There were three indoor cats and three outdoor cats. The indoor cats were Tiger and his two kids, who were both beautiful longhairs named Fluffy G (because gray) and Fluffy T (because tiger striped). Badger considered Tiger too evil and powerful to go outside as he killed so many birds and bullied the outdoor cats, but at the same time he considered the fluffy cats too innocent and naïve, too domesticated, to go outside, because every time they got out they got lost and couldn’t find their way back in. So those three cats were to stay indoors while the outdoor cats who were not fixed were meant to stay outdoors, especially Bobbie Sue because he was constantly spraying his damn musk on everything and Badger didn’t want him stinking up the house. Sometimes it even seemed like Badger simply did not like Bobbie Sue and had some kind of grudge against him and to a lesser extent Bobbie Sue’s brother Billy Joe, who was always hanging around meowing and letting Bobbie Sue bully him. At first I’d advocated in defense of Billy Joe but Badger wasn’t into it and he'd remind me that Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue were technically my cats because back in 2018 when they’d first come a mewlin out of the pines across the cotton fields to the south I’d started hanging around with them and making them feel like they belonged. He wanted me to take them as my own when I left but I didn’t think that was a good idea. The third outdoor cat was Panther, a very skittish young black cat that we both thought was a girl but whom Badger would later discover was a boy. Panther was kinda feral. You’d usually only see him just as he slipped away into foliage or shadow or underporch.
While Badger was away that week I had an issue with the cats. The indoor cats found their way through a cardboard and duct tape patch job on a 4 panel window that let out onto the screen porch and beyond onto the outdoor porch and into the yard. By the time I’d collected Tiger from a ditch across the road he’d killed a large copperhead and was shaking it in his mouth (which I’d found by following a trail of 13 dead birds all with the heads chewed off) but he dropped as soon as I picked him up, becoming submissive and obedient right away. He was kind of like a recidivist who enjoyed getting caught.
But Tiger’s children had gotten out as well and they’d wandered out to a far part of the yard where Bobbie Sue confronted them, and Fluffy T and Fluffy G mistakenly interpreted this as an invitation to play. It was not. This was Bobbie Sue taking vengeance upon the children for the bad deeds of their father, which Billy Joe understood right away, which is why he fled immediately, sprinting over the lawn to the toolshed and underneath it. Billy Joe was a coward, a pussy even, but he was not wrong to be a gentle soul and avoid violence and the terrible revenge cycles of this kind of class war between the indoor and the outdoor cats.
“I’m not here to play,” Bobbie Sue growled in a low nightscary voice.
“Be careful T,” G said. “This seems rough!”
“What have you got against us?” Fluffy T asked naively.
But Bobbie Sue knew that the time to stop talking and start kicking ass had come and he felt a sudden surge of revenge’s hot hate in his veins and he leapt at them and did to each of them as their father had done to him, doing much damage in very little time and then springing away into the bushes as the other two fled crying toward the house, at which point I was able to drunkenly gather them up and carry them back into the house before attending to the compromised window patch that’d caused the problem in the first place.
When Badger got home he noticed the wounds behind the ears on Fluffy T and Fluffy G and immediately realized they’d gotten out and been attacked which caused him to become frustrated with me and even moreso with Bobbie Sue. This unfortunately did not mix well with my sense of brokenness and self pity and so I felt very lowly and tried to compensate by telling myself that at least I was on a roll creatively and achieving things artistically that I thought I’d given up on even attempting years ago.
After I’d finished the final edits I showed an online friend who immediately offered me surprisingly good money to put it in his hip glossy print magazine, Woke Bitches Quarterly, and suddenly I was a somebody with the hip young to middlin to rich Brooklyn types and getting referred to one of that online friend’s creative friends who was interested in optioning the story for a Television show on Reality Studios Prime, which was I think the second biggest streaming service at the time except for Heil Ubermenschen which was all superhero movies. Maybe I’m thinking of Disney. Anyway things started happening very fast and it was all very intoxicating for me especially as I was in the midst of some midlife crisis adequacy issues shit because of my hernia and my damn personality and deep seated psychological issues and brain abnormalities and whatever else, so that I suddenly became very egotistical and arrogant. An unbearable asshole pretty much really. And I unwittingly poured some gas on the fire by spending $250 in fiction money on oxys and xannies from Badger’s shady friend Zeke. I thought I was being cool, see, but the pills actually made everything much crazier and less chill. Dear reader! I genuinely become so obnoxiously snobby that Badger finally punched me in the face! And pretty hard too, which in retrospect I agree was warranted. I did indeed have it coming. But at the time I’d hated it all because he knocked me down and as I hurried to get back up I felt a flash of pain and fell back down and sat there and put my face in my hands and wept loudly and shamelessly as Badger went outside cursing and left the door wide open and I calmed down and took a couple pills and finished my beer and crawled upstairs to pass out. It turned out that Badger stayed up after I’d gone to bed which I’d done promptly after writing a drunken self-pitying apologetic email to Nina and sending it and then writing a drunken apologetic email to Denise and not sending it before crying myself into a dark and dreamless sleep.
It wasn’t until late the next morning that Badger told me what had happened. He’d gone out early and I’d gotten up and had an oxycodone (the real ones not the “perc 30’s” I’d end up running into later, blues, fentanyl, you know) so I was kinda high by the time he’d gotten back. I saw he had a bandage in his hand.
“I did some fucked up shit last night,” he said bashfully. I could see that he was genuinely troubled, there was true sorrow in his eyes, and I felt bad for him even though my face hurt on the side of my eye where he’d punched me pretty hard the night before.
“Looks like you hurt your hand on my head,” I said kind of jokingly, nodding at the bandage on his hand.
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. Now I began to worry that something terrible had happened and I felt a sense of dread creep over me like Fonzi or like the memory of Fonzi. A lot of times the memory of Fonzi was there but I didn’t know because some part of my mind protected me from the other. Some guardian angel. Memories of terrible things can be like that, that’s why they can really sneak up on you “out of nowhere.” The only thing more surprising than suddenly remembering that you were brutally raped by the Fonz as a young kid is the light of the world after a long dark night of the soul. “It’s a cat bite. I had to go to the department of health and get it looked at and get some antibiotics.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Cats have enzymes in their saliva that cause infections.”
“Yeah he got me good,” Badger said. “But.”
“Badger are any cats dead or paralyzed or anything?”
“No,” he said. “What happened was I left the door open and went to my truck to get my other tin of dip and Bobbie Sue got in the house and sprayed the other cats’ litter boxes on the outside and I think he sprayed the wall too and it really stank you know that smell.”
“You hate that smell.”
“Yeah I got real mad,” he said, shaking his head and looking down. “So when I cought him and picked him up I was a little rough.”
“He’s small, Badger!”
“Well he bit me and I let go and he ran away and he’s okay now,” Badger explained.
“Well I can see why you feel bad,” I said. “I hope your hand gets better soon. And I’m glad Bobbie Sue’s ok—”
“Well but here’s the thing,” Badger said seriously. “After he bit me and ran away I went and got my nine all drunk and high as hell and chased him around aiming to shoot him until he disappeared on me.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake Badger.”
“I partly got real mad at him because I was already real mad at you to the point that I hit you. Sorry about that by the way.”
I waved my hand dismissively. “Psssht!” I pssshtted. “I really had that one coming. Fair play my friend, fair play.”
“I got more beer. The guy at the department of health asked if I’d provoked him to get bit and I admitted I had.”
“He wasn’t rabid, you had it comin,” I said.
“Fair play my friend,” he said softly, shrugging. “But so we’re supposed to quarantine him for ten days just in case, and if we can’t do that we’re going to have to let animal control take him and cut his head off because that’s how they’d test for rabies.”
“Oh no!” I said, putting my hands to my cheeks.
“So since he’s your cat I need you to quarantine him in skinny’s cage and do all of the food and litter and shit.”
“Oh Christ,” I said. I felt like there were some weird interpersonal issues and power dynamics at play and I thought much took a breath but then said nothing.
“So now I’m gonna go to Greenville and fuck my wife and take a hot shower and stay there and do grad school stuff online in the morning and then swing by school and come back at night. I know I did a fucked up thing and I felt like I should tell you about it.”
The last part of this really hit me in the gut you know. And I felt a certain kind of sorrow and dread intermingled with a sense of awe at the beauty of actual human conscience reaching through difficult things between two difficult people and seeking to make things right again through honesty and sincerity. On the other hand though I didn’t want to put Bobbie Sue in a cage because he was a wild young tomcat who was used to roaming free in the rural outdoors.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Later,” he said, and was about to leave and said, “I’m sorry again about hitting you. You know my life, you know how I am. I was a really violent young man with violent parents and violent friends. I chose pacifism and nonviolence when I was 25 and you’re the first person I’ve hit like that in 25 years.”
“Well I have a way of arousing passions and making the old feel young again. It’s okay dude don’t worry about it. I think you’re a good person.”
We hugged and he said goodbye again and left. After that I could feel the bad vibes setting in and I was dreading putting Bobbie Sue in the cage and frustrated that Badger hadn’t just let go of it because we both knew that the cat didn’t have rabies and that we didn’t need to follow health department regulations. But I didn’t want to defy Badger and felt that if I got Bobbie Sue in the cage for a day or two we could let him out but Badger would see that I respected him and cared about being responsible for “my” cat.
I cleaned up the cage (which had been sitting on the screen porch with a hen living on it so it needed some cleaning) and set it up so that Bobbie Sue had food, water and a litter box, and then I started barbecuing some pork and zucchini and potatoes in the smoker and hanging out on the porch drinking beer and listening to some Jimi Hendrix trying to do some vibe management as I was experiencing a confusion of vibes, with both good vibes abd bad vibes aplenty intermingling in my soul because despite the rather dark turn of recent events I was still very excited about having sold my writing to what seemed like a cool publication Woke Bitch or whatever and having this deal for optioning it to some tv people happening. It was now the end of August and so much had happened in a wet blur of booze drugs jam sessions writing injury catfights and swampwater.
Soon enough Bobbie Sue came around as he usually did. He loved coming and socializing with me and loved to purr and be pet though sometimes he would spray me. He really was out of control with the spraying and I realized then that if I’d just paid for a trip to the vet with the money I spent on pills that things mighta gone better for all of us. But I had not. So I picked Bobbie Sue up and put him right in the cage with him completely unsuspecting as he’d been outdoors damn near his whole life and had no concept of cage or carrier in his little mind or wild soul. But once I closed and latched the door shut on him –(this was a dog cage about 6x4x4 I guess) he started trying to escape and it was just about the saddest thing I have ever seen and as I began to weep a light rain began to fall and in the distance I heard a rumbling of thunder. And within my soul, like an indigestion in the guts, dear reader my beloved oh light of my life, the bad vibes also rumbled. It reminded me of the couplet from Blake “A robin redbreast in a cage puts all of heaven in a rage.” The cage was basically made like a shopping cart, a mesh or lattice of metal, probably aluminum, and he was crawling all up the sides and meowing loudly in a way I’d never heard him do before and then he dropped down and made a mess of his cage, pushing his little litterbox around so that it spilled into his water and made a bunch of the water slosh out.
Part of this scene involved me seeing myself as a kind of stray cat of a human being who didn’t always fit in or know how to deal with civilized life. I felt that I had somehow betrayed myself. And I wondered at why I’d betrayed myself and others in all these ways in my life and what was wrong with me that I always did that. How could I just watch myself do something wrong and do nothing about it. And I realized that I felt kinda caged up in my own situation there in East North Carolina and that I had to move on soon before getting too mired and stagnant in the swamp of my surroundings, because I’d been very isolated being in a rural area with no car and an injury that got sore if I worked or walked too much. And I wondered at why I was so restless and yet so lazy, why was this confusion of vibes where at my most me moments I desired to never stop moving and sleep forever simultaneously.
I cleaned up the mess and redid Bobbie Sue’s food water and litter and thought about quarantine and stuff in general. How a lot of humans felt caged up in this time of self quarantine and masks at stores and closed restaurants and working and going to school via telecommunications networks from home… a lot people felt caged up. The weird thing that struck me was how a lot of my experiences and a lot of the experiences od people I’d met and known did not involve having to stay at home so much as not having a home to stay in.
But too much thinking tends to mess me up so I had another oxy and a beer and in hopes of a beneficial vibe adjustment I fed Bobbie Sue some of the crispy outer parts of the hunk of pork I had going in the smoker and put the sound system, which basically consisted of my trusty 2014 Macbook Air and Badger’s fairly fat blue tooth speakers. I had to move everything around to keep the water off it as the rain began to fall a little harder and then I went inside and got the Dr Bronner’s and commenced to bathing in the rain outside. The whole time I was there I’d had no running water I just flushed the toilet by pouring ditchwater into it from a 5 gallon bucket. At first it had been magical and had worked to restore my soul and help refresh me emotionally and wash me off a little spiritually but now it had begun to feel sad and hopeless. And as I bathed I became suddenly and intensely sad that Trinity had died. And I thought about Trinity a lot that day in a kind of endless incoherent inner montage of memories emotions and fantasies all simultaneously made both vivid and muted by the alcohol and opioids and benzos endlessly drifting and evaporating and condensing and intensifying and diffusing in pastel mists as I sat in the rain with my head hanging back and my face up to the sky, my mouth hanging mindlessly agape.
Fortunately I did not get so zonked as to ruin any of the food I was cooking though I did do quite a bit of sad wasted rain daydream musing. I made sure to share pork with Bobbie Sue and late in the day the skies kinda revealing cloudclusters and octaves of red I felt uplifted and reassured for no particular reason and I looked at Bobbie Sue and he still hated his cage and I wondered why I got so upset about putting him in a cage in the first place. After all if you go to adopt a cat somewhere they are usually kept in small cubicles the size of the carriers one might take them to the vet in. He’d be okay. But then I looked at him in the cage and felt sad again because I thought of Trinity and other strange wild souls I’d known whom this world had been too much of a cage so that they felt trapped and grew helpless and became self destructive and died. Not as if I’d helped her much, though I’d tried while I was with her. I don’t consider myself a particular good person most of the time. But I do occasionally try to be. But I’d had to leave her behind because things had gotten gnarly. I hadn’t even known her long but I felt really sad that she’d died. I felt slightly dirty taking one last oxy before heading upstairs to sleep and reminded myself that I had to stop when I left and avoid opioids and get my shit together before I got in too deep and they tore my life apart again.
I slept for a long time and woke up to go outside to piss and then had a beer and went back to sleep and went back to sleep and I dreamed I saw the angel Gabriel the Archangel wielding the sun like a weapon against a three headed gila monster on a vast and surreal desert plane that stretched out beyond infinity. I woke up thinking I had to figure out how to get out of where I was and find somewhere else to go before the bad vibes of my situation wove a sad cage around. My hernia felt strange as I got up so I lay back down and tucked it in again, which I had gotten pretty good at by now, there was a pattern to it, had to push in x direction at y location on body in z order. I didn’t yet know if getting back on the road and carrying all of my possessions in my two bags on my back and over my shoulders might cause discomfort, real pain, or further rupture. As I cleaned my room and got my stuff together I kept track of how my hernia felt and behaved. I knew that it would require thousands of dollars in surgery to fix so I was hoping it not get too gnarly and hold together until I once again rose to the rank of multi thousandaire again.
When Badger got home that evening he seemed sad and angry.
“I let Bobbie Sue out of the cage,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Elizabeth—” that’s his wife—"said I should stop drinkin and doindrugs.”
“I feel like I’ve been a bad influence.”
“Nah, I’ve been real bad sometimes even while you weren’t here.”
“Listen I just want to be thought of as a bad influence here can you just validate me please.”
“Fine,” he said. “Also, did you know my niece Kayla, the one who was sleepin on that couch before you got here this time.”
Yeah well she died of a heroin overdose. I knew it would happen.” There was a pain and bitterness in his voice. Kayla had only been 19 years old. Her family was very fucked up, had always been the impression I got from what Badger had told me over the years. Her mom had had one very bad abusive boyfriend who’d pimped Kayla’s older sister for crack money back when they were just kids. Her sister had only been nine years old. “Stupid bitch,” Badger said. I was not really a fan of how he was talking but I kept quiet.
“She left here,” he said, “because she got caught breaking my neighbor’s poker shack down the road. It fucked up my relationship with my neighbor’s poker shack down the road. It fucked up my relationship with my neighbors and people are gossiping about it all now. I was mad at her and I made her leave and go back to California with her mom, and I should have let her stay and now she’s dead because of me because I’m a psycho who pulls guns on cats,” he said ruefully, his eyes shining. “Fuckin bitch,” he growled, looking down at his feet.
“This is heavy,” I said.
“Life!” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling wickedly like Jack Nicholson. “Is there any leftover barbecue?”
“Oh yeah, I think we have fixins for slaw but there might not be any slaw made.”
“Alright I’m gonna eat barbecue and drink beer but I’m gonna quit drinking and drugs once you leave.”
“And that will probably be pretty soon,” I said. “I just gotta tether to your phone and contact Wyatt and Hannah.”
“I figured you’d wanna go,” he said.
“Yeah I think it would be best,” I said. “I feel kinda stranded out here. I’m gonna see if I can get Wyatt to come pick me up in a few days or a week.
“Pick you up? From where?”
“Jersey. Ridgewood actually.”
You got someone who will come pick you up down in County North Carolina from Bergen County, New Jersey?”
“I think so, yeah,” I said. I could feel the magic coming back inside me. Sparkling. I smiled.
“Well ain’t you special,” he said.
We both laughed and it all felt sad in a beautiful and peaceful kind of way. Badger had chilled out considerably. Bobbie Sue was free. Badger and I ate and drank and talked about life and death, love and violence, miracles and traumas. I emailed Wyatt and Hannah. Badger said he wanted to go to bed early and get up early because there was a hurricane coming. Hurricane season was upon us and we both knew I was right to try and head north quickly. Before going to sleep I messaged Bethany, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned her yet. She had been involved in some of my troubles in 2018 and was apparently still having an effect upon my life. But I’ll get back to that in just a little bit. Not long after the hurricane, which was very impressive especially with the high winds, Wyatt did come get me. It is strange. A good thing will come to you over the distance across a vast darkness, as the sunlight to the earth, but oh how the darkness will test your will to believe that such a thing as so.
North Carolina And Hannah, who lived in Flushing, Queens, had invited me to come visit and stay with her a while and I felt confident about that. Much more confident than I should have been it would turn out. The whole thing with Hannah and Benedict (her husband, whom I’d known from online and who’d read one of my books and who’d moved from New York City to Marry Hannah) turned out to be a total nuclear meltdown of bad vibes worse than any I’d experience until I saw that fight between a guy with a baseball bat and a guy with a pistol at the bus stop at Grant and Freeway after I made it back to Tucson. That would be the day before my 46th birthday in 2021 and I wasn’t there yet. (I’m typing this now in my room at Rex’s house where I live with him and Bill after being homeless a while typing up my notebooks today is Saturday August 6th 2022 and I’m typing up a notebook from sometime last year when ((take it through the lens brightly)) I was) sitting at the Speedway gas station and convenience store on Ajo out west of the city past the horse veterinarian but before three points. (Doing soime revisions now Nov. 29 2022) It warm already but not hot yet. (I was writing in the present tense then, there was a certain presintensity to it all, but it is past now and now I speak of it in the past tense but I’m not tense about it but where was I?) I have to catch the free (because of Covid we still have free public transportation) shuttle back into Tucson to get a care package that Amelia sent me at my friend Jessie’s house. Jessie lives on the south side of Tucson not far from the Motel where I got my phone stolen that one time. I’ve known her for a little over ten years. She has always beengood to me, though she doesn’t let me in her house because Denice told her I was a thief which I can’t blame Denice for seeing as I’d robbed her and all. Plus Jessie had kids every other week and didn’t want someone like me making her space for them feel it unsafe which I can’t fault her for in the least since danger follows me all over like my shadow. My very being presents a threat to domestic spaces and home energy. But that’s why the fact that she associates with me at all and lets me receive mail at her house. That speaks to how kindhearted and generous she is and her generosity speaks to me and now I speak it to you dear reader light of my life through the aeons and the vastness of space across the universe in Beatles songs let it be. But so I gotta go to Jessie’s and get the package from Amelia.
But I should get back to my departure from Badger’s with Wyatt in September 2020. The fact that Wyatt came down just to pick me was great. It was like, at that time you weren’t supposed to travel into NYC metro from as far away as NC because of Covid and if you did you were supposed to shelter in place for ten days. I was not going to be able to do that I didn’t think but if I got a ride from Wyatt and could stay at his place a couple few days before heading into the city to Hannah and Benedict’s.
It was funny just how different Wyatt and Badger were. Very different vibrational energies and such. Badger was older and grizzled with the wild brown and gray curls and bushy beard of a satyr or storm god and Wyatt was younger (37) and tall and thin (Badger was short and stocky and fierce for his size like a badger) and kind of elfin and ethereal. Wyatt had a kind of delicateness to him that sometimes worried me but which more often impressed me because he was genuinely gentle and generous. They knew each other through me and as they kmet for the first time, all of us standing at least 6 feet apart and all wearing masks, I looked back and forth at each of the and was struck by the vivid contrast between their appearances and personalities and their spiritual-vibrational isnesses and it made me realize just how big and soulful the entire world is because there are so many different people out there each a universe unto themself, and that though each might differ and contrast from the other each is also shaped and made from the other. Everything ending and beginning at the same time in each apocalyptic moment smoothed out through all of death and heaven on a cool sustained horn tone of Gabriel like Miles davis black music white light stretching back out of generosity through generations across the aeons and the aether and the vastness of the void and the tiny little stars through me all the way to you dear reader and light of my life.
Badger gave Wyatt a painting as a gift, which made me happy. The painting was good, it was a street art inspired abstract with vivid colors and strong curves, altogether vibrant and giving an impression of moving in place. Then Wyatt gave Badger a small baggy with a few joints and some magic mushrooms in it. Each was genuinely thankful for the gift from the other, for Wyatt loved creative people and was an artist of a sort himself, being very creative if someowhat shy about it; and Badger had been trying to find mushrooms for a while now and having trouble. He could only find booze and hard drugs from Zeke and he had to drive all the way to Raleigh to get weed. So that was all very good though within the next few days Badger would test positive for Covid and tell me he was sure that it was Wyatt he’d caught it from. I couldn’t figure it out I don’t know.
But so Wyatt and I headed north smoking joints and talking about life. I hadn’t seen Wyatt since 2018 when I’d lived at his place in Ridgewood after living at the Radburn train station and getting arrested for lewd disorderly conduct involving an American flag. That was around the time I’d become convinced that Angel was doing sorcery and plaguing me with demons somehow. Around the time young Bethany from Radburn falsely accused me of stalking her. Bethany had been age 19 then, the same age my babysitter Nancy Bonaduce (who took part in brutally victimizing me with my dad’s best friend and partner in crime Fonzi) was when my dad had an affair with her. She got obsessed with him and stalked him and crashed her car into our house one time. My father and Fonzi made a fuck doll out of her and she and Fonzi did the same thing to me and she was involved and I don’t often remember the details of such things and for many years I did not even remember that it happened. But so young Bethany’s false accusation would lead to a big internet scandal and my own online “cancellation” as we call it in the parlance of our time dear reader light and love of my life like black music, and I’d add that I did have it coming for many good reasons, I should admit to as much. It was made especially scandalous by the fact that she’d said I was yelling and screaming at her from outside her building and posted a video that she’d claimed was of me doing it but the video was just like the window of her apartment through venetian blinds but I wasn’t in the video there was just one guy walking in the street and no real audio or anything. But people got very into the whole thing. I only bring it up in detail again because it comes back yet again to bite me in the ass and complicate the tv and movie studio who wanted to option the original Spring 2020 Book of Exodus piece as it was published in my friend Oliver’s surprisingly popular (for a literary magazine) literary magazine.
Wyatt told me not to get too excited until the papers were signed and to tell him if anything went wrong and I needed help getting a fair deal. He had a good friend who was a reputable contract lawyer.
“Yeah well,” I said. “I know Tony Beefaroni.”
Wyatt laughed. “Is that a real name?” he asked.
“No, his name is Tony something else, but they all him Tony Beefaroni because if you got beef you call Tony.”
“I forget you have those kind of friends,” Wyatt said. Then in a Jersey Italian voice: “Ey we got Tony Freakin Beefaroni ovah heah. Well don’t rush to call the violent guy if things go wrong. Get in touch with me first.”
“I will,” I said. “Ilike to steer clear of all that stuff. That life.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t just end up in organized crime.”
“Disorganized crime is more my thing.”
“How do you write novels without being organized?” he asked. He’d read a lot of my stuff.
“Well a novel is a small material thing that you can shape with and hold in your hands. But the world is an tricky infinite and intricate symphony and tapestry of objects and energies and souls.”
“Makes sense,” he said. The land was so green with plant life and all the waterways and inlets with cyprus and big swaths of bulrushes, with a bright blue sky above and puffy fluff mountains of clouds full of shadows and different gradients of gray. I was excited to be traveling north. We rolled over the land up from the agrarian and watery green of the rural southeast and swung safely east of Washington DC and made our way up into the industrial intensity of New Jersey in all its concrete and steel and traffic and money and angst. Even though I’d grown up in New Jersey I often felt intimidated when returning there. I immediately felt lazy there.
I saw the Angel Gabriel in the rearview mirror in the sky behind us and he was enormous and frightening and he wore enormous sunglasses that darkly reflected the world below and his horn shined as bright as a second sun, but I didn’t let all that distract me as I talked to Wyatt about a mutual friend of ours who was always doing conceptual art about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology who’d recently sent out a mass email about leaving all social networks. Kinda funny really. Barry was, we agreed, a brilliant and creative cat; but this was silly.
“I took a full year off Twitter in 2019,” I said.
“Yeah thank god,” Wyatt laughed. “I still don’t understand all that.”
“You know I never went to my trial over the flag thing.”
“I knew it,” he said, making a fist to show that he’d grasped that already “so don’t go to Hawthorne I guess.”
“Right,” I said, holding a finger up and nodding. We finally came to the northern suburbs of New York City exiting the Garden State Parkway and heading for Wyatt’s place in Ridgewood. He rented the first floor of a house with other tenants on the two floors above. We made it to where the streets were lined with single family houses and tall hardwood trees. We had journeyed from the soft pines and soft earth of East North Carolina to the granite and hardwood, the traffic and trauma, of northeastern New Jersey.
“Ridgewood is really coming back to life now,” he said. “A lot of outdoor dining and music just lately. Everything was completely shut down for a while though delivery food has been doing well and I’ve been working steadily doing that. That job is my acid and mushroom connection and I like driving and I have a couple beers after my shift.”
“Where is this place again?”
“It’s called Ray’s it’s right on Walnut Street by Franklin.”
“Oh okay.”
I’d grown up in Ridgewood and had so many memories that just floated up just from me being there again. Weird how mind and the memory work. I had memory issues because of having suffered great trauma in my home going up, and my trauma was connected to my homelessness. Some of my memories of growing up in an affluent overly white suburb were typical or even stereotypical for that kind of life, but it was different too. They weren’t all happy days. Some of my memories were terrible beyond reckoning to the point where I thought they might be fake or to where I did not remember certain events that everyone else told me had indeed passed. But like for instance sometimes I doubted that the man who raped me so viciously was not actually named Fonzi but that I had gotten that idea from somewhere else and that his name was actually Fred. I remember I’d talked to a girlfriend about it, her name had been Cassandra, (I’m sorry if this is inappropriate and I don’t know why I feel the need to say it but I used to call her “my little fuck puppet” as a nickname) one time and she’d said she thought I’d gotten the name from somewhere else and when I got insulted and didn’t know why and demanded she explain she suggested I might have gotten it from one of my favorite childhood television shows, the muppets, where there was a musician character named, Fonzi Bear, and I said no Animal was the musician you dumb bitch, not Fonzi, he was the comedian, and then she asked why I’d called her a bitch and we got in a big fight and I couldn’t understand why and she stabbed me with a knife and we eventually broke up and she committed suicide long after. This all happened in a town far from the town I was entering now and where I grew up, Ridgewood New Jersey, in a town called Woodridge in California where I fled to in a fugue state without remembering one time though I prefer not to talk about it because it gives me anxiety. Now of course dear reader light of my life (im sorry I keep echoing the book Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov here for some reason) I know that there is an actual tv show named Happy Days with a character named Fonzi who was an Italian American and a biker and a gearhead (just like the guy who raped me but that is a coincidence) from a broken home named Arthur Fonzarelli dear reader sorry for echoing but that is a coincidence and if it is not I prefer to reveal the truth while hiding behind that puppetshow of happy days and pedophiliac rape trauma behind the mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished the artist like the god of creation remains within or behind or beyond or above her handiwork invisible refined out of existence paring our fingernails yes I will yes.
Anyway though my dad had been a teamster and a gangster and my mother an alcoholic editor of medical trade magazines. My whole family was very troubled and from an early age I felt like I didn’t fit in in the town. And those feelings returned to me as I returned to town but from a distance over the aeons and through vastness of black void like starlight I heard a voice whisper to me that it was going to be alright and I thought to myself yes I will yes.
First things first upon returning I took a shower and got a load of laundry into the washer and Wyatt and I had some beer and magic mushrooms and smoked joints while we talked about Covid. He didn’t like that the new school district that he had a job in, in Glen Rock, was pushing hard to reopen schools and businesses to keep the yuppie constituency happy. The town had been mostly republican but would swing left to majority democrat in the next presidential election when Biden would be elected over Trump. While crossing into New Jersey I also had memories of growing up with cats and how when I was sad and wounded as a boy my cats would come to me and stay with me and purr while in physical contact with me and I thought about how purring involved some really good vibes and about how scientists couldn’t explain why cats purr and I felt the vibrations of the car’s engine and could tell that rate, like the heartbeat of the car, was just about 777 (revelation) revolutions per minute or nearly 12 per second with the wheels at I guessed 81.57 inches around and it occurred to me that cats purr as a means to regulating certain biorhythms and socialize with humans who fid the purring of the feline felicitous and therapeutic. Then I had a vision of an eclipse and fell into a kind of happy daze and a dreamy smile came over my face and I felt myself begin to vibrate and hum and everything grew kind of warm and bright and I felt I might begin tremble but I just purred. I realized that there might be a cat at the center of the universe and that that cat’s purring was the primordial syllable of being, the om of the ancients, and that om is where the art is, and how the puns rhymes and rhythms involved in this was connected to my having grown up in a home with cats and my homelessness as an adult. I wondered. Then I thought about how in a lot of these rich New Jersey commuter suburbs like Glen Rock and Ridgewood the political pendulum will swing back and forth and that a lot of the people in those towns can go either way and that people can be pretty progressive and compassionate or hardhearted and rotten with money and how the swinging pendulum of that stuff is kind of a heartrate or purring but this was all just a daydream.
“Dude,” Wyatt said.
I kind of snapped out of it and came to and looked at him. I felt kind of energized but serene.
“Are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just had a nice daydream. I think I might know why cats purr.”
“Cool, what do you mean.”
“I don’t know,’ I said, and laughed. “What else is going on?”
Then I thought to myself that a dialogue between two people is like a pendulum or a purring cat.
Then we talked about how a vaccine or vaccines for Covid had been developed and I was optimistic about it all but he seemed pessimistic and cynical.
“I just feel like it’s never going to end,” he sighed wearily, a soft distant look in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me he was focused on traffic. He liked driving, it seemed to soothe him. That is part of why he came to get me and drive me back to New Jersey. I wonder if it had to do with the purring of the car and how the words cat and car differ by just the one letter at the end and how t was just two letters over from r in the alphabet and how the number of letters in the alphabet was just two letters more than the number of hours in the day and how the earth rotated at 1 revolution per 24 hours and how alternating current with it’s pendulum quality involves a frequency of 60 hertz because that allows for the most efficient distribution of energy in power lines and how Nilolai Tesla was in love with a pigeon or a dove and I remembered a dove I’d seen at the Tucson Greyhound station in April 2020 and that one hertz is 60 cycles per second and that there were 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year except every 4 years so that there was a cyclical unit and that 6 times 4 is 24 and then I heard music in my head and grew dizzy and Wyatt asked me if I was okay and I kind of snapped out of it. Wyatt had turned up the music and the song signs by the band Tesla was on.
Signs signs everywhere is signs…
He was singing along felicitously as I drifted back through dreams of felines and electricity and hummed along with him. Good vibes.
“Piscadoro,” he said.
“Dude,” I said. After the song ended the next one came on. It was Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys. “Synchronicity.”
“What?”
“You ever seen synched fireflies?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What were we talking about?”
“Covid’s never gonna end but I’m trying not to worry about it.”
“I hear you dude. I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll all end one way or the other I guess but like at the completion of the revolution per something the revelation will come and the end or omega will be a new beginning or alpha and their conjunction will be the aleph.”
“That’s just what I was gonna say,” he laughed.
“Really?”
“Nope!”
He laughed and soon we were back at his place in Ridgewood and I felt at home and we listened to some records on his record player at 45 rpm which was three quarters of 60 rpm which was related to how the record player was powered by alternating current at 60 hertz or 60 cycles per second. I asked him the bit rate for high resolution FlAC and Apple lossless files and he told me it was 24 bits per 192 kilohertz and I nodded and said of course. He had gone to sound engineering school and worked as an i.t. guy at a school in Glen Rock. I wondered about language, the om of cats, and the compression of digital information.
“You keep getting that look,” he said, a gleam in his eye that reminded me of Badger looking in my eyes.
“What look?” I asked.
“There’s a gleam in your eye that reminds me of someone.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But listen. I feel like we could have more better riots if there were no plague,” I said and chuckled.
He laughed and tended to the records player. I’d put on some Rolling Stones but now he put on Harry Belafonte live at Carnegie Hall in 1958. I recommend that one to everyone. Belafonte would have been a much bigger star in the United States had he not been so morally upstanding, so class and race conscious, so beautiful.
“Republicans are going kind of nuts acting like Antifa and BLM are destroying cities but insisting that Covid isn’t really killing anyone as people die by the hundreds of thousands,” he said.
“On the democrat side I think Cuomo (the governor of New York) fucked up big time and is responsible for a bunch of deaths and it is going to catch up to him.”
“Oh yeah definitely.”
“What a world, what an age.”
“It is wild to me how people will say a disease with about a one percent fatality rate isn’t worth worrying about even as it shows signs of spreading to the point where over a hundred million people get it and a million die,” he said sadly.
“It’s weird,” I said. “I went through a phase where I loved studying networks and systems and the math of it. It all coincided with a psychotic break in my late 20’s when I eventually became too obsessed with prime numbers and transfinite numbers and questions of continuity on the number line and the analytical plane and whether or not digital mathematics with its integers and combinatorics and partitions would ever be exhausted, along with quantum physics, so that we returned to an age where the dominant mathematics involved a language of continuity, real number functions and new forms of advanced post digital analog encoding.”
Well dear reader light of my life over and through aeons and vastness of space and endless gardens, you know how this kind of thing goes. Wyatt was an engineer and a lover of abstraction as well as an audiophile who preferred vinyl records to digital music although he respected the fidelity of digital formats and such but so we got into a heated discussion about the possibility of super vinyl in a post digital world though it veered quickly away from more scientific realism into fantastical fancy and folly. These were the kind of things we often talked about. I think he was glad to have someone who agreed with him about how it was better not to rush back into getting things “back to normal” in terms of schools and businesses and such. I of course was pretty much morbidly enthused at the prospect of an economic collapse and fascinated at the strange idea that the virus might have more revolutionary potential than all the young people calling for guillotines or posting about eating the rich online or whatever. This thing, a virus, which isn’t even alive, it’s just like a small string of parasitic code not much different from the kind you’d find on an ordinary everyday computer but still livingish enough to seek to reproduce itself through host after host after host and insodoing sabotage and subvert global capitalism by shutting down factories and restaurants and disrupting supply chains and shit like that at a level only dreamed of by my anarchist and communist brethren and cistern.
Wyatt did not agree with me on everything., he was not a crazy radical like myself, but we had great conversation in his living room which had natural light coming in greenish through large houseplants swaying slightly along in the abstract ectoplasmic kinesynasethesian vibishness like underwater seaweed in the weird wordly air as he changed the music again and Harry Belafonte live at Carnegie Hall gave way to Jethro Tull’s aqualung with its pedophiliac weirdness as the mushrooms began to kick in and we both began laughing and opening up growing gills for the fluid of the trilling flute druid rock music and I thought of Pan in old Greece and Mallarme’s poem Afternoon of a Faun and Debussey’s orchestral version and Will Farrell’s Anchorman character and the jazz flute aqualung joke in that movie and just kind of amusedly mused upon it all while Wyatt and I engaged in a free associative conversation like an impressionistic montage you know. It was all very cathartic and revivifying for me, though Wyatt did have to remind me to chill and to not get too excited and berate himas I had done on one memorable day in September of 2018 while recording some music that I would put on an album I released in late January or early February of 2021. I apologized and acknowledged that I could sometimes be an excitable boy.
“Excitable boy,” we both said.
For two or three days I lived in a suburban paradise at Wyatt’s and we both experienced the kind of psychedelic vacation from everything that can really turn a person’s life around. I mean it didn’t actually turn our lives around but it was the kind of thing that very well could have. We had pizza and bagels from good spots. Those are two of the things I like about coming back to New Jersey. Pizza and bagels.
But Wyatt had to prepare for his new job at the high school he’d graduated from in his youth one town over in Glen Rock and I had to get going to go see Hannah and Benedict in Queens as well as meet with this guy named Cyrus Ademi and his partner about the sale of the tv and movie rights to story I had gotten published in my friend Oliver’s magazine, Woke Bitches Quarterly, and I think they were going to have a contract for me to look at. As I told Wyatt about this I grew excited and he cautioned me to calm down.
“I’ve just been such a brokeass nobody for such a long time,” I said. “And of course I know that on one level material gain and contemporary celbebrity and notions of artistic success are all bullshit, but on another much deeper level I’m so starved for validation and recognition and so desperate for a better life where I have a place of my own and a bunch of instruments and equipment and, to be honest, more better people thinking that I’m hot shit and wanting to give me sex money and recognition as an artist, so—”
“Show me the contract before you sign it.”
“I’m not a baby, Wyatt.”
“I know, you’re a man-child, it’s completely different.”
“Hey man, Lao Tzu was a man-child.”
“That may be true,” he said. “But you my friend are no Lao Tzu.”
“The Lao Tzu that can be spoken of is not the real Lao Tzu.”
“Aye,” he said, nodding.
I told him I’d show him the contract even though I figured I wouldn’t need to. He gave me a gift bag for the road with three hits of acid and some mushrooms and a few joints in it and I told him I’d be in touch and we agreed that good things were on he horizon and I left with all my stuff which I was thankfully able to carry without my hernia getting too janky and I walked the short distance from his place on Brainard down Broad Street to the Ridgewood Train Station and caught the train to Penn Station via Secaucus Junction and was amazed by how little humanity, how little human traffic there was, at these places that are usually just as warm with people going between New Jersey and New York. It was surreal and reminded me of the movie Vanilla Sky or that big Stephen King story The Stand, you know. I mean, Penn Station was sparsely peopled enough that I saw someone skateboarding down through one of the main concourses which would be unimaginable under normal conditions in the world before Covid and though I was there after the peak of the Covid Devastation in NYC and NJ, things were radically different. And it was ironic, you know, because the old normal in these transit hubs, the sheer mass and density, the insectoid frenzy, the sweaty urgent swarm with the capitalist velocity vibrations, were straight up overwhelming, even for someone like me, a New Jerseyan who was raised within it all and who had so many friends and family and such who understooid or “understood” that adapting to and working within all that was part of growing up in the nyc metro area; but like I say it was ironic in the sense of a surface meaning with an opposite meaning in the underspace because the weird and haunting and haunted aspect of the lack of the bustling swarm and sheer capitalist immediacy was even more of a shock to the system you know, it was all very surreal and dreamlike and I had simultaneous feelings of new vulnerabilities and new possibilities because the old orders were breaking down and new orders were bound to emerge. Blue Monday, New Tuesday, the strange dangers and miraculous rolling koan satori potentialities of the inscrutable east.