicists and moonbeam-baby astronomers could never possibly deduce.

Understanding the hue-moods of the naked deep-sea octopus, then, is nearly a supernatural undertaking.

But crawfish aren’t octopi - not yet anyway - with really no exception. The laws of evolution are hardly etched in stone; and even stone etchings have a shelf life. There was absolutely no logical explanation as to why a glowing crustacean might be fisting its telepathic Bantu into the sensitive fissures of his psyche.
But that unlikelihood, after all, is why stories are told, why anything is worth reading or wondering on. If everything worked the way it was supposed to, if leaps of logic and reason were never to be endeavored, what dreadful films might we be watching in the darkened theaters of the world that we couldn’t see right outside our front doors everyday?
A crawdad was sending messages to a little boy from a creek in Fairdale, California, and it was fucking things up.

Exercises in Forgiveness

"I want you to know that there are times when I find myself able to understand why you do what you do. Why you did what you did. There are fissures of clarity, maturity and apathy that allow for infinitesimally minute waves of forgiveness. Like a shrug in a hurricane. Or a wink in winter snow.

"There are moments when I find it not only completely okay, if a bit ruthless, for you to be exactly who you are at the expense of others’ trust, others’ love, others’ possibly unstable psychological balances, I deign even to eek out a tiny smile, like a silent salute to the overwhelming powers of thuggery, cowardice, soul-stomping uncaring. And in those moments - those weak links in the chain - I love you again for just a millisecond for being everything I’d hoped you would be to everyone else but me. And it’s like a little time travel bonanza to the one millisecond of adventure and fun I feel comfortable acknowledging we shared together.
"You get one second, and nothing more."
You get one millisecond. And you get no more." 

Frozen Hair

Two dead leaves commenced a tiny dance in the shadows of their branches, a life after death, waltzing with frozen hair and beetles all skittering along the concrete with the swirling winter wind, sounding the defiance of their demises with brittle clicks and clacks against the ground like little morse codes from beyond the grave. ".. / . -..- .. ... - . -.. .-.-.- / -.. --- -. .----. - / ..-. --- .-. --. . - / -- . .-.-.-"

Mean Maybe

I'm going to record some songs I've been working on the past year or so with my brother over the holiday break in Sacramento. So far, I've just been sending him bedroom recordings of me on acoustic guitar and singing - usually quite out of tune. But I'm excited to get something recorded again after a very long hiatus. Sometimes when I'm working on one of my own tunes (rudimentary though they may be), I stumble upon some other tune I really like.

I really like this song "Mean Maybe" by this fantastic band Yellowbirds. So I recorded a dumb little bedroom recording of it. I think you can hear my cat howling in the background of just about everything I've ever tried to record. Goddamn thing.

I Should Have Shouted

There have been times I should have shouted, but could not. Did not. Did nothing instead. Did nothing but feel suddenly hot as my blood boiled and my heart rate tripled. But that's not really doing anything. Maybe on some metaphysical level, the biological reactions I've experienced on my insides could fit the mold of some sort of reaction. But blood pumping through my dumb, dead veins all day isn't exactly voluntary. Doesn't make me brave. Or maybe it does. But no one will ever see it, or know, or deign to stretch to guess that sitting around doing nothing is actually doing SOMEthing.

I can feel when it happens; when I want to scream and when I want to scare someone. Or when I feel like some cerebral injustice is about to unfold and some fucking common sense ought to be distilled from all the half-truths and conspiracies and shortcuts to thinking that are all-but bound to stem from a panicked mass of souls, each of them afraid of dying. Of growing old. Of being alone forever. I can see it in the eyes of some of my closest confidantes when the veil of their skepticism is lifted, and everything's a grimace, and how could anyone in the world have a sense of fairness and just thought amidst this big pop culture tornado blowin' through the Bowerys, and the Bays, and the Burnsides.

Follied be they for whom extant virtues have been absorbed through mediums they can never understand. Fortunate (and rare) be they for whom sense doesn't need to be common to be just. And fair. And a life lived in the moons of neverending cosmos invisible to eyes a million years from now be wished upon to those for whom the rigors of honesty with themselves, with others, and with unencumbered pride and humility for the understanding of it all is relegated to some fantasy realm. That the fantasy is often much more appealing than the small efforts and rewards bequeathed by leading a virtuous life is the wellspring of every evil in the world.

It is to these last referenced that my silent protests, my seething inner diatribes, my distrust in humanity as a whole, is most steadily focused upon.

So, there have been times I should have shouted, but did not. For some reason figured I could not. That to rock the boat meant to chase the tornado. Meant to acknowledge that I play a role, if only as opponent, in a web of systematic insanity. With paper trails. With photo IDs and retina scanners, and workplace safety standards and lunch hours and no time for naps or outrage or questioning of anything of any real cultural significance. McKenna's maxim "Culture is not your friend" is perhaps the best synopsis, or the most succinct. Had he pointed out, in turn, that the parameters instilled into those whose entire intellectual apparatus has been hinged upon impossibly unreal expectations, has been imbued by unfair standards of role, has been smeared before even their birth by thousands of years of hate, fear of death, disgust of peace, I believe that McKenna's relatively small contributions (although terribly influential to many facets of rational thought, and to a more dramatic extent, influential to the scores of brain cells mystified by extraterrestrial research, or drugs, or humanity and fear) may have hit home harder outside of the underground world of ethnobotany and the hippie-youth drug scene who desperately want to believe that we're descendant of apes who mistakenly ate psylocybic mushrooms growing on ancient cow manure.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe nobody would have thought any different anyway. Despite the evidence. Despite the inimitable truths burning holes right into their eyes and ears. And that is what is worth screaming for. That the proof in the pudding must pale its hue to that most lethal drug: Distraction. For with the barricade of ignorance, willful or otherwise (but especially willful, which, frankly, all ignorance is), distraction's etymological kissing cousin, destruction - at least of the brain, or of any other wholly humanistic trait that separates us from wild dogs - is all but a foregone conclusion.

Live in the wild and live your truths, and be who you are. If your wild is the cultural wastelands of the valleys and the strip malls and the ridiculous facades of faux-historic corporate conglomerates, stay there. If your truths are morsels culled from television programs run by corporate-sponsored networks, or billboards, or flash-in-the-pan, hypnotic, repetitive, bland and unoriginal pop music, save them for yourself (see also: save yourself from them). And if you question, for even a second, ever, that who you are is a force detrimental to the advancement of society, or a hurdle in the thoroughfare toward peace, or a chigger in the doe hair of mother nature's vast, uncompromising-yet-delicate hide, CHANGE.

Failed Pitches

...Wherein I post treatments or pitches that were rejected by various publications for indeterminate reasons. This installment was sent to the folks at Amtrak, as I and every other writer in America with more than a passing penchant for laziness lunged to try and land a residency to write aboard a long, free train trip. I sent them a writing sample previously posted on this blog ("Cadaver"), forgetting to read the fine-print that they were not interested in any crazy-asshole rantings on sociological accounts of depressive maniacs or otherwise burnt-out fuckers bent on imminent demise. Whoops.

Anyway, here was my stupid, idiot pitch on what I would have written about, as sent to the suits at Amtrak, and which was given a big ol' "FUCK YOU, GUY":

I'd like whatever I write to be a meditation on the effects of human tendencies toward isolation/agoraphobia/complacency as it relates to a world bent on bridging the gaps pertaining to hermetic psychoses (social media, smartphones, GPS, FourSquare, etc) - the paralyzing fears wrought by lack of connection and the collective bristling of people who’d just as soon be left alone.

-An intrinsic analysis challenging the false connections people make over uniform obedience to social trends and entertainment; or the nearly blind filing-in and marching along with the ubiquitous ebbs and flows of some TV series/news story/fruitless pandemic warning.

This idea could be given further bloom within the construct/context of the writer/narrator isolating himself within a sleeper car aboard a passenger train burping across the country - the United States rolling by; interesting ramblers carousing in the observation car; the junkies and lovesick romantics and runaways and spooky old drunks; the sometimes mortifying proposition of a dimly lit dinner in a dining car at a table full of strangers. The dichotomy of attempting to expand on one’s comfortable spectrum, while being forced to abandon certain aspects of reclusive tendencies to accomplish it. Almost being commanded to.

It’s not that the story has to take place on a train. Rather, the self-imposed isolation could serve as impetus to the creative synapse necessary to spark my fledgling story of this meek figure who’s facing his fears of returning to the location of what he thinks is the source of his self-imposed isolation.

...Clearly, they made the correct decision to decline. So it goes...