Savage Nuns w/ Rulers, Trust in God or Else

 

Pinky and I found another condo in Pattaya by the Sea worse than the other one— priced at a whopping 47 dollars a month.

There’s a sliding glass door we keep open and a small arched terrace that opens onto a field of young Eucalyptus trees emitting a scent like burning incense. 

I have nicknamed the room, the Birds Nest because we’re surrounded by stuff and feel cozy as chicks in a nest.

Our old condo is ten blocks down the road, seaward, so Pinky bought an electric scooter for 85 dollars, a fragile thing I’d be afraid to get on, but she claims it’ll hold me. 

We have more than a few suitcases to haul so she uses the fly-weight scooter, moving things bit by bit like an ant carrying broken grains of rice.

The days at Pattaya by the Sea go by slowly, and I catch myself looking at the clock twenty times an hour— This town's all about the sea and rental pussy, neither does much for me. 

For starters, I hate the sun, which like fire, will burn you if you let it, and nothing is more bogus than paying for sex with someone who’s not into it, saying every few seconds, 

are you finished yet? 

Then finally,

my friend’s waiting with her motorbike downstairs.

Pinky’s inventive, she uses rank milk mixed with water for facials, picks leaves from bushes to flavor soup, does our laundry by hand, and makes aloe vera sandwiches with sprouts, tomatoes, and mayo. She grew up on a cocoa farm in Northern Thailand spending her days roaming the forest looking for edible insects and fossils. 

Last night I watched her on the terrace of our third-rate condo as she stood facing the Eucalyptus trees looking like a jungle witch in a trance, reaching out, connecting with something as the trees swayed in the nighttime wind.

Writing isn’t coming easy, it’s taken me a week to write three pages, but I’m going to finish this bit today. 

My last story, I’d Do Anything For a 4F was a flop. It’s a good story, but, the last paragraph recounting a fuck with a Black woman on a storeroom counter likely alienated some.

A favorite Twitter friend, @FerialPoetry, said the sex bit made her blush.

As a card-carrying atheist, I don’t follow Christians on Twitter. Being a Christian is the easy way out, that’s why so many guys in the joint convert. 

Take David Berkowitz, alias the Son of Sam, who shot four innocent New Yorkers in the seventies and is presently serving four life terms at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upper state New York.

Berkowitz is a Jew who’s accepted Christ, so he’s forgiven of his sins and given a ticket on the A Train to Heaven when he dies. 

Absolved of his sins, David will have peace of mind, but in truth, he'll never go to Heaven because Heaven is nowhere to be found.

And, if there’s no Heaven there’s no Hell, a perk for us all.

Life without God and church opens a world of possibilities as it frees you from guilt— spawning good feelings inside. 

There’s a marvelous scene in the film The Night of the Iguana, adapted from the play by Tennessee Williams, where The Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, played by Richard Burton, is delivering an atheist sermon in front of a group of hostile parishioners.  

Appropriately enough the sermon is about the weakness of man and calls for forgiveness for those who go off the straight and narrow.

Shannon quotes a passage from Proverbs that seems to describe his own shortcomings—

He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.

Finally, the disapproval of his parishioners proves too much for Shannon and he breaks down, shouting angrily at the congregation as they hastily leave in the rain. Meanwhile, Shannon rants against their narrow interpretation of religion—

I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this angry, petulant old man in whom you believe. You’ve turned your backs on the God of love and compassion and invented for yourself this cruel, senile delinquent who blames the world and all that he created for his own faults. 

Tennessee Williams lived a Godless life, he was a party animal— addicted to booze, Seconal, and sex. In later years as his addictions began eclipsing him, he was baptized a number of times by a Catholic bishop, hoping it would bring goodness back into his life, unfortunately, the baptismal voodoo didn’t work and he died of an overdose soon after. 

However, he choose to live he was the greatest playwright in history, he brought ranchy soul to broadway, thank God.

I just deleted a few paragraphs on the dark side of Mother Teresa— as a product of Catholic school, I couldn’t bring myself to talk shit about the sister— fearing she might come back from the dead and rap me on the knuckles with a ruler.

Anyone who went to Catholic grade school in the sixties remembers being smacked around by nuns.

The offenses that brought down the wrath of the sisters included talking back—which was my specialty—swearing, fighting, fooling around in church, throwing snowballs at girls, and so on.

There was a nerve-racking randomness to the way punishment was measured out. A wisecrack might bring a dirty look one day and a slap the next.

If there was an upside to the nuns' use of corporal punishment it was the spirit of camaraderie it fostered among us . It was us against them, all the way. We were united in our defiance of the nuns' authority—and the church's, for that matter.

We are near the end so I’m going to conclude with a bit on Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which affects all writers. 

The following is from a 1994 interview in the Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER

Your only formal studies in fiction were as a fellow in Wallace Stegner’s writing program at Stanford. What did you learn from Stegner and also from Malcolm Cowley?

KEN KESEY

The greatest thing Cowley taught me was to respect other writers’ feelings. If writing is going to have any effect on people morally, it ought to affect the writer morally. It is important to support everyone who tries to write because their victories are your victories. So I have never really felt that bitter cattiness writers feel toward their peers.

I'd Do Anything For a 4F

 

It’s early morning in Pattaya by the Sea, the ugly brown curtain is blowing inwards at our condo because the sliding door is ajar.

Pinky and I are in bed, we spend a lot of time in bed, her doing whatever she does on her cellphone and me writing on my laptop. 

At times she exercises in the room, making up the moves as she goes along. 

These days I walk a lot, but for years I ran cross country every day, even during cold Wisconsin winters.

My father worked at General Motors in Detroit during World War II, he was the editor of the factory newspaper, a one-man show working every aspect of the paper himself, except for the typesetting and printing.

Luckily for him, working at GM was vital for the war effort, so he wasn't drafted. All the men in my family avoided conscription one way or the other. It was as though the wave of patriotism that overtook America during World War II passed them by. 

I grew up in the sixties feeling shortchanged because my old man didn't have any war stories to tell. Although, he'd brag to pals about the horny GM secretaries he nailed in the nooks and crannies of the factory.  

By the early seventies, it was apparent that copping out of the draft was a family tradition, possibly genetic.  

When I got a notice in the mail to report to Fort Sheridan, an Army base in Northern Illinois, I knew I was fucked and had to find a way out, not wanting to go to Viet Nam.

The military barred gay men from service under medical fitness standards.

My plan was to show at the base wearing a bra and panties, lipstick, and a dress, like Max Klinger in the film Mash.

On Monday morning I dressed, as usual, packing my drag outfit and some makeup in my gym bag. 

I catch the early morning bus to Highwood and walk to the base where a group of inductees are sitting in an army bus outside the MP station. 

When the bus is full it moves forward and is waved by as it passes the guard post. 

We get out at the gymnasium, going inside to be prodded, and poked like lab rats, sized up by the Army appraising their new property.

I slip into the head, go into a stall, dress in drag, and put on lipstick, mascara, and a wig— as I walk out into the gym I notice people are eyeballing me, and why not? 

As I stand in line for my medical exam I ignore the catcalls coming my way. Eventually, my height and weight are measured, they check my vision, and hearing, and take blood. I ask a male nurse slurring my words, pansyish,

darling, when's that sweet doctor going to examine my bean bag, I just can’t wait. The male nurse answers, 

be patient beautiful you’ll get your turn. 

After my nut sack is pinched and squeezed, which hurt, a female nurse asks, 

are you Henry Lucwoski? 

Yes,

please follow me, sir.

I follow her, looking at her ass.

We go to a small waiting area, there’re a few inductees there. After waiting a while a door opens and an Army Captain appears saying, 

Henry Lucowski,

I walk inside, he’s sitting at his desk and he says, 

Henry, I’m Captain Silverman, the base psychiatrist. I'm going to be evaluating you today. Let's begin with the Rorschach test.

Sure doll,

I’m going to hold up some cards with different images and I want you to tell me what comes to mind. 

He holds up the first card and I say, 

oh my goodness, Doctor, that’s my boyfriend’s anus, you’re making me horny!

He holds up another card and I say, 

that’s a big juicy cock and I want to suck it. Silverman says, 

OK, Henry, I think that's enough,  you’re not a homosexual so stop with the act. Frankly, our brief session and your behavior at the base today have convinced me that you’re psychologically unfit to serve in the armed forces. I'm not sure what you are, but I will proceed to send my findings to JAG because it'd be a grave dereliction of duty if I classify you 1A— it’s my job to weed out nutcases like you before they can do any damage.  

You’ll be receiving your 4F certificate in the mail.

While listening to Captain Silverman I couldn't help but smile and he says,

do you think this is a joke Lucowski? A real man takes serving his country seriously.

I realized I'd gotten a section 8 discharge and could take a dump on the office floor and it wouldn't change a thing. 

Silverman dismisses me and I make a B-Line for the bathroom, changing back into my usual clothes, taking off my makeup with a kleenex, and throwing the drag gear into a stainless steel trash can. 

Off base after the ordeal, I hitchhike north on Sheridan Road headed to the Wisconsin line. A black woman in a Cadillac stops and she asks,

Where you goin baby? 

Over the state line to buy beer in Wisconsin. She says, 

Common doll, I’m going to work, I tend bar in Kenosha. What’s your name?

I’m Henry, what’s yours? 

Lucinda, 

Twenty minutes later we reach BBs Pub, Lucinda parks her Caddy in the alley and we walk in the back door. 

I sit at the bar and she walks behind it, taking over for another Black lady and saying to her, 

Betty Ann, look at this little ole White boy I found on the road, ain’t he cute? 

Yeah, baby he sure is, gotta go to my night job.

Lucinda says, 

whataya have Henry, 

beer I guess, I’m not twenty-one.

You can have anything you want in my bar, baby. 

OK, make it a Crown Royal and Coke, let's celebrate, I just pulled one over on the Army.

Lucinda says, 

good for you doll, let's party sexy, you like Black pussy?

Sure I do, you got some for me?

Sure do doll, I’m gonna fuck your little ole honky brains out in the store room, but let’s eat I'm starving, I’ll order us a bucket of ribs, slaw, and some sweet potato pie from Bootsy’s.

After we finish eating, Lucinda asks a regular, the only one in the bar,

Buster, watch the bar for me, I gotta go to the storeroom for something, you're a doll.

Lucinda pulls my arm and we walk to the storeroom. Inside she pulls her skirt above her hips, bends over a desk, and pulls her panties down. She has a huge ass, the size of two basketballs. I get an instant hard-on, fucking her hard from behind, loving the sucking sound her pussy makes. When she's ready I can feel it as she screams, spraying water everywhere. 

We walk outside to the bar, like nothin happened, drinking till we're drunk at closing time, 2AM.

Fake Eggs, Gold Teeth, & Gary Gilmore

My girlfriend Pinky tells me, 

your attitude sucks, 

whataya mean? I have 1725 friends on Facebook.

Have you ever had a drink with a Facebook friend? 

Shut up Pinky,

she thinks it’s funny, she never takes me seriously, she's childish.

I just took a Facebook photo of my face, using Photo Booth, turning my head to one side, so the gap on my nose left from half-ass cancer surgery doesn’t show. 

My hair is long, white, I pull it back and wrap it with a hair tie, man bun style, putting on a pair of knock-off Ray-Ban Wayfarers for the final touch. Then smiling, an open mouth smile— my gold teeth reflect rays of yellow light.

Pinky says, 

I’m going to cut your gold teeth out when you die before the mortician gets his hands on them. 

You're gonna need a power drill, do me a favor and wait till my body's in the morgue.

Pinky is waiting for me to kick so she can run off with a younger guy and do some serious fucking.

She has been making the three-hour drive from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai to see her orthodontist every month, but I know she goes to see her X boyfriend, who lives there, for a quicky. 

We aren’t exactly in an open relationship, but I screw around some— I'm looking for a respectable lady to ball on the side, like a nurse or a teacher. 

Someone you have fun sex with, without obligation, in Thailand is called a geek. 

When I think of a geek, I think of a carny who's hit bottom, living in a cage, biting the heads off chickens or eating them whole, uncooked, feathers and all. 

I  went to the Ringling Brother's circus with my mother when I was five, in the mid-fifties. There was sawdust and hay spread everywhere. 

Somehow we end up in the freak show walking past the human anomalies who are elevated on crates, sitting and looking out — the Fat Lady, the Lion-Faced boy, who's hirsute, and the Crab boy, who's missing three middle fingers on each hand leaving his thumbs and little fingers which causes his meat hooks to look like claws, ouch. 

In due course we reach a cage where an unsaved man wearing a dirty white shirt and ripped slacks is lying in a bed of straw, stroking a live chicken. Suddenly my Mother yanks my ear, towing me out of the freak show and saying, 

there are some things you don't need to see or know in life, Henry.  

This morning I ordered a small coffee with a fancy Italian name, a blah blah blah day or something at Starbucks, Pattaya City. It cost 115 Baht, 3.35 US Dollars— I felt ripped off paying that much for a bit of coffee.

People go there regardless, enjoying the razzle-dazzle maybe. I bring my laptop and write some— listening to jazz, with my duct-taped Marshall headphones on. 

The Marshall Celestial amplifier gained fame when Eric Clapton plugged his Gibson Les Paul into it for the first time while playing with John Mayall’s band in the mid-sixties. The Amplifier went on to become a rock n roll icon. 

My duct-taped Marshall headphones are falling apart, the sound's good but the plastic framing is second-rate. I just ordered another pair for 17.00 US Dollars which will also fall apart in time, what is the world coming to? 

The Chinese are unrepentant, Chinamen are making fake eggs these days, with chemicals, gelatin, and paraffin. 

The fake eggs are cheap because you can make them fast, and it's not as time-consuming as waiting for a hen to lay one.

Yesterday I watched fifteen minutes of The Executioners Song, a made-for-TV movie from the book of the same name by Norman Mailer. 

It’s a true story about conman Gary Gilmore, who resembles Ronnie Wood with short hair, circa the mid-seventies. 

Gilmore was released on parole from Marion State Prison in 1975 into the custody of his cousin Brenda Nicole, who lived in Provo, Utah. 

Brenda arranged for him to work at her father's shoe repair shop, which didn’t work out because Gary couldn’t remove worn-down rubber heels from shoes without scrapping his hands. 

Eventually, he lands a job at an insulation company and after getting a raise he puts some money down on a used pickup truck.

Gilmore drank continually from the moment he was paroled, failing to check in with his parole officer in Provo, he was going downhill fast the minute he left the joint in Marion, Illinois.  

He meets Nicole Barrett, a confused 19-year-old woman with three kids. Vulnerable, she's easily won over by Gary's talk of reincarnation and soulmates, but, after several months of dating, she becomes fearful of his violent booze-fueled outbursts and breaks it off. 

Gary loses it after Nicole leaves him, spinning out and going on a crime spree, robbing a gas station and murdering the attendant who had complied with his demands, pumping two rounds into his head saying,

this one is for me, and this one is for Nicole.

The following day, while his pickup truck was being repaired in Provo, he walks into a nearby motel and fatally shoots the manager, Ben Bushnell. 

Bushnell’s wife sees Gilmore as he flees with the motel cashbox. While attempting to discard the gun, he shoots himself in the hand, leaving a wound the garage owner notices when he returns for the truck. Then, when Gary calls Nicole for help, she turns him into the police. 

Gilmore’s murder trial began at the Provo Courthouse on October 5, 1976, and it lasts two days. A motel guest testified that he saw him in the motel office where he shot Ben Bushnell that night. Gary gets the death sentence.

Soon, America’s news networks were in Provo, covering the Gilmore story because unlike most on death row, he didn’t want a retrial and asked to be executed as soon as possible. 

His grandmother was a circus performer and psychic who was known as Baby Fay La Foe. She often hinted that Gary was the lovechild of Erich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini. Later his youngest brother said Fay made the shit up. 

In his teens, Gary was a leather-jacketed reform school kid who hated authority figures.

He would chug cough syrup and hot wire 57 Chevys for joyrides, abandoning them when they ran out of gas. 

Gilmore robbed pawnshops, grocery stores, and his friend's houses, going to jail for the first time at 16. Gary would be in the joint for all but two years of his remaining life.

No model prisoner, Gary behaved like Wild Bill in the film The Green Mile, dismantling everything in his cell, flinging pooh at the guards, and peeing on them when they weren’t looking.  

When he was on death row, his soulmate, Nicole rekindled her relationship with him and they exchanged hundreds of letters.

During his three months on death row, Gilmore who was a lowlife for the first three decades of his life became a cause celebrity— he received stacks of fan mail, and his hero, Johnny Cash called him on the prison telephone.

At dawn on January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore walked the green mile to an abandoned building and was strapped into a chair.

When asked to make an official last statement he said,

Let's do it.

The bit on Gary Gilmore has been exhaustive for me, but I can’t complain, Norman Mailer's book The Executioner’s Song is 1136 pages. 

Sadly, 65% of This is About Fred Exley

 

It’s always the same, I do it the same way, stretching like a sprinter, cracking my knuckles, warming up to write a new story, nine pages of lies, the more irregular the better.

I go to PDF Drive and download a shitload of books by authors I like— Thompson, Parker, Cheevers, Robbins, Bukowski, Hemingway, Carver, Baldwin, anybody familiar, reading bits and pieces, until I’m ready to go. 

I like to listen to music when I write, so I'm listening to Art Pepper's album, Smack UP, which he recorded while high on junk.

People on Twitter, mostly those in the writing community, tweet questions, which seems like an attention-getting gimmick to me, but I’d like to ask— 

Do you listen to music when you write? 

Stephen King seems down to earth, I don’t know him personally, but I like his interviews, anyway, he listens to Megadeath, AC/DC, and Anthrax, real loud when he writes, or he used to, likely he's grown out of heavymetal.   

When it comes to writers who don’t listen to music when they write, my guess is their work is barren— I'm a Cancer so don't think for a second about questioning my sixth sense. 

Hemingway listened to music from the different periods he lived through, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, fight songs of World War I— Let’s Bust up the Hun, Over There, You Can’t Beat Us (music that makes you wanna jump outta bed and salute). 

The next question I would post on Twitter is—

Do you listen to music when your fucking? 

Listening to music while fucking doesn’t do a thing for me, it’s intrusive at a time when all I want to do is deep focus on my taco inside my ladie's guacamole. 

And the last Twitter question is—

Do you like the way your personality comes through on the written page? 

If you don't like the persona oozing through the lines of your work, box it up, baby. 

A Brit I know who likes my blog has told me over beers, that I write with confidence as if writing confidently is unique for authors. Anyway, my reply is always the same, 

thanks.

This guy, Peter, talks nonstop, and it’s nearly impossible to follow him because of his English accent. 

His conversation jumps around the globe from Australia to England, then to Thailand, seemingly changing the enumerations of events from day to day. 

If I attempt to get the numbers straight he says in a spin, grimacing,

wait, I’m getting to that now. 

I have given up trying to make sense of his monologue, simply nodding my head— I will go to a different bar to drink in peace tonight. 

Have you read Fredrick Exley? He was a wild man, round the bend, and out the door.

In 1968 Harper & Row published A Fan’s Notes, a fictional memoir by Exley.

The book was so unorthodox that it captivated the reading public. Exley was an unknown, a drunk, a fantasist living in an invented world struggling to adjust to the demands of society.

He once said, 

I’m telling you from my heart, that I will always be the drunk, the poet, the prophet, and the criminal— in company with those whose focus is insulated from the humdrum business of life.  

Exley is pointing a shaky finger at the transgressive nature of his work here.

He was the son of a telephone lineman who grew up in Watertown, New York in the forties— a dying industrial town close to the Canadian border. His old man was known in town as a star athlete and barroom fighter. As a kid, he adored and feared his father, who’d come home drunk and strapped young Fred.

Anguish dogged Exley throughout high school in a town where football was bedrock. 

He once blew a playoff game getting flagged for illegal holding in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter. 

After graduation, he went to the University of Southern California, a glowing campus awash in the California Sun. 

Rain or shine, Fred felt like a leper on the USC campus, ignored by the priggish Greek set he hung out at local saloons in the company of an aspiring literary crowd, fellow misfits.

The future author would watch Trojan football games at bars with his pals, beguiled by Frank Gifford who was everything he wasn’t—  a popular, gifted athlete with movie star good looks. 

Gifford later became an enigmatic character in Fred’s book A Fan’s Notes, a character he couldn’t come to terms with, but was a driving force nevertheless.   

In the fall of 1953, Fed Exely rode a bus across America from LA to Manhattan with his BA degree in hand, renting a room at the YMCA, and getting a job as a PR man for the railroad. 

Night after night, Fred would carouse the bars in Greenwich Village, drinking alone, perched on a barstool, dreaming of being famous like Frank Gifford.

In due time Fred lost his job, so he moved back to Watertown where he spent his days at his widowed mother's house tidying the house up and walking the family dog.  

He lived for Sundays when he’d watch the Giants and Frank Gifford play on TV. Cheering Frank on kept Fred going— in a weird way when Gifford scored a touchdown Exley scored too. 

Fred trained the family dog to sit with his back to the couch, so they could watch the Giant’s games together like two pals. 

Soon he was drinking alone in the house and talking to his dog. 

Having gone mad, his mother has Fred admitted to Wingdale Asylum where he enjoyed playing cat and mouse with the shrinks and began to write, reading his work to patients who'd listen.

Later, on the outside, he told friends that he loved the asylum and could live out his life there.

Fred was his own teacher and editor, educating himself by reading Edmund Wilson, and Flaubert. He particularly loved Nabokov’s Lolita, reading it over and over till the pages fell out. 

Out of the asylum he holed up in his mother’s attic typing away on the book that would become A Fan’s Notes. 

By 1964 the book was completed and he moved back to the YMCA in Manhattan where here would shop around for publishers, rejected by Random House, Houghton Mifflin, and others. 

The publishers told him a book about football wouldn’t get reviewed and they were worried about being libeled by the Giants or Gifford. 

A Fan’s Notes was much more than a book about football— it was a travelogue, from bar to bar in the Big Apple by a psychotic drunk who was an obsessive Giants fan.  

Finally, Fred found an agent, Lynn Nesbit, who specialized in off-beat writers. Lynn gave the manuscript to Harper & Row editor David Segal who had an eye for the avant-garde. He liked the book's searing honesty, advancing Exley three thousand dollars for it.

A Fan’s Notes was published in 1968— a victory for every nearly do well author swallowed up in the canyons of New York City, the broken hearts that never mended, and people whose voices were never heard— because the madness known as Fred Exley roared above the crowd, hear tell. 

I'll never write another word about Exley and his fucking book. I’m in bed, ill, after dashing off the bit about the loser— of course, it's plagiarized some, which is lucky for you because the original is ham-handed, like a hoofer with two left feet.  

Whereas my girlfriend, Pinky, is living testament to the aforesaid proclamation in that she's lying on her back motionless and uncovered next to me in bed, looking like a dimestore mannequin ready to be lifted and dressed in some kooky outfit.