Once upon a time there was a winter that would end all winters. No other season could ever be this barren, this silent, this lonesome. The cough that had settled in his lungs stole his breath and he could not walk from his bed to the bathroom without stalling in the hallway for air. The house had almost no furniture in it. Any sound that found it's way in would echo around the rooms for a long while before finding an unused corner to settle into and wait for some inopportune moment to jump out and scare him while he tried quietly to get up the nerve to walk outside and check the mail for the news of his reprieve. Even on Sunday he checked that mailbox, the loneliest man in the world hoping God had finally called him home. The mailman became a lover to him in his mind, and his most hated enemy.
The letter he was hoping to receive was not a specific note from a specific someone. Just a letter from out there where he had burned all of his bridges asking him to return, to help repair the damage that the world had wrapped around itself since he had last had words with it. He just wanted to be asked. Instead, he waited alone in his house and watched the sun creep shallow angles across the wall, never staying long enough to warm the air before retreating below the horizon again.
Standing in the middle of the room trying to move his hands and mouth in perfect time with the crossroad blues coming out of the only speaker that hadn't been completely blown out in the screaming days. Swaying in the drunk's clown walk, tilting almost perpendicular to the plane of the floor (not an easy task in a crooked house) then around, balanced on one leg to shuffle step sideways, never missing a beat. Later on he would practice a hobo strip tease to Sharp Dressed Man, still keeping the drunk in his limbs, following the clothes as he pulled them off with movements that always seemed on the verge of collapse but magically resolved themselves into balletic accidental grace. Elements of the old Rat on stage in the back of his mind kept it just dirty enough to be sexy- Ratty pistoning the whole piano back and forth with his legs, arms out, SERMONIZING his songs; the piano falling over on it's back as he stepped lightly to the floor. Destruction and beauty in one simple movement.
The urge to create is a destructive urge. He knew this too well. It disassembles reality and sets up a chaos in it's place. Thoughts tumbling through one another with out care for rule of law. Whole universes blown away with the sweep of a pen and new ones thrown up in their place, only to fall themselves at the whimsy of the devils of creation And why? Just to make room for the endlessness of dream. Dream which cares for nothing and abhors permanence. The unending flux that only leads to confusion and misdirection. The constant tossing between one world and the next that unchecked eventually unbalances the mind altogether.
If one wanted to make a new beauty in the world, he would need to tear the old ones apart to gather the raw materials needed. How far could this be taken? At what point would he too broken to be put back together? All the kings horses and all the kings men were drunk in the bar and not a bit interested in what one bad egg was doing in that witches shack he called a home. Care would have to be taken. It was certainly not being given.
He often to forgot to eat or to use the bathroom, sometimes for days. Shouldn't this be a sign? His mind running in circles like a long gone dog playing with itself and forgetting all else. It sits inside of itself and creates while the body falls to pieces. He tries to keep some order about the house. The place is a shambles. It's not that he's lazy or slovenly (he thinks). It just that it all seems so complicated and he's so easily distracted. If something falls onto the floor he stands there and looks at trying to decide between stopping whatever he's doing to pick it up or to just ignore it before he gets frozen with trying to think whether or no the thing maybe had wanted to be on the floor and that's why it went there. Why can't objects have desires? The desire of objects, the objects of his desires. Loops in loops and him standing there with a not uncharming smile on his face laughing at the idea of it. And why not?
It's better just to pretend not to notice all the things accumulating at odd angles around the rooms. Just keep walking. Nothing to think about here.
While he waited for his letter he would do long convoluted math problems on the walls of his room with an old grease pencil he had found in his pocket one morning after some horrible three day binge of sleeping in the backs of pickup trucks and on abandoned porches who's houses had long ago fallen away as a way of making the time go by. If any of the math made sense it did so only to him.
He was fascinated by numbers and would kiss the clock every time an interesting pattern would show on it's face- important dates in his life, numerical palindromes, random combinations that appealed to him for no reason he could fathom. Eleven-oh-one was a lucky time to wake up, one one zero one being 13 as expressed in binary, or one-oh-one which was five, an important number in his life. He would add together the digits of any number he came across to reduce them to a single digit to decide if it was lucky or not and would sometimes have to sit staring at the clock for a minute or three before doing anything so that he could start on a three or a five or a nine.
Sixes were very bad, sevens somewhat less so depending on his mood, as were eights. Fours and twos could be neutral or unlucky, but never good. Ones were always evil, which could taint the joy of seeing eleven:eleven on the clock. It was a numerical palindrome which was good. But it also added up to four which could go either way, and it was a string of ones each one upsetting him more than the last. And then, it translated as fifteen in binary, which was three times five and therefor good, but also reduced to six which was terrible. The whole thing confused him horribly and he would get unsettled if he happened to glance at the clock at that minute and fidget and mumble until a more propitious number came into view.
All this damned waiting. And for what? Waiting to figure this part out so he could get back to the very serious business of slowly drinking himself to death in some anonymous bar down in New Orleans.
A phrase from a book he read about some people in New Orleans that reminded him of the sort of people he knew there keeps coming into his head, though he's pretty sure it does not mean what he thinks it means as he digs around on the shelves and in the drawers trying to figure out what he did with his cigarettes- “Things that remain out of sight.”
In the story there were a couple of dirty old men drunks who were also really bright and had chosen to be decrepit bastards. He thinks this is a great front- I'm not fucked, this is right where I want to be doing whatever it is I'm doing.
He was given an IQ test somewhere back in the second grade so that the teacher could have him stuffed into the eddy bus classroom. She didn't like him at all and was convinced it was because he was stupid. Not so, it turned out. He was smarter than her. Maybe she really knew that all along and the test thing was like a prayer to St. Jude or something. In any case, it was determined that he was almost, but not quite (three or four points worth of not quite), a genius. He was also incapable of focusing on anything for long enough to do anything with it. He could learn anything really quickly, but not apply it in any kind of useful way. So, in a manner of speaking, the teacher was right after all. He was functionally an idiot who would never amount to anything. But he would fail with an air of awesome knowing that most people would take for some kind of virtue. Right up until they didn't, that is. That teacher would be so happy about how he had turned out if she wasn't so irretrievably dead. Winning by default was something he was willing to accept in this situation. He had learned a few things to keep him shy of outright destitution. In keeping with the original judgement he didn't actually do any of those things very often. He was surviving for now, and saw no reason to change that just yet.
There are three or four books on the table, music on the radio and in the background a movie playing with the volume turned down, set to loop back to the beginning when it's over. His guitar leans by his leg it's strings tuned to something resembling an open chord, but pulled slightly to the left so that it rings a touch of dissonance when it's strummed.
He dances between the books- two novels, a treatise on Math, and a thin volume of Dylan Thomas. Occasionally he grabs up the guitar and sings a bar a few bars of some old songs trying to find the place where they will become something new. He uses pieces from the books, the radio, and the TV. He uses the bits of dream he managed to pull back with him this morning as he lay below the surface, one ear in each world, eyes rolled back.
He knows he's got to never stop this assault for even a second. He must keep his mind from finding any room in which to run. Once it starts it won't stop until it exhausts itself, which could be days away from now walking around the house with one shoe on talking loudly to himself or suddenly finding himself out in the streets still wearing only one shoe staring at a piece of paper in the gutter. And in the end when he comes back into himself nothing will have been learned. Nothing ever remains from these journeys, only seeping tiredness and depression.
When he gets back he knows that he can not prove anything is real. Not the walls of his room, not the music that vibrates the air around him. He can not say with absolute certainty that the people he knows are not just ideas he has created in same strange hidden room in his mind. There is no way be sure that his eyes are not lying to him. Everything is subjective and there is no objective reality and if reality can't be said to be objective than how can it be said to be real. It spins him around and around and he ends up lying on what he thinks is the floor feeling what he perceives as sickness. He can't talk look anyone in the eyes for days after this happens. It terrifies him and all he can think of is suicide, though he is very careful not to look at those thoughts directly. He glances at them in the periphery while he sweats and tries to distract himself by any means necessary. He lies back and prays no dreams may come.
Scratched on the ceiling in what he can only hope is his own hand-
“Time is a figment of the universe's imagination. Time is a fragment of the universe's will. Time is a long lost love come back to haunt our dreams, and when we wake up it will stain our mouths like blood and whiskey. Time is our only friend and has come to town to kill us. But first it must find us and prove that we are real.”
Christ, when did he lose his sense of humor?
His brain is filling with cement, becoming calcified, stupefied by the noises it can still hear locked down inside of it. But all lines of communication have been cut- the translators have all taken the day off and will not return for any amount of threats or pleading. So the voices talk at each other now but not with. All the little faces that hide in his mind have that same dumb pleading in them like a foreigner desperate to find a bathroom- an accident is imminent!- but getting only polite confused smiles from the locals, the natives, if you will. But who could be native to this place? A jungle littered with decaying fruit that can't find a place to lay down seed. And if they did, so what? The sun will never again reach down into this place, not until everything has died and withered, been ground to sand- the desert of the invalid mind, staring from the windows of the day room at what once must have been a familiar scene- moonlight on the trees, lovers dancing in the willows, night blooming flowers flirting coyly with the stars above.
He likes to hope that this too will pass. He continues to grimace into his books, happy every time a phrase turns into something to which he can relate. Not that it happens often. Maybe a whole new philosophy of thinking is needed starting with the most basic precepts. Where to begin?
Nothing is real. That's a good place. Nothing is real so there is no threat in this decline. He is only moving from one hallucination into another. Both are equally valid in that neither one can call itself truth. That could be comforting. Of course he'll have to avoid other people. They're likely to insist on a reality, stoned and mortared to the world. This is this and that is that and all that fucking jazz. So he must stone and mortar himself in against them. And find some way of reopening the organizational departments in his skull, get them talking to his heart again, get the flesh in on the whole thing. Then maybe he could start to go outside and consider joining in with the group on which hallucination they were all going to live under today. And if it's a new one tomorrow, then that's just fine. As long as we're all in agreement we can get along nicely.
He'd already seen, and too many times, how the pain we have caused is returned to us. The sorrow and sadness we have given to those we love, out of selfishness or stupidity, come around again to hang like a stone from our necks where tender arms should reside. He knows this part to the ends of knowing.
But when does the compassion come back to us? All of our tenderest loving kisses; every time we have sat and listened, absorbing someone's regret so that they may stand up and shake off their blue minded fears of a death without redemption. When does all of this come back to us? Will these moments ever be wrapped again and re gifted, delivered to our doorsteps in the night while we shiver alone in our memories of days when there was a sun in the sky that was not a mocking laughter, a sneering reminder that we are lost now, and have most likely never ever been found?
It's these thoughts now in endless streaming chains that dance like hurricanes in his brain, his eyes pulled up against the too much light of the day. Colors so strong they render him deaf and dumb. He can see the ground slide away beneath his feet but he can not stop moving forwards into this decline. “How full of my own stupid pain I must be to think that it matters. Cry for me world! See me on my cross and care! Oh, pull me down and see to my bruised heart with the love of a lapidary smoothing rough stones into precious gems.” Fuck.
Yes indeed, lovers, this is loneliness. And worse that, it is lonesome too.
“There is no going away anymore. The road is over and this is where I will stay. My exile on Main Street, across a too-high bridge. The bridge that brought me to this town by merit of being the place from which my brother stepped out of this world, swinging above the evening breeze and forgetting everything.”
The thought of dying does not bother him. It's the thought of dying alone.
He wonders sometimes why death still surprises him, why it still shocks him straight into introspective depressions on the impermanence of everything. He knows, at least on a philosophical level, that everything is temporal, subject to the winds of change, and has been dealing with the death of loved ones for a very long time. When he was seventeen (a good number) Paul who had always talked of suicide while they lounged about high as fuck listening to Joy Division, eating fruity pebbles with orange soda poured over them, had died of an overdose. It was not The Death that Paul had been planning. He had included a healthy dose in his plans (what better way to prepare for heaven than by bringing a bit of it with on your travels), but a plain old overdose was not quite... dramatic?... enough for Paul. He had said he would go to Riverside Park with a cooked up shot already loaded and a large knife. He would sit there looking at that ribbon of sewage listening to Ian's dirges and take his shot, and then before it could pull him under he would plunge the knife into his heart. That would show them, wouldn't it?
But instead Paul had just fallen into the dreams and not come back. His body, realizing it had been vacated, had let it self wind down. His heart, maybe expecting the knife, had jumped the gun and stopped on it's own. His last breaths lit out for better shores. No one ever mentioned if there was any music playing when Paul had taken the high road out of the world.
He had been out of the city when Paul died. He heard of it in an almost casual way from Tanoe who passed him on the Avenue.
“Where have you been?”
“Up to Vermont and back. I just got in.”
“So you haven't heard then?”
“Heard what?”, his heart jumped. The building had finally been evicted, or had caught fire and been left to burn by the Fire Department. They were back to sleeping in the park.
“Paul's dead. He overdosed two nights ago. The cops left him lying on the floor in the community room for three and a half hours, right there by the TV he had put the sledgehammer through.”
Paul, as a way of punctuating a conversation about how the house was falling to pieces and no one was communicating with one another any more had nonchalantly picked up the sledgehammer that just happened to by sitting next to the old television and put it through the screen. There was no anger or violence in the gesture. It was as innocuous as somebody commenting on the weather. It was one of the many reasons he had loved Paul.
He remembers how the first stupid thoughts were of bad pop references. Paul is dead. Turn me on dead man. And then guilt for not having been there getting high with Paul, discussing the finer points of a well executed suicide.
The list had grown like pi since then. A seemingly endless stream of unique values being calculated and then passed by in the search for the next. A person could only remember so many of the digits. Trying to recite the list would always find you realizing you had missed a few and then starting over a couple of times before seeing how morbidly stupid it was to try and going to the bar to start bending the woes away. Three days gone and you're nearly there with all of them. Goddamn the Sun singing in your foggy ears you'll crawl back home and start over.
He sits in the debris of his room one leg splayed out at an odd angle the other folded neatly beneath him and tries to notice everything at once. The radio sits confusedly between stations and he tries to sing two songs at once, out of time, out of tune. His books are laid out in a precise pattern. It takes a long while to set up this scene. Days maybe, but it's hard to say exactly as he moves sometimes very slowly and deliberately sometimes in a horrible rushing clatter.
In the kitchen a clock is ticking down as it's batteries die. It hurts trying to see it all together, to see how it's all connected, but also see each thing as a separate entity. He realizes that in trying to hold everything at once he is losing it all. He'll have to start again from the beginning. But what was, where was., how was the beginning? He can't remember. A new beginning then. It shouldn't really matter. All beginnings are the same. Pure moments, undefiled by the world, by what's to come. All beginnings lead to endings, and beginnings again.
He closes his eyes and tries not to think of anything. It's not the same as thinking about nothing, that's easy. But nothing is still an idea. It has a flavor and a form that his life has taught him to make for it. He almost catches the edge of not anything but it turns around and grows, becomes. It gets a name for itself from out of the shelves in his head. And then it's gone, leaving him back at nothing. He shudders and thinks about making something to eat. But the kitchen is so far away and that fucking clock.
That fucking clock will have to be dealt with. It's worse than the mirrors he carried down to the corner and set, each one at it's own angle, against the telephone poles to confuse and trap any stray thoughts that might be trying to sneak up the street and into his house while he was sleeping.
He gives up and grabs three pieces from the pile nearest him and starts to juggle them in various thoughtless patterns. Slowly he begins to relax. The pieces fall out of his hands and he lays back an drifts for a while. The last thought before going down is this- Sleep is only one house in the country of death, but it has many rooms. And some of them can hold you for a lifetime.
He wakes up to the sound of dogs howling at a train. Orts of dream are clinging to the dried plates of his eyes as he tries to focus. He runs down a stream of punchlines to help him grab onto the room. Hello ladies stick with me swim for your life it's time to get a new fence you're just not eating right to get to the other side I wished for a tiny orange head does this taste funny to you? I'm afraid not.
He shakes and stretches realizing that he actually wants to go outside today. He's notices a couple of shades from paranoia shifting around behind but he leaves them alone and flips open the machine to see what the song of the day will be. Setting it to random he stabs play smiling as a piano starts trilling the opening lines of Big Chief. A parade song. He digs out his second line costume and collects into the pockets a collection of useful things. He shuts down the machine as it starts into there she goes again slips into his bag and looks out the window. The tree in front of his house looks warm and still. Taking a few deep breaths, hand checking the knot of his tie at the door he steps into the day.
He plays with walking on his way towards what serves this place as a downtown. High parade steps, tightroping the curb, hopskotch and shuffle footed hobo. He hears himself singing and it takes a minute to realize the tune. I went down Saint James Infirmary, see my baby thair. A parade song, a second line. Somebody somewhere has died today. His voice sounds good coming up out of his chest. I'll fly away, he thinks, and wishes whoever's gone safe travel.
He plays Fred Normal at the Poo Ball, juggling knives blindfolded on the slack rope, and walks into a telephone pole just as a cop is rolling past. The cops slow and he quickly runs the motions of an old fetish- touch your knee touch your nose never ride in on of those- and the car moves on. He smiles at his hands. Some magic still works. He spins the cane around and Charlie Chaplins the rest of the way to the coffee shop.
***
What does it mean to be a clown? The transformation of all of your failings into a pleasant smile on the lips of the crowd. Laugh clown, laugh. You are the mirrored funhouse walls the world will walk through. You will soak up their twisting forms and keep them safely hidden behind you, in the dark, when the carnival has closed. But the carnival never closes. Lent is a dream of death, the final act of the will. Laugh, clown, laugh.
Sitting on the little curb outside of the store, staring at his whiskey but not drinking, he felt the ground beneath him become solid. He knew for certain then what his life was, and he knew it would not change. He closed his eyes and shuddered below the fragments of a smile. He died there.
And he lived happily ever after.
This is an incomplete version of this story. I'm still working on it.
Something Else by the Kinks
