Superman y Yo

 

I write every afternoon, high on ganja, mostly edibles. 

I have never earned a penny writing, but a shitload of people read my work, thousands. 

 

Page 2

Lucia and I are in bed around midnight watching the Dick Cavett show. 

John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara are on.

The three were making late-night talk show rounds promoting Cassavete’s new film, Husbands. 

While shooting the film Cassavetes encouraged actors to say whatever came into their heads, and improvise.

While on the Cavett show the drunk and obnoxious actors pulled juvenile pranks and were rude to Cavett and his audience. 

Lucia feels sorry for Cavett because he seems effeminate and afraid to  stand up for himself, Henry chuckles, 

Don’t fret over Cavett, he's gayish, a superstar!

Anyway, we’ve been to the beach every day this week, so I’m working at home today. Wes Far called, he’ll pay a grand per for a story on the Native American writer, Sherman Alexie.

So anyways, 

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane Indian who was born on a reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He writes about his early life in the short story Superman and Me. 

His mother had a minimum-wage job which was middle-class by Indian standards. But, like most Indians on the reservation, they were poor. His father was an avid reader and the family house was cluttered with piles of books that would often cave in and collapse. It was a task walking around the place without tripping on a book. 

In his book, Superman and Me, Sherman 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, examining it hard, the words were clear as mud, and as if the gods were blowing in his ear, he sees that the words on the pages are 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.  

Still 3, the prodigy sees the world in paragraphs, in his own words,

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, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and our adopted little brother.

By the age of 5 he's in kindergarten reading The Grapes of Wrath while the other kids are busting their balls 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 Sherman Alexie applies and is accepted to Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, one of a few Indian kids to make it to college from his reservation.   

Initially, his work focused on the troubles of Indian life on the reservation, alcoholism, poverty, and despair. Later as he matures as a writer his work is less focussed on Indianness, and Sherman begins weighing what it is to be human, as demonstrated in the following poem,

Grief calls us to Things of This World 

The eyes open to a blue telephone

In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,

Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is blessed among us and most deserves

The first call? I choose my father because

Poppa's astounded by bathroom telephones.

so, I dial home, 

hey, Ma,

I say, 

Can I talk to Poppa? 

And then I remember that my father has been dead for nearly a year and I say,

shit, Mom, I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry— she says,

it’s okay, I made him a cup of instant coffee

this morning and left it on the table—

like I have for, what, twenty-seven years, and I didn’t realize my mistake until this afternoon. 

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.

Da angels burden and unbalance us and da fucking angels ride us piggyback. 

 

A Filthy Slash Rotten Wonderful Day at the Beach

There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t tell you I love you, Lucia, 

that's what you say but I know you're turned on by other women, not just me Henry.

looking at themselves in the bathroom mirror, they brush their teeth, then braid each other’s hair, native style. 

They walk the short distance to Dog Beach pushing a cart with a couple of folding beach chairs and a loaded cooler in it.

A friend Carlos mentions nude beaches. 

At Nude Beach they drink bottled beer, Lucia squints, putting on her Ray-Bans, looking seaward, looking for Cuba

when gravity fails Angels take flight.

Someone's kid yells,  

fin, 

people run ashore, not panicked, but wanting to get ashore. 

At T-Bones, the boss makes trippy cocktails blending fresh mint leaves, ice, and coca paste. 

Are you familiar with our menu?

Yes we are, we'll have the lobster chowder on homemade bird nests, Greek salad, and a pitcher of Rum Cocas

what kind of dressing on that salad? 

Garlic sour cream, 

the food takes forever, the kitchen’s backed up, it’s Sunday. 

They're 3 pitchers of medicated goo to the wind, too loaded to eat. They take a doggy bag home for their neighbor's Golden Retriever, Billy. 

Finally home, they sit at the kitchen table and talk about  Raymond Carver, his film Short Cuts, and the failed and wasted lives of blue-collar workers from the Pacific Northwest. 

I’m reading Raymond Carver, he’s depressing, I’d rather read Marquez, his stories transcend everyday life to a place where there's hope for all humanity.  

Yes, I get it, 

what’s on HBO, Henry? 

I’ll check the TV Guide, 830 PM,

oh, here's a freaky bit,

Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I’ll pop some corn, quierdo. 

Sitting with their legs up on the coffee table the couple munches popcorn as the plot unfolds, 

... an unhinged United States Air Force general orders a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It separately follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a Royal Air Force exchange officer as they attempt to prevent the crew of a B-52, who were following orders from the general, from bombing the Soviet Union and starting a nuclear war.

It’s impossible, isn’t it? 

God, I hope so. 

The Cinema

 

in a hush eating mars bars and 

popcorn @ the Oriental theater

where celluloid dreams ooze off 

the screen as Queen Cleopatra  

shows off her chest and dreams of a

roller coaster ride looking to the sea

, wondering why starfish are falling 

from the sk@i 

Tomorrow's the Pow Wow!

 

I posted my first story, Hell Out West on Twitter 0n November 23, 2007, and I've been writing ever since.  

I’ve written hundreds of stories and everyone has been a step forward. 

Nothing makes me happier than reading the lions of literary history— the greats from Plato to Sherman Alexie. 

Writers and born not made, and every one of them has his or her own style. 

I was a big talker in College and spent a lot of time in the downtown taverns. 

By junior year I realized there was something, somewhere, I needed and the university scene wasn’t it, so I packed my Polara wagon for a trip out west.

Somewhere between Topeka and Junction City on I-70, I pull my over and pick up a hitchhiker, an Indian gal headed out west who says, 

O-Si-Yo friend, I'm Magnolia,

I'm Henry,

there's a Pow Wow at Pineridge Reservation this weekend, let's go handsome,

show me the way, Pocahontas.  

She pulls a map from her beaded leather bag,

drive to North Plate, turn right, and head north on Old Highway 83, 

I know Old 83, are you hungry Geronimo? 

You bet,  

20 clicks up 83 they pull off and park in front of Hannah's Corners. Inside, a waitress wearing a gold sweatshirt that reads, 

Viva Las Vegas,

takes their order, 

have you looked over the menu, sweetie? Magnolia giggles saying, 

 

My lover and I will share, we'll have dollar cakes, scrambled eggs, chicken fried steak with gravy, hash browns, and a pot of coffee, 

you bet, let me go place your order, Henry smiles saying, 

lovers? 

 you must feel the vibes, Henry, 

I do, I do.

Eat hearty because the skins on Pindridge just eat fry bread. 

You mean donuts? 

not quite but close, dog,

dog? 

You're  Sweeting Dog. 

Henry pays the bill and they walk outside, then gases up the Polara. Magnolia sits in the driver's seat and asks.

can you teach me to drive?

Sure, how old are you? 

28, 

he gets in and tells her, 

pull out of the station onto the road, start off slowly, just use your right foot on the pedals, now put the car in drive. 

As they drive on Old 83, Henry laughs, 

you've driven before, haven't you? 

How'd you guess? I don't have a license, do you think the cops will stop us? 

Just keep one eye on the speedometer and the other on the road.

By sundown they reach the South Dakota border where Magnolia continues west on 18, turning right on a gravel road.

At the end of the road a Buck on horseback signals for her to stop, she looks up and asks, 

where's Crow Dog?

Drive a few clicks passed Pinky’s Grill, and look for a shiny Airstream trailer.

She drives a bit and then parks the wagon under a Mesquite tree.

Magnolia and Henry walk to Pinky’s for supplies, bologna, fry bread, donuts, and beer which they place in a styrofoam cooler on ice. She reminds him,  

silence is golden my Indian Buck, 

oh, it's "my" now? 

Yeah, just behave. 

They set up camp near Crow Dogs' trailer, then for luck field strip an American Spirit cigarette, tossing the tobacco into the wind.

Leonard’s wife steps out of the trailer and walks to Magnolia,  putting her arm around her, 

we've converted an old school bus into a camper, you and the white boy can stay there if you like.

Crow Dog walks outside wrapped in a blanket, approaches Magnolia, and says,

you’re a Cree from Wisconsin, you’re Painted Red Horse’s daughter, tomorrows the Paw Wow, get some rest. 

They walk through a field of discarded beer cans, and doused campfires to the school bus, inside, there’s a loft bedroom made of pallets. 

Ready for bed they shower in a plastic shower stall outside.

Dripping wet they wrap up in Indian blankets and go to their new home, the school bus.

After getting comfortable in the loft they light Sage incense and candles. Then Magnolia lights a joint, and they sit cross-legged on the mattress, puffing, passing the joint back and forth, Henry says softly,  

Tomorrow’s the Pow Wow.

Love-Love-Love

Lucia scolds me for leaving the lid of the potty up, this is taboo in our house, I say, 

yes dear, and she says, 

just make sure you close the lid next time burro and don’t try to butter me up. 

It’s awful, my words are nearly always an offense.

A man must partly give up being a man
with womenfolk.  

If a thin man is with a fat woman she has to give everything it she’s got because she’s lucky to have him.

How bout the fat girl who's loved by a thin man she's gotta stay on top of things, especially her man. 

shit happens,

Some guys like a women that treats em mean and doesn't care.

It's bein in the lobby of a Miami Hotel looking for love, love, love, or when your woman spends the night with another man.

Remeber that love comes and goes in life. 

In Bukowski’s book, Women, he writes that he never got laid  until he was a famous writer— the dude was fugly to the bone. 

Women fucked him because they were attracted to his mind.

Joanna Bull, a voluptuous blonde former girlfriend of rock star drummer Levon Helm, sent him samples of her poetry and began visiting him at his bungalow in East LA. 

Miss Bull(shit)  knew he wanted to sleep with her. 

One night she got loaded and stayed at his house late remembering,   

when we got to the moment of truth, wrestling around and doing stuff, preparing ourselves, he realized I hadn’t taken off my panties and was disgusted. 

Afterward, she goes into the toilet and throws up, saying, 

it was unbearable for me, 

If Joanna Bull had a lick of kindness she would have mercy fucked Bukowski, regardless of his looks.

In his book Ham and Rye, he mentions going to ROTC instead of the gym because he was ashamed to wear shorts and exposing the boils on his legs. 

Around the same time, his old man, Heinrich, sent Charles to a dermatology clinic where a nurse spent hours painfully sucking pus and blood out of his large cysts and boils with a syringe. After a few weeks of the horrid process, Buk’s face and body looked worse. 

By the fifties, Bukowski’s Acne Conglobata was a non-issue. 

Buk claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life, representing himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. 

Simply put, his life was as undomesticated as his writing.

Is There Anything to Take Away Here?

                                      

Humbolt begs Lolita who's passed pubescence but is younger than 17,

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul— Lo-lee-ta the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap. Lo. Lee. Ta…

Vladamir Nabokov

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York… 

Sylvia Plath

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…

Hunter S. Thompson

These examples of opening paragraphs written by authors I love.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Earnest Hemingway 

Hemingway’s opening paragraph paints a picture for the reader.

She quietly dresses, slipping into a white thong, then covering her nakedness with an oversized Oxford shirt. Outside, she gets on her Vespa scooter, moments later she's at Dog Beach where she rents an umbrella and folding beach chair from Lazy Carlos’s. 

Figaro Lucowski 

How does this opening paragraph from my story Lazy Carlo’s stand up against the others here?

More on Hemingway—

He was a man’s man who couldn’t get a handle on bohemianism. He didn't fit in with Stein, Elliot, and Pound. 

The sea fish, Marlins, and Swordfish he spent hours trolling from his boat, Pilar, got revenge on him when he fell ill with stage IV skin cancer while living in Idaho in 1961. 

In the end, bohemians have the best time, from TS Elliot to modern rockers, the Beats, jazz musicians, and artists.

James Baldwin said, commenting on life in the 60s, 

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does homosexuality. 

There are abundant articles on the web about pain, heartache, pleasure, and happiness, stuff you read in Psychology Today— words, words and more words, soapy stuff, experts and more experts writing the same twaddle, none of it out of the box.

Experts make the point that we are living in a world where people take too much psychotropic dope, particularly anti-depressants and mood stabilizers— I’m on anti-depressants, why? Because my body and soul were consumed by a black spirit.

A few years ago I met a German psychiatrist in Pai, Thailand, an unorthodox hippy town in the Kao Tao mountains that looks like a Spaghetti Western set.

We drank Thai beer, Leo, with ice like Thais do. Earl (the shrink) says to me, 

psychotrop drogen sind nutzlos, after a month the body becomes immune so you must continue increasing the dosage, so there's no reason to prescribe them. 

I got the vibe the German shrink was on the run— Pai’s a scene where people can slip away from the de facto world, a no man’s land, or from the law even, for writing bogus scripts.  

You must go to jail to know what it's like.

I'm at home in bed, not in jail. Millions of men and women in the world are doing time as I write this— 

God bless the blind poets and poetesses doing time because they can’t look up at the moon for inspiration.

God bless your computer and typewriter— they are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a flash.

They Killed, Henry, John Berryman, & Me

 

                                        

Fading away on tramadol and ganja takes my pain away, Lord take me to the upper room.

Keep your nose to the grind Henry, breathe easy God says.

John Berryman wrote Dream Songs— here's number 1,

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it that made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, we survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be
once again a sycamore. I was

kicked off the stage by the MC.

I wrote the following poem in 2013. 

They Killed, Henry, John Berryman & Me

John Berryman, high on something, scribbling a poem in the English Department,

remembering 

a  hot, mixed-up, cockeyed day in Chinatown at an opium den, dreaming of wooden ships, the god Neptune and flying fish.  

The Bronksville Hotel Henry is pulverized by cockroaches, mosquitos, and lice magnifying 1000 times in the coterie of his dying brain.

He told the screws to mix his ashes with tobacco and Bougainvillea pedals in a tin of Prince Albert Tobacco, and to place it in the trunk of a Cadillac sedan, because in his words,

there won't be a body this time.

The street people follow the cheerleader to Wicker Zoo where she hands the guerilla a hand-rolled Cuban cigar.

King Kong lights a blunt and blows smoke rings at the sun.

All in all, it was lovely remembrance somewhere south of Elysian Tield.

Where are the Valiums?

Where are the valiums? 

It will come to me in a second, darling.

Driving home the other day I saw a truckload of pigs headed to the slaughterhouse. It breaks my heart every time I see it, I haven’t had a thimble full of meat in ten years or more, sure I crave it, ribs, bacon, pork chops, but I can't get around slaughtering pigs.

Barbecued ribs have been an institution for hundreds of years in America for Chinese Americans, Afro-Americans, and whites.

State fairs throughout the US hold rib cook-offs every summer. 

The Holy Quran states that you can eat pig meat if you’re starving and there's no way out— Jews that eat Kosher think the same.

Some would eat human flesh if they had nothing else— in the film Alive, the starved survivors eat flesh from the bodies of their dead comrades to survive.

Any cannibal worth his or her salt wouldn’t think twice about eating people, the Wari of Brazil celebrate victory on the battlefield roasting captured enemy alive and eating them. 

Personally, I can't stomach pig or human meat. Let's move on.

Henry and Lucia have a noon reservation at Conch Republic in Key West for the yearly exotic meat festival and he asks his wife,

what's the fare at Conch Republic,

the usuals dear, alligator, wildfowl, escargot, jellyfish,

pigeon? 

Yes, it’s wildfowl,

they’re flying rats, 

they mate for life sweetie, it's romantic. 

At the Conch Republic, the couple is greeted by the owner Carlos anouncing,

it’s the most beautiful man and woman in Key West, I hope you all didn’t eat cause we got an exotic meat spread that’s gonna knock your socks off, go help yourself it’s cafeteria style.

The couple orders a pitcher of a local brew, Funky Buddha, then go fill their plates with exotic meat. 

Back at the bar, Carlos points at their plates saying, 

you got a croc, pigeon, eel, we did what we could to cook jellyfish, but the creature's acids burned our mouths.

Henry tastes the pigeon saying, 

damn, this is better than chicken, pass the salt and pepper darling.

They drain the pitcher of Funky Buddha and order another, Lucia insists on Cubano beer, Buccaneer, Carlos tells em, 

the salad bar's ready, 

at the salad bar, they fill bowls of mac and cheese, cole slaw, mashed sweet potatoes, and poi, bringing the bowls to the bar on a tray. Henry wonders aloud asking,

Jesus, Carlos, you can't be makin any money here, 

Henry, we make money on the booze and break even on the meat product, my brother Ray owns a butcher shop, I get it at cost,

nice Henry says, 

Carlos speaks in Spanish to Lucia.

I came to Miami in an overcrowded rust bucket during the Mariel Boatlift in 79, Fidel shit all over El Presidente Carter, trust me, Lucia, nobody expected the Cubans to do so well in Miami,

sí Carlos, el pueblo Cubano del Miami fit in well here, cono Latino is always welcome, Henry grins saying, 

yes, everyone loves Latin pussy, it makes the world go round.

Wait, Carlos says,  

as the two get up to go, Carlos slips Henry a brown envelope wrapped in a napkin saying, 

I think you're going to need this wee man, love you guys!

The couple's loaded, holding on to each other for balance as they walk home and go to bed. 

Later at 9PM, Henry wakes Lucia and they walk out to the patio. Lucia goes inside to mix up drinks in the blender, bloody marys garnished with stalks of cellary, bringing them to the patio table.

Henry lays out 8 lean lines of cocaine row by row on the tabletop. 

They roll dollar bills, snorting the protean stuff, Henry asks Lucia, 

where are the valiums, darling?