Jesse

During the summer of 78, it was so hot in Chicago, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.

I was making 3.25 an hour working at the downtown Montgomery Wards as a stock boy. 

I worked with a Mexican guy, Jesse Valdez; he was 5ft 3 with a black pompadour, wearing pointy-toed shoes and tight pants. 

He was funny wise, saying shit like, 

if you're talkin to a chica and ur polla's hard, it means you can fuck her.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Loyola University neighbourhood near the el, riding it to Monkey Wards every morning.

After work one evening, I buy dinner and beer at El Pollo Loco for him. After we eat, he says, 

ah, Henry, let's go to my place, 

okay.

We walked six blocks to his three-story walk-up, then walking up three flights to his room 

His room was closet size, seven feet from the elevated train tracks. We squeeze in, him on the radiator and me on the tiny mattress; he has some pot, so we smoke. 

The sounds are deafening; train wheels give off a high-pitched squeaking sound; the air smells like burning rubber and rust.

Jessie had ripped off a Barbie Doll from Wards, he says, 

watch dis Henry.

He tosses the doll out the window, and it straddles 

the highly charged and lethal third rail, burning to a crisp in seconds.

After a few months at Wards, we were bored shitless; there was the time Jesse smashed an Easy Bake Oven to bits with a baseball bat or when he'd strip down a Ken and Barbey Doll and bend them into sexual positions like puppets.

One day we had lunch in the cafeteria; Jesse was in love with a server named Butterfly, he wanted to titty-fuck her, saying,

I'm gonna come down on that chica's titas, fat girls. Thank you to fuck 'em, Henry.

Butterfly lived in the Evergreen Trailer Camp, somewhere in Cicero. 

During the bus trip to her place, he says, 

dude we should bring Big Caesar with us to be sure we satisfy Butterfly, I tell him,

I see so you're planning a love-in.

At Butterfly's trailer, we knock on the door, and she opens it. 

She's working on a wade of bubble gum passionately saying, 

I hope you boys are up to the task.

Inside the three of us are talking at the kitchen table.

Jesse pulls out a pint of mescal, passing it around when Butterfly says, 

did you all boys bring the Spanish fly? 

Sure we did it's in your drink.

After a few drinks, Butterfly falls out of her chair onto the trailer floor, Jesse says, 

she's ready man, 

and we jump her, and Jesse says, 

back off Henry, 

I thought this was goin to be a love-in.

I need some downtime with Butterly, Do you get it, amigo?

That morning, we show up for work, we run into the store manager, John Blow, and he says, 

We gotta video of you boys bustin' up merchandise in the warehouse; security will escort you out of the store. 

Uma Kline Meets Henry Bukowski

I remember the summer of 78, bits and pieces of it anyway.

I lived in the basement of the Sparkling Angels Condominium. I was the janitor. 

I loved the basement place; friends called it the bunker.

I had an electric plate and oven; I could cook anything. 

In the morning, I'd make Swedish pancakes with Loganberry sauce and wash them down with hot green tea. 

By 11 am, I'm lying in bed smoking devil weed, fiendishly reading Alan Ginsburg's poem Howl.  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

At midnight, I go to  The Skank Bar. Sitting at the bar, I order a Bud Light and a bowl of clam chowder. 

A Germanic woman sitting alone in a booth walks to the bar asking, 

are you Henry Lucowski the writer? I've read your work in The Village Voice and The Bronx News, 

thanks, I don't get many positive reviews, tell me about yourself.

Okay, I’m Uma Kline; I’m an actress currently performing in the off-off-Broadway play Velvet Kinks at The Steppenwolf Theater.

Henry, let's go to my place and have a drink. It's not far, we can walk there, 

great, The Skank Bar bores the hell outta me.

As we walk, Uma grabs my hand; her hand is warm, her warmth is appealing. 

Reaching The Chelsea Hotel, home to an A-list of literati who've lived there over the years: Mark Twain, Herbert Huncke, Quentin Christ, Leonard Cohen, and so on. 

We ride a cage elevator to the 11th floor and walk to Uma's room; it's a rectangular room with a painted concrete floor, purple wallpaper, red velvet curtains, a black leather sofa and an antique bed.

Uma's on the bed, and I'm on the sofa; after a few drinks, she lies back on the bed  

She lies on her back and opens her legs, takes off her panties, stroking her large blue clitoris. 

In a New York minute, I jump on the bed, landing with my head in her muff.

She knows every position in the book, after balling we fall asleep in each other's arms

I wake the next morning, noticing a note written in lipstick on the mirror reading,

See you tonight at The Steppenwolf Theater; the tickets are  under your pillow; love you, Ulma.

That night, I was paralytically drunk in The Skank Bar, falling off the bar stool and landing on the floor. I never saw Umla again.

Fancy Dancer

Sherman Alexie is a lionized Indian writer and filmmaker; I doubt you've heard of him. 

And, for sure, nobody on X has heard of him.

Family, friends, and publishers convinced him to open an X account, and he only got 4o followers, because Tweeps are into horror, romance, and spy novels 

Sherman is a lionized writer worldwide. He's a card-carrying member of the Academy and Institute of Letters whose pin is in the desk drawer under a pile of papers.

In his book Superman and Me, he talks about learning to read when he was 3, reading a comic book, and associating the panels with the written narrative.  

One day, he picks up a book and looks closely at the words. It's hard, but he sees the words on the pages as though they were cattle corralled into paragraphs. Sherman says it like this,

I didn't have the vocabulary to say, paragraph, but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence.  

At the age of 3, the prodigy sees the world in paragraphs. In his own words saying, 

This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and adopted little brother. 

By the age of 5, Sherman’s in kindergarten reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, laughingly, as his neighbors are reading Dick, Spot, and Jane.

Sherman, the wunderkind, was seen as an oddball on the reservation; Indian kids weren't supposed to be geniuses. 

In 1985 Alexie applied and was accepted to Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, receiving an academic scholarship, the only Indian kid to make it to college from his reservation.   

His work focused on the troubles of Indians, life on the reservation, alcoholism, poverty, and despair, but he didn't cry about it, he wrote comically.

Sherman played guard on the Jesuit school's basketball team till his Senior year. 

One day, he calls the reservation to talk to his mom, who's in the bathroom, asking her,

is papa there? 

Henry, you know your father died 7 years ago. 

Alexie says, 

My mother laughs at the angels who wait for us to pause during the most ordinary of days and sing our praise to forgetfulness before they slap our souls with their cold wings; the angels burden and unbalance us, and da ride us piggyback. 

Alexie is also a filmmaker. He's produced and written screenplays for several low-budget films, including Fancy Dancing, Winter in the Blood, and Smoke Signals. 

All in all Sherman Alexie is 1 of my favorite writers.

The Door to Door Portrait Artist

Henry chills at home while Lu Lu's shopping at Safeway sitting at home listening to a never-ending Mahler Symphony, flashing back to the hurricane, the turbulent seconds it took to move on, and the days of rain it left behind.

Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me; a lyric from Time is On My Side, penned by Jerry Ragovoy, on loan to the Rolling Stones for an unknown sum.

The summer is over, the harvest is in, and we are not saved; Jeremiah 8:20

Jeremiah's Old Testament proverb vetted the coming famine when the wheat, fig, grape, and olive harvest was shredded to nothing by a swarm of locusts in 600 BC.

The dewy-eyed novitiate asks the Clown Monk;

your highship, I have nothing to do,

 

butterfly, talk about sex, do drugs, watch La Liga and Bonanza on TV, avoid telling the truth.

1984, a year when computers are as slow as molasses, and cell phones are bulky and rare. Stable operating systems are few, and the World Wide Web is a year old, the year cocaine is more popular than computers. Henry asks his wife, 

have you read the articles on computers in Science Magazine or The Xylophone Quarterly?

I'm a mermaid, not a geek.

They fuck in the hot tub and smoke a 3 pronged joint, and when they're baked, Lulu confesses to Henry what really went down in Cuba with Fidel Castro saying

I fucked Fidel, he was going to send me to jail. We'd party at his Havana house, he had the best of the best, ganja as well as cocaine. Did you know Fidel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were best friends in the day? Year after year. Marquez would bring his beautiful wife, Mercedes, to Castro's house, where they'd talk about Latin music and literature. Both were the best at what they did. One night I said to Fidel,

mi amor, your passion for the Russian rockets and AK 47s is secondary to your passion for sex, Castro says, 

in my position, wearing one's heart on his sleeve is impossible. When I listen to cold and rigid Russian concertos, I remember the El Movimiento 26 de Julio and the revolutionaries who fought and bled by my side. 

Henry wonders, 

do you still love Fidel? 

He's arrogant, a wild lover hung like a burro. He’d rub cocaína on his pollo to stay hard. He had so many women, 1000s; I'm hot let's jump in the cold tub.

As they're eating chicken salad sandwiches the doorbell rings; Henry opens the front door and a Black man holding a white cane says, 

my name's Andy Higgins, I’m a blind man, a door-to-door portrait artist, 

 

please come in,  

Henry leads Andy around the bungalow, walking him to the kitchen table, where asking him,

how bout a drink or some pot? 

Thank you, yes, Seagrams & 7, and roll a fat joint. 

Lu Lu cranks up the air conditioner, it's clear Andy is hot.

Then she spins an LP on the record player; the George Shearing Trio tickles the keys playin, Unreachable Heights. Andy asks, 

George Shearing?  He's blind, ain't he? Does he play without looking at the keys? I have no musical talent, I became a photographer to prove that a blind man can do anything if he puts his mind to it. Let's go to work, Henry grab my Polaroid and the tripod. Set the kit up facing the sofa; think like you're doing a portrait.

Henry secures the camera to the tripod, looks through the lens, frames the shot, goes back to the sofa, sitting next to Lu Lu. 

The couple didn't dress fancy, he was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and she was nude.  

Andy stands, walks to his camera, knocks it down, then catches it in 1 hand, Henry asks, 

How’d you catch the falling tripod?

Everything's feel for a blind man. OK, here we go, I’m going to say, get ready, count to five, and shoot, now let's smile!

Henry and Lu Lu don't pose, they ignore Andy, making out, playing scissors, rock, and paper, even wrestling on the sofa, Andy says, 

I can smell your body, she answers curtly, 

keep your nose to the grind pal.

In minutes Andy says,  

I think we have enough shots, for an extra 5 bucks, I’ll immortalize your portraits in a plastic-bound photo book.

Henry goes to the kitchen, mixing drinks, martinis this time, bringing them to the living room on a tray. 

On the sofa, the couple pages through the Polaroid portraits, laughing insanely.

They love the photos, the work is realistic, raw, 

well— you all know how much Polaroid film costs, how about 200 bucks for the works?

Henry stands, reaches into his pocket, walks to Andy, handing him 2 hundred-dollar bills, the blind man asks, 

Can you call me a cab? 

Henry laughs saying, 

Trust in the Lord, Ray Charles, 

I'll be trustin in the Lord alright, Henry, gotta go, my cab is here.

Lu Lu leads him out of the bungalow to the sidewalk; he faces her asking, 

what ya think? She answers, 

Andy Higgins, without a doubt, the GOAT of blind photographers.