A Million Dollars Worth of Wisdom

It was one of those days, a summer day, you know the days, the peak days when everything feels like love, love is everywhere. 

The smell of Jasmine Flowers blooming in Central Park flowing through the city mixes with the scent of diesel fumes and smoke from barbecue pits in Harlem. The whiff engulfs you, it is the unshakable smell of summer magnificence sometime between 1970 and 1980.      

Henry up early, 9 AM nursing a gallon can of German beer, unable to get the hang of it, trying to suck it down but missing allot— unfiltered beer (whatever the fuck that means) agonizingly drip, drip dripping on his bare chest, leaving him feeling sticky and awkward. He then eats leftover ginger fried rice from a to go container with chopsticks from Ho’s, in Chinatown. 

Lost on booze and ganja, thinking about LSD, Orange Sunshine to be more specific, Orange Sunshine an other-worldly story. Henry a Puck-like half naked Beat, AWOL from the Air Force enters the sacred acreage of Yasgur’s Farm at the Woodstock Festival without a ticket walking leisurely, not thinking much. Then out of no where, and I mean no where man— a lovely wood nymph hugs him and gives him a hit of Orange Sunshine —Orange Sunshine a kind of eternally happy happy to the end of the Universe and back again dope, synthesized by the happiest man in the universe, Tim Scully, a Canadian chemist with an eternal smile who has happy hap-pied his way into the hearts of some of the best pussy in Canada. 

Aside— Figaro Lucowski

Dear reader— you are reading work that is all the way bonafide, take it any way you want, take it the way you feel when you read it, it doesn’t belong anywhere or to anybody.  

Henry losing this story, it was lost from the beginning. Lately, every story an attempt go further out. 

Losing his mind was on-going for Henry—the shrinks at Queens Welfare Office wanted to lock him up at Riker’s Island. He was intuitive and knew the shrink’s game, he frustrated the shrink’s at every turn, vague and making a joke of it all. They couldn’t figure out what made him tick, he was enigmatic. 

It was known by most on crazy pay in Queens that the shrinks hated anybody who was smarter than them and many a smart ass found their way to Riker’s Island.

What was happening at Queens Welfare Office and on Riker’s Island—the crazy pay folks versus the shrinks stuff, was the stuff Ken Kesey wrote about in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The shrinks humiliating the crazies in muted ways, Kesey says it like this.

It wasn't the practices, I don't think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me--and the great voice of millions chanting, 'Shame. Shame. Shame.' It's society's way of dealing with someone different. 

The difference between Henry and the character Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was—Henry could slip under the cracks, he was invisible and would do everything in his power to stay out of the joint or nut-house. McMurphy seemed to be powerless over his fate whereas Henry felt very much in control of his. He was no hero and didn’t want to be a hero, he saw American Heroism as a myth that needed to be repeated over and over for whatever reason. He was an antihero as was Randle McMurphy. 

It was 8 PM and Henry needed a break, he had been writing all day. 

He was thoroughly wasted on beer, so he snorted some cocaine in the bathroom as he washed up. 

He leaves his Queen’s apartment and gets a cab at street level. The cabbie a black dude says,

You like poetry brotha? James Baldwin is reading at the Harlem Academy tonight, it's a fundraiser! 

Henry says, 

take me there! 

Baldwin was known in the black and white world for writing the truth. He wasn’t afraid to expose the skeletons of racism and oppression in America. He wrote about the physic damage suffered by blacks and how they dealt with it.  

When he moved to Paris in the 50s it brought him out of the trapped feeling of being black in America. It also freed his mind to look at the world as a whole, writing about the higher values that all of humanity, people of all colors share became a theme of his.  

Henry paid the cabbie and thanked him, the cabbie says,

I’m parkin my taxi and going to hear Baldwin read myself. 

Harlem Academy was a brown brick school building and the reading would be in the auditorium, Henry paid 10 dollars at the door which was donated to a scholarship fund.  

Henry is early so he sits up front, he takes a few swigs off a pint of Jack Daniels he has in his breast pocket. The auditorium fills up quickly, a mix of black and white people, mostly intellectuals. 

A black women wearing a green Boubou, an African dress, with weaved hair, says, 

The Harlem Academy thanks everyone for coming here tonight in support of scholarship. James Baldwin is a man of America letters who needs no introduction in Harlem—ladies, and gentleman James Baldwin. 

He walks out to the middle of the stage, he has horn-rimmed glasses on, a black suit and white shirt, no tie. He is surprisingly short, but he face reveals a huge intellect. 

He says in Swahili,

naomba kupiga picha?

He takes a few snapshots of the audience with a Polaroid camera. 

He then says, 

I would like to read some poetry tonight, I rarely get a chance to read poetry in public. 

He shuffles through some papers and begins reading a poem called, Staggerlee Wonders.

I always wonder

what they think the niggers are doing

while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists, 

are containing 

Russia  

and defining and re-defining and re-aligning 

China, 

nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,

from blowing up that earth

which they have already 

blasphemed into dung: 

the gentle, wide-eyed, cheerful

ladies, and their men,

nostalgic for the noble cause of Vietnam,

nostalgic for noble causes,

aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages—

ah—!

Oh, noble Duke Wayne, 

be careful in them happy hunting grounds.

They say the only good Indian 

is a dead Indian,

by what I say is, 

you can't be too careful, you hear?

Oh, towering Ronnie Reagan,

wise and resigned lover of redwoods, 

deeply beloved, winning man-child of the yearning Republic

from diaper to football field to Warner Brothers sound-stages,

be thou our grinning, gently phallic, Big Boy of all the ages! 

Salt peanuts, salt peanuts,

for dear hearts and gentle people, 

and cheerful, shining, simple Uncle Sam!

Nigger, read this and run!

Now, if you can't read, 

run anyhow!

Henry realizes James Baldwin is the hippest man in the world, and his truth-saying is cutting but not without humor. 

The last reading is from his book The Fire Next Time, which is a suggestion that black and white people should transcend what they think they know, fear, understand and believe for a higher idea, and that America is both a country and an idea that is handicapped by a narrowness of thinking. 

Blown away by it all, wondering how James Baldwin got so connected with the truth? 

Henry takes a taxi back to Queens at 1030 PM.

10 bucks at the door of Harlem Academy gets you a million dollars worth of wisdom he thought