Bi Polar Deers

Christmas Eve in Chicago 1990, hardly blessed with the spirit or hallmarks of Robert Frost in a horse pulled sleigh coasting through pure powdered snow delivering figgy pudding to his neighbor. 

The snow in the city was mucky, in the alley-ways wino's hovered close to old oil drums at midnight, burning anything to keep from freezing, hoping the sun would come up tomorrow and warm their bones as they caught a few winks on a park benches at Avalon or Chopin park.

It was Christmas Eve in Miami 1990, Henry worked as an orderly at Dade County Mental Health Center, unofficially, the nut-house. Henry nuts himself, the patients his brothers and sisters, he felt more rapport with them than he did with the staff. 

The Psychiatrist were particularly disengaged and alien. Freudian and Jungian therapy was a thing of the past, therapy was a thing of the past. Big Pharma: Wyeth, Pfizer, Roche, Eli Lilly, Snafu, pushing dope to heal souls and making billions was the future.

People should be allowed to medicate as they see fit, as long as they have the money to support their habits. 

When the ward nurses weren't passing pills, they were passing gas, drinking coffee in the nurse's station talking about sex and shopping, on call, waiting for people to freak-out, cups of Thorazine, hypos full of sedatives close at hand, like stun-guns.

Henry wondered how dope worked over time to stabilize psyches, emotions, brain-waves? People's bodies were resistance to drugs after time. Or could it be people (patients) in another time and place, or in a different reality would be the ones on the outside? Henry often thought, does insanity mirror reality or does reality mirror insanity?

On full moon nights the moonbeams seemed to rattle folks brains more than usual, as though the electric signal in the brainwaves did flip flops, taking some on a roller coaster rides. The selective process out on the street that determined who went to jail and who went to the nut-house, vigilance on the lookout for abnormal behavior, particularly violence or disregard for the laws of municipality, sleeping on the beach, balling on the beach, moving your bowels in the woods. Of course, legal for deers who regularly expose themselves and can relieve themselves wherever they want. But, illegal for humans who regularly hide their penises or vaginas out of modesty, or if gay and liberated, wanting to walk about nude and show themselves, holding back, having to live within the laws of  fat mayors or municipalities.

Henry thought if you were going to punch someone or take a dump in the ocean you were always better off acting crazy when the Stasi showed. If you are lucky enough to get in the nut-house, be cool, down the paper bucket of Thorazine, walk the halls nude, wrap a cigarette in the lip of the foreskin of your uncircumsized   cock, let it dangle as you move, light the cigarette and walk down the hall.  Open your jaws, pointing at your mouth like a geek, waiting for someone to throw a live starling or rat your way to chomp on, but it's OK because, your nuts pointing to your mouth, dry, saliva-less, apparent, teething like a baby.

In the morning, drink plenty of coffee, eat some grits and eggs, then chat up a girl in the ward you like, another nut-case like you, fuck her like crazy in an empty closet, then run out the door in your leopard skin speedo and go for a swim in the sea. Life is good if you know how to play the system.

I'm Al Pacino, I Got Cocaine all Over my Face,

The story of the blues, " One day you got it all and it disappears so fast ." 

Death is the great equalizer, nothing you did while alive changes what happens to you mind-wise when you die, experience in death: nothing, your'e unconsciousness, not even sleeping, your mind currents don't exist, it is nothingness, nobody knows for sure it is a toss of the coin, if God exist or not. I  doubt  hell is forever. The Jews have it right, Hell, the worst you were in life, the longer you burn, your soul then purified, ready to go anywhere, to Heaven or to live in the forest with Martians, Avatars, highly evolved on the purest level of bio-consciousness, maybe another universe, reincarnated to another universe. Nobody knows for sure yet, faith isn't enough to know what will happen to us when we die, it is just a presumption, well, if you have accepted proof that God is, not on faith, proof of God and Jesus almighty, not just because the bible says it, because your faith says it, because you see it for real? Contact me @ aloha20001@yahoo.com 

Billy, looked like a goat, a poet-goat, with a wispy beard, living  in  Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the 80s, it was a horrible time for popular culture, disco, not making much use of rock n roll. He sold weed, not liking the feeling he got on speed, he liked cocaine enough, but was living in a place that didn't have much cocaine, drinking was good he would  get drunk, every night loving it and arrested from time to time by the long arm of Dade County Police, most the time arrested for nothing, arrested once for flipping the bird at a lady cop, walking the street after having a few drinks, never for dope.

He didn't have a car, he road a Piaggio moped. It had a good engine that hummed, he would take back roads, drive on canal roads. 

There were allot of great parks, you could lay in the grass and smoke a joint, listen to nature, the moped didn't need a state plate, it meant freedom of movement.

Billy was bi polar, retarded, had autism, was psycho, and had parkison's decease, but he he loved nature, it was all he needed really. He didn't know at the time he was bi polar, he was self medicating.  Self-medicating,  unaware of psychotropic meds, drinking and getting high, realizing that there are levels of drunkenness, meds work under the bridge, so to speak, but levels of drunkeness can coexist with meds. Billy found his level, avoiding black outs, and problem drinking, relaxing, enjoying life, in privacy.

He could control his drinking, drinking was a gas, he would push it to the limit, he was not a guy for say, 2 drinks, he prefered drinking bottles of booze.  Billy was a Buddhist, reading works by Buddhist authors, Alan Watts, the Bagavid Gita, stories of the childhood of the Dali Lama, he liked Henry Miller as well.

Billy took a trip with some gay pals, they drove, loaded with dope, bags of weed, downers mostly. Four of them ending up in Tampa, all the others gay except for Billy, thier car parked in a spa with a swimming pool, the gay pals getting out and goint to the spa to fuck their brains out, fair enough. Billy got out of the car and started walking around Tampa. He ended up taking a bus back to Ft. Lauderdale, he had to work on Monday. His friends must have stayed for a while. Billy didn't spend allot of time in gay circles, but had worked with gay people. 

He liked to take trips to Palm Beach, he would drive there in his Renault, he could score in East Palm and go drink in West Palm. He would stay for the day and drive home at night, only 60 miles from Ft. Lauderdale on the Florida turnpike, get out of the car and light up at rest stations or in parks, so you didn't smell up your car with weed, the highway patrol will stop you for nothing, and if they smell weed in your car, the feel very rejected by their fathers.

Billy bit his nails, it was a habit he couldn't kick, he was a nervous person, he would get hang nails and fungus under his nails. 

In West Palm Beach Billy would score weed, he could buy a kilo from a Jamaican he knew well, the short drive to Ft. Lauderdale was a breeze if you keep with-in the speed limit, 62 MPH was a safe speed, Billy never drove drunk while transporting weed, he must have transported 1000s of kilos around Florida over 2 years.

He once had his car hijacked when he lived in Chicago, he was in Cabrini Green, once again scoring a dime bag. He went up stars in one of the projects, to an apartment with everything striped out of it. It was bare cement, with a kitchen table, one guy at the table who seemed to be the owner of the shooting gallery, knocked Billy out, taking his car keys and stealing his car, they found the car, an orange Volkswagen Beatle weeks later, the parts had the engine striped it had to be sold as junk. 

Billy walked north to the CTA station, got on a train and went home. Didn't want to be bothered with reporting it to the cops. Knowing the sinking feeling you get as a prisoner or suspect in jail, the authorities attitudes, big attitudes, allot about attitude with them. For the prisoner it is grayness, grey hell. 

He would put the kilo of weed in the trunk of the Renault, the kilo hidden in a banana box, knowing the dope dogs could find it. Billy was just lucky, he could blend into the shadows somehow. He never was busted in his life for selling weed, but he had been brought in for drunk driving, disorderly conduct. 

He loved the feeling you got in your mind when you smoked weed, a relaxed, elevated feeling, the pureness you felt inside when you where high, the feeling that you didn't need a thing in the world. Billy had thought of opening centers in the hills of South America were people could go to be happy, get  cocaine therapy sessions with trained counselors, a cocaine resort, on the ocean, providing fresh cocaine leaf grown in the area, or high quality crystal cocaine. Sessions to work on positivity and stress, with an all organic Japanese diet. Saving months of time in therapy, the cocaine like a truth elixir, patients entering life with a new sense of exhilaration, turning to the rain and the wind , excited.

Billy had a fetish for the wild man poet Chinese-man,  Lao Tsu, Tsu sure did have a fresh approach to life,  he lived life simply, in nature, in a wood burning cabin. Drinking, drinking  rice wine writing poetry, looking at the snow cowling a field. Saying beautiful and persuasive words were not beautiful, but the snow on the field was blameless.

Most nights Billy would stay home is his apartment, cooking Chinese food listening to Chopin drinking red wine, smoking weed, writing, listening to music, domesticated, he had lived alone most his life, he new he wasn't the only one in the world who lived alone, that living alone had it's advantages, some people who live with others envy people who lived alone and vice-versa, Billy wanting a love that understood him like everyone else, someone who liked his writing, someone who could be a mother at times, a friend more.

Hunter S. Thompson thought that writing was the bottom-feeder of all the arts, music is much more powerful, ok so what? All kinds of music, whatever people like, if it makes them feel full, good. Hunter came as close to being a supreme being as anyone in recent history, allot of big musicians revel him, he was only a writer. Dylan in line too, the way he plays, he's a jammer, when he plays live, he plays minute to minute, inventing it. Martin Luther King or Ray Charles modern day saints. Knowing how to lay out the code, sounding it out, half way to the moon. Martin Luther king, the best Jesus so far, the man on the edge of the universe man.

But what does it all mean, what will happen on earth? Think about the most positive scenario and that is what will happen as long as we all think that way, that is what will happen. It is cheers to the universe, take a drink to its longevity everyday, because it isn't going anywhere soon.

Henry's Dream

Henry didn't have much on his mind and had even less to write about,  retreating into dreams to see what he could come up with, chasing the offbeat and surreal.

The barriers of his dreams were layered with walls, like the bijou sets in “Gone with the Wind” filmed at Culver City, a historic street with a view of the suburbs painted over at the backdrop to meet the needs of the scene. 

Henry knew the colors of his dreams, there were three, brown, amber and red, red to highlight; accentuated lips, script, flowers, hearts, nipples, vagina lips and so on. The black and white backdrop took up sixty percent of the dream scene, the rest brown and amber, with the occasional red highlight.

In his dreams Henry would wonder through the city streets which felt like small movie sets. He would often meet his parents who had been dead for many years and they were always broke. Many dreams involved apartments or houses that were closing in on him and falling down around him,  the hound of foreclosure was always at his back as well. 

He had little connection with the people in his dreams feeling that they could turn on him at any minute.

Frightful dreams such as  being in a
concentration camp, being chased by demons or zombies were strictly in black and white, no shades of amber, brown or red highlights here. 

Henry the voyeur, just a huge eyeball viewing the show, other times walking, sitting, flying through it, and sometimes talking to the folks in his dreams.

His favorite dreams involved walking through streets and going to hear music or to eat, although the food had no taste and he couldn't hear the music. 

There was a film with Robin Williams called “ When Dreams Come True” about Heaven and Hell, Henry thought the scenes of after life were more like dreams, at any rate, best graphics of dreams ever. 

One night Henry had an enlightenment dream, one moment he was walking around a Zen-do wearing a robe naked underneath.  Later, at an event put on by Microsoft in a open field somewhere. There was allot of dope there and bands played, Hare Krishna monks were serving delicious food, which Henry ate but couldn’t taste. 

He smoked some pot and felt very alive, not saying anything as nothing happened around him , he full of enlightenment. Nobody noticed or gave a shit because they all were enlightened plenty, they didn’t need any help from Henry. 

Well, so it goes with Henry’s dream, everybody must have different dreams he thought. 

Mohave Blues

Henry lost in the Mohave at 10 am, a hand full of mescal buds, plenty of bottled water, a cell phone that worked to got get through to Las Vegas. Loving it, waving a  hand-size crucifix wrapped in rattle-snake skin in one hand and a marimba in the other, the Cactus was wavy, the colors pierced your eyes, purples, pinks, red, green, the dry desert air is healing.

He was living in Las Vegas looking for a job, a salesman. He had a few rentals apartments in Jersey, in no hurry to get a job, he was lazy and hated work, saying... 

"People  punching time clocks, terrifying, terribly disrupting to your bio-rhythms, as bad as Orwell's "1984". 

Henry loved everything about Vegas, the cheap food and booze, cocaine everywhere, he wasn't a gambler though, he liked getting high and walking the streets, enjoying the light show, waterfalls of  purple, light green and golden colored water, walking through a psychedelic wave. Going to bars drinking some, talking to women, meeting people.

The day in the desert started to unfold psychically, vultures eye balling you, rubber-necking, flying like crows, sloppy flyers, lazy waiting to score road kill, eat some rat-tail,  the garbage man of the desert, taking flight, cooling off some. Crude paintings of vultures on rock walls, on the hills, pulling you, shaking you, if you put your ear on it, the rock moans old secrets, it goes into your bones.

Travis Henderson wondering the desert, in the film "Paris, Texas," a shaman, like Jesus in the Sinai, speaking to the Devil, Travis exorcising his own devils. Travis and Jesus walking miles in the desert, not eating, not drinking, seeing the Devil inside the body of a decaying vulture, not feeling right, smelling death, running away into the desert, people looking for Travis, worried.

On the ground, using binoculars Henry watched a slow flying descending Virgin Airline jet on the way to Vegas, thinking the powerful jet engines must blow huge payloads of spent carbon fuel out. Enjoying the open spaces in the uncluttered open desert, luckily, not roped up in an airplane seat, like being in a straight-jacket.

At Dusk, Henry loaded his BMW dirt bike, finding the main road back to Vegas. His  hotel the "Lazy Suzy" in a lousy city neighborhood, a meth neighborhood full of hookers. Henry felt sorry for the girls, they could have been anything before they took fucking meth, cheerleaders, nurses, who knows, the devil drug meth, Henry liked psychedelics and beer, he hated speed. Henry wouldn't hire the hookers on his street for all the tea in China. He would rather practice celibacy. The johns, lost lonely fat white and hispanic men dudes, who lost the art of making love.

He loaded up a cooler with ice and filed it with german beer. Laying around the room, listening to music, his cell phone rang, a call from a strip joint, talking about a job as a light show technician. Henry wanted the job...

" I want this job, I got a tripped out light show in me , blue lights, fast blinking pink strolbs, light-o-rama, stuff you would enjoy on acid watching hot chicks pole dance, trying hard not to cum in your pants?"

The boss a young guy says....


"OK dude you can start next week on thrursday be here by 5 o' clock, don't fuck up on me...."

Great, Henry thought, what a job, you could go to work high, listen to cool music, plenty of hot women around, his lucky day.

There was a knock on the door, it was a hooker, Henry knew her and she rarely hit him up for money, not much, 10 bucks sometimes. Henry invited Claire in for a beer, she was a mess, he told her she should go to rehab, get out of hooking that she was going to get HIV, the usual stuff. Claire woke up one day and she was a hooker on meth, giving truck drivers blow jobs. Claire didn't care what Henry said, she talked about people, names like, Emerald, Chrystal, Angel, Poppy, Dusty, Trip-Boy, all meth users. It bored Henry, he asked Claire to leave, wanting to go out, he put his only suit on, brown with a cotton shirt and green Hawainana tie.

Wearing converse all stars, he walked to the park and smoked a joint on a park bench, enjoying the view, heading to "Lucky Ladys," having a few drinks, meeting his friend Goth Melva, she was nice, very educated, smoked cigarettes too much, liked Trent Razor, Iggy Pop, Lenny Kravitz, music Henry had no idea about. Henry asked if she would like to go to Casares Palace with him and drink a few bottles of wine, she was thrilled, couldn't wait. 

They sat at the small bar near the pool, it was like a dream, Henry asked Melva if she wanted to dose on some chocolate mescaline? They dosed and ordered the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, they looked into the stars, coming on, feeling very natural, connected to everything and everybody. Henry loved Vegas it was the greatest place in the world if you didn't gamble, kept a low profile, enjoyed the people, enjoying laughing at times to yourself.

Vegas in place, stuck there, not going anywhere, good, bad, indifferent, it isn't a monument, ( what kind of a monument for what, you can't think of anything), (a monument to the investors of the properties? OK so what? It doesn't mean much.) Vegas an achievement of engineering excellence, it will never be one of the wonders of the world, made to look rich, extravagant, garish, not hip really, but fun on drugs.

Melva and Henry headed for her place at 5 am in the morning, they crashed out, Henry used her computer, wrote some, going to bed scared him, bedtime was the loneliest time, he crashed on her sofa, having to lay their without a computer in his face, stuck with himself, trying to meditate, wanting to treat the world right.

People who predict the end of the earth, an impossible thing to do, astronomers approximating the downward spirals of asteroids, saying it can happen someday, in 400,000 thousand years maybe. Nostradamus, poetic predications, lofty unspecific writing, like the bible, open to interpretation, waiting for all the bad stuff to happen in the world and not much of it ever happens, not enough to end the world. Jesus never comes, you just die eventually, not the end of the trip.

Melva and Henry headed out to the desert on his motorcycle. Stoping for a drink at a small run down indian bar, Henry took a picture of the place, it was rustic, a 100 years old, like out of a western, old weathered, light blue painted wood. There were two Navajos Indians at the bar, guys with long white hair in solid green flannel shirts, slowly sipping Grainbelt, not drunk, silent, enlightened. Melva and Henry drank a few beers, lit a joint and passed it over to the Navajos granddads, they grinned from ear to ear, mouths full of white teeth. 

Henry and Melva wanted a teepee. He could be the next Bugsy Siegel, bringing employment to the Indians,  building 20 teepees, a swimming pool and bar, psychedelic drugs available, beer, wine, no whiskey, the works. A place where people were coached to live in peace, by caregivers, a place to come and die and reach the Great Spirit. To be buried Indian style, your body laid out to dry up in the sun, on an elevated tarp on poles, maybe for the vultures to munch on. 

People could come to Henry's Indian Village and feel things deeply, trip and party in peace, safe, opening up to one another, heart to heart, sitting on a blanket cross legged, facing each-other, looking into each-others eyes, full of joy, seeing, feeling everything nature has to offer, wrapped in flora.

It would be the " Longest journey that starts with the first step" one teepee and a well.

Henry Yellow and Weak

Henry feeling yellow and weak inside,replused by modern culture. At times thinking he would welcome a fast death, unsure of what was on the other-side, but knowing it would be more pleasing than the slop the world was dishing out. 

Everyday was much more of the same, all the booze, sex and food in the world didn't give him any relief, but writing emptied the junk of his soul. 

Perhaps it was the depression that comes with aging,  the future offering nothing,  friends would tell him that he was old and must accept the big nothingness of hoary life.

Henry thought of William S. Burroughs, it was unimaginable that the Colonel lost his fanaticism for writing in old age, surely the magic existed for him until the end.

Or the good doctor Hunter S. Thompson, Henry wondered what the doctor was feeling inside that moved him to shoot himself? Writers block?  Where his juices dried up? 

The workings of soul and mind are Gordian and knotted when it came to the creative process in old age Henry thought. 

It is often said that the average man in modern times lived in first class luxury compared to kings of old, but it was clear to Henry that luxury didn’t make people happy, that happiness was an inside job, perhaps just a matter of letting go. 

Buddhist non-attachment was the stuff Henry thought, most the time Henry didn’t give a flying shit, a appreciable state of mind for him. If you have Skype you have seen the emoticon of the little man dancing without a care in the world, that was the ticket for Henry all-right. 

Henry thinking of Bukowski towards the end of his life, pie-eyed and ripped every waking moment, a chick hound who let the ladies rattle him, his psyche up and down, he was uncontrollably attached to it, the booze and the woman his fountainhead for rage, but the Mahler and late night writing sessions delivered him.

Many times finding peace was a simple matter achieved by jumping out of the habit box we put ourselves in. For Henry (Not unlike Bukowski) it was dialing in the classical music and writing instead of chatting on the net(Chatting, a vapid experience).

Henry rarely ended his stories with
—one for the coach— inspirational speeches on artistic creativity,  after all the fuss, inspiration is always with us, we just loose track of it sometimes. 

Flaming Arrows and Cherry Bombs

Henry on a cold, cold morning driving on a frozen lake, his 1963 BMW doing figure eights and cluster fuck spins. In the trunk there was a bow with arrows wrapped in sack, soaked in petrol for a some flaming arrow action later that night. 

The forest a backdrop to the lake, a picture washed in sepia and bronze light, the leafless tree limbs and twigs accentuated the scene, symbols of nature, graphic color like you would see in Jackson Pollack painting. 

He loved the aroma of the forest, burning leaves, melting coconut butter, fresh grass shoots,  deer musk. 

Henry didn’t hunt game,  preferring pyrotechnic stuff that tantalized the senses,  shooting flaming arrows at night, sometimes he would attach Cherry Bombs or flares, creating an outrageous light show with sound.

Later Henry went to town for a drink—  Walden, Maine a small town with a Maple Syrup mill and a L. L. Bean outlet. 

Antler was a bar where Jack Kerouac hung out in the seventies. You could find all types of people there, bikers, priest, poets, bums, business men, all with their heads submerged in their drinks and not one of them wanting to talk about Kerouac. 

Henry at the bar eyed a gal with dreads and feathers in her hair, approaching her he asked what here name was. Her name was Sparrow, she was a poet. 

She invited him back to her place,  she lived in a cabin near a cornfield. After a few drinks he lit Cherry Bombs and Roman Candles almost setting her cabin on fire. She told him to get the fuck off her property and never come back.  Henry made a big impression on her

Just another day he thought.