piscadoro! spring 2020 North Carolina
Spring 2020
I had recently arrived in North Carolina and had already seen some U.S. Marshals in paramilitary gear forcefully apprehend someone waiting for a bus at the Greyhound station and met an illiterate ex convict and a flamboyant southern black lady sex worker whose nails I painted outside so it had been quite an adventure already! So Badger and I go to see our friend Harry and do a socially distanced stop and chat and give him some money for weed. Steep hill not far behind us in the back yard. These are townhouses or condominiums or something. The land is beautiful. Tall trees looming under gloomy gray skies. Sci fi sounds of cardinals wubwubwubwubwubwubwubwubwub. Cardinals sound different in the dim green rain. Glistening rock faces protruding among the pine needles and twigs. Lichen, Moss and mushrooms. A steep hill in the back yard. Small sounds of dripping and trickling water coming from damn near every direction.
Badger and myself were out on Harry’s patio in our masks. We were both conscientious about masks. I was not as mindful as he was but he got me to be more responsible about it. It’s funny, I’d always expected reality to be the opposite you see. I thought I was smart, but it turns out I’ve disorderism. But so my friend is earthy. My friend is the reminder that we are really living now in the land of the age of (or the age of the land of) Giants you see. Not Gods nor Men but Giants. Nephilim. Titans. Big uns.
But so he might on a night in the calm air before the hurricane become a laughing grandfatherly type with a beard full of trees and rolling hills and music of centuries and rocky generations through memories of teeth falling in stars cascading down in mathematically exhaustive permutations and incestuous murderers in Orion and the cross of The Lord with the porch rollicking thunder pecan trees asway in humid blue winds under soft black skies meanwhile to the tune of the birth of American music. I will read a biography of Francisco Goya at Badger’s House. Saturn Devouring His Son. There’s an Age of Giants archetype for you. That’s us now too. Sad. Sadder’n Saturn as we used to say back in Jersey. So there is a kind of delicate balance there. Badger was a schoolteacher and worked part time as a nurse so he was especially conscientious about certain things. So I got used to masking up and washing regularly.
Harry lived in a Townhouse in a residential area in Raleigh. I was not too familiar with Raleigh beyond the Greyhound station at this time. Such a different world from The Tatooine Interzone District. East North Carolina (which I having been born in the T.I. but having grown up mostly in New Jersey ((hence my honorary Italian status)) consider “The South”) was so incredibly green and humid and thankfully not quite too hot yet. Tall trees thick with dark green needles and bright green leaves water trickling all around and cardinals singing spaceship sounds reverberating among all the trees in that dreamy way like my childhood whispering cool shadow is your mother green leaves all your lovers. Light drizzle in a mini symphony of mist drifting down. Badger moved under a tree but I just let it hit me. Soft flow into subtle gills of ectoplasmic shadow forms, my lunar organs awakening? You really don’t think dreams don’t involve secret secretions that we can’t see on our own don’t you? This is already The Book of Drome and Nothing Less. You don’t know from Las Fantomas you intergalactic gringo. You’ve never seen a Mugwump in your life you ur virgin of the post topian alterity. Night adds up. We’d all gone to the same high school back in Jersey. I’d known Harry from playing pickup basketball. I had game back in the day dear reader I headfake you not! and athleticism is all I’ve ever really loved if I am to be honest with you. That and crime. Badger had been an all-state fullback at the violent kids’ school.
I’d first met Harry through my big brother and I’d first met Badger through Harry. A little later I met Harry’s big brother through Badger who was best friends with him. Harry and his big brother got along well. My big brother and I didn’t talk anymore at all really. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other. Each of us just lived as if the other didn’t exist. We’d both been part of something we weren’t supposed to and it felt like it ruined us both early on and each of us was just a reminder to the other of what hurt and what happened when we were just two innocent little boys who didn’t deserve it. It is now buried under years and years of inner earth piled with what shit shovels God gave us to survive being beaten and berated and raped and told such strange and confusing lies in the first place. Dear reader over mind and through body by water and light through poem and flower I do not know. He and I are never hostile so much as very distant. Estranged. I’m pretty estranged in general. I know it's obvious.
Badger is kind of a late-in-life replacement big brother. He took me in after one of my many many falls from grace. I have stumbled downward over and over. Ahh but to have fallen from such heights in the first place dear reader light of my what is life really wubwubwubwubwubwubwubwubwub. Sometimes we are still Giants. Look. We grew up in the other America displaced and estranged the last of the lost at the end of the bottom in the shit of the ass of the armpit of the mouth of the world. Sometimes we seek out replacement families you know. Are we not mammals? I don’t even know what that means anymore save the wasted ancient elderly man on wheels yearns for breasts and light. Yeasts for bread and life. Are warmth and up the same thing why would that matter. What is the world in a word. Are we not light reaching through water and water seeking only to ride upon and/or within light? I hear a chorus of angels even in the onset of my own disintegration and why is it that I might be overblessed in a strange and dangerous world such as this? My sour glowing inner grin a lemon-wedge of light-sharpened sugar. My own dilapidation and decrepitude blossoming out into some hoary lichenthropic yawn of symbols of fearsome time like tiny frost designs on windows all over the world. For any who give it away are of us who have lived and will live. The snowing crystals and marble mausoleums faintly murmuring. The name of Tommy Salami echoing through the skulls who would rather not know!
I’ve somehow ended up even more lost than ever before going all the way back to the bad times I don’t remember (or remember too vividly! I will suffer but I will live) from early childhood and before into the further reaches of time that I can only imagine through generations and aeons of earth and space. The cosmic. The genesis of life. The emanations of Ein Sof. Braman, Atman, Jerry Garcia. Poem Unlimited. I am a part of all of this other stuff beyond my immediate self and body and social and familial associations I am the Age of Giants. I never blamed my big brother for what happened when we were kids. No wait I should not say that. I did actually, I blamed him for everything immediately and it was terrible. It made things worse! But I was just a little kid and didn’t know what was happening! Now looking back 40 years later I still don’t. Fonzi really messed us both up and all the other shit like the crazy family shit was beyond our control as kids back during the worst of times and the terrible things we did to each other in the context of all that were not our fault. But I just couldn’t talk to him you know. Just like I couldn’t talk to my dad whose replacement big brother was the one who really fucked me and my brother up when we were really very young. My dad’s real brothers used to beat him up all the time. Wild Irish brothers who knew only the violence and music of the world. (They’d all end up in The Navy with liberty and justice for all and all that.) And the swim coach and Latin tutor at his Catholic school used to rape him when he was just a kid so I kinda get why he was so bad about blaming me and my brother for getting victimized by his big hero Fonzi. I’m sorry to bring all of this up my dear reader and light of my life but it is essential to my story and I promise you I tell you these things in good faith not to drag you down but to lift you up. Always remember that beauty can save the world.
I mean now at 47 I can barely even blame Fonzi when I think about what I know of his history. Before all the violence and death he experienced as a young machine gunner in the Vietnam war in the late 60s he too had been victimized as a child. Then in Viet Nam he’d done unspeakable things to women and children involving sexual violence and mass murder and he wasn’t the only one and that kind of thing happens wherever war goes to some extent though Vietnam was a particularly fucked up war. His eyes lit up when he spoke of mixing gasoline and laundry detergent to make homebrew napalm and throw the flaming jelly on children. He was a war hero highly decorated and could go on death trips down to Texas and New Mexico and Arizona at will and even if they found the dead women he’d tell any cops who questioned him who and what he was and they’d nod along and send him on his way back out into the desert.
Harry’s brother also lived in Raleigh but in a more bougie part with his wife and kids. Harry was a bachelor. I told them about some of my adventures as an idiot on the fringes of the underbelly and among the liminal criminal elements in the Tatooine Interzone District of America. The Zone. “The City.” Harry said his life had been much less eventful than mine as the shop he worked at had shut down for a few weeks due to Covid and he’d mostly just been working out and trying not to drink too much. I was drinking a beer as fast as I could but I nodded subtly to indicate that I understood his sentiment and the principles involved. The beers were strong. Harry talked to us through a screen door the whole time.
After a half hour or so Badger and I headed back to his truck and headed back east toward the farm and country pine forests and marshes and harbors and waterways in the inner banks. Hyde County. My sense of relief and comfort at being back with Badger in North Carolina would not last forever but it was very real at this moment and I was aware that it was happening and that sometimes it is important to appreciate these things while they are happening and that if one can sink into them and really live in the moment with them it can revive and salubriously reset you so that you can deal with the bullshit of everything again once it inevitably returns.
We listened to the Grateful Dead and talked about politics on the ride back. Badger was a Bernie Sanders leftist in a rural southern right-wing region and he did not have a lot of people who agreed with him so he enjoyed talking to me, his mildly queer kinda crazy perpetually broke quietly communist oldly anarchist in n out of jails and hospitals and rehabs friend. I loved him. He didn’t fit in in his environment which I understood being a fish of the desert and all. He was an atheist socialist who taught everyone else’s children and coached several school sports teams. We discoursed upon the state of the nation and the conditions of society and current events and whatnot. I told him I thought the recent riots in the news were cool because riots were kind of like rock concerts.
“I just hate that people break things and steal shit especially in their own neighborhoods,” he said.
“Listen,” I said. “First of all, if the right people do it to the right things from the right other people then breaking things and stealing shit are fucking amazing and should have holidays devoted to them. Second of all—”
He interrupted me. “That’s like a cool edgy position you can take to seem attractive online I guess but I don’t feel like being cool.”
“Not to worry my friend.” I used my cool guy voice.
“I’m fifty and I care about black people okay. I teach school to black kids in the rural south.”
“That is pretty righteous,” I had to admit.
“I can’t tell if you mean that mockingly or not,” he said. “I’m not cool enough to gauge the irony level of hip edgy people!”
I chuckled to myself.
He took a deep breath and was about to explain more but then something occurred to him and he did not speak but his eyes were very expressive. He had a mole by his eye that changed color with his mood. If the mood was especially intense the mole would become bulbous. The mole was mellow gold right now that was good. He had a strange light in his eye very small on the surface but I could tell it was the tip of a thread that stretched back into an infinite depth to the very root of the light of his soul so to speak. His curly hair seemed like foliage spilling around a great ancient rock tightly curved and coiled and bouncing along with the bumps in the road in a silvery spill of soft slinky springs gleaming. He was about to say something but got distracted when the music changed and he got excited and distracted and pointed at the radio. We were listening to The Grateful Dead. “This might be the best Playin they ever did.” He was referring to the song Playin in the band specifically but also saying that they played it well.
“73?” I asked. 1973 had the best versions of that song I think we all know that.
“Hell yeah,” he said. “But so anyway,” he segued back to the more serious subject at hand and kind of nonsequitered: “what have you got against black people?”
“Excuse me,” I said, getting worked up and indignant. “I of all white people on earth am probably the most down with the blacks out of anybody and being ‘cool and edgy’ is what unites me with black American culture, which is where the best music comes from. How can you question a man whose roots stretch back into an infinite depth to the very root of the light of the soul like black American music so to speak my dear friend like that tell me now.”
“’The blacks’?” he asked, laughing.
“I am not too cool to be woke I assure you,” I said, shaking my head. “Listen. You’re a painter and an art teacher and a musician, I’ll give it to you geometric: wokeness and coolness can seem different but they have a triangular relationship where at the lower levels they are maximally distant but then at the higher levels converge to one point and fuse into the mystical hybrid of myself. Capice?”
He turned up the music to drown out the conversation. I laughed to myself and watched the wet world roll by all dark brown and deep green. We listened to the Grateful Dead rock out for five minutes and then he turned the music back down and started talking again.
“I was drivin by the water comin back into town and there was this big Trump sign right by the welcome to Scranton sign, which was on public property, so like they shouldn’t have a sign like that there, so I stopped and ripped it out of the ground and threw it into the bulrushes.”
“Breakin things and stealin shit!” I cried, pretending to be outraged for a second before laughing goodnaturedly.
He turned the music up again. I looked out at the lush land as we passed by farm fields of soy and cotton and patches of pine forest with the occasional house tucked in among hardwood trees. This was the kind of place where you figure everyone has a dog, a bible and a gun. Dogs who know how to shoot guns and guns that shoot little bibles right at you. Other dogs who wave flags while other dogs read bibles in the buzzing bloodlight of a moist mosquito dawn. You think I’m joking? This is America. No other person in America is more American or knows more about what that means than I, for I have seen the revelation and all its fiery whirlwinds like the turbines of time itself. The sky was a deep blue pasture and the puffy clouds grazed peacefully. Badger had also had a lot of childhood trauma and problems with violence and sexual abuse in his family but we didn’t talk about it often which is how it is with such things you know. The air in the moment tasted very beautiful and I didn’t know why which made it taste better.
He turned the music back down. “You want Bojangles?”
“Oh hell yeah,” I said.
“I have some pork we can smoke tomorrow. A picnic. That is a technical term. A picnic is a smaller cut than a shoulder or a butt.”
“I can buy some food if you need I still got my New Mexico card.”
“Oh right you were in New Mexico,” he said, nodding, his hair bouncing slightly. The mole turned silver. “So Nina kicked you out huh.” His tone became empathetic. Badger was a troubled man raised in violence but he was very warmhearted and empathetic and he had a real conscience and I loved that in him. It might only be visible as a tiny gleam at the surface but a real conscience stretches back into an infinite depth to the very root of the light of the soul like black American music so to speak my dear reader and light of my life I assure you and if you believe in nothing else ever please believe that and that beauty can save the world thank you.
“Yeah last year in December. Then I went to The Tatooine Interzone District and was living with Denise and got kicked out of there for being a thief and a junky and then I was at Trinity’s which got really weird so I left and then I stayed in a seedy motel with my stimulus money before taking the Greyhound here.”
“Listen I don’t need to know your life story,” he said in a very New Jersey voice.
I laughed. “I’m restless and poorly behaved,” I said. “And I think we probably all need to know each others’ life stories.”
“You been writing at all?” he asked.
“Yeah I’m going to write about this trip I’m on now lately I guess. Traveling among the displaced and disgraced and disabled and dispossessed and the liminal and the criminal and the marginal and all that. People like me. Human garbage. Like I wanna try to show people what it is to get a glimpse of this obscure world within the world where the apocalypse happens every moment and everything is destroyed and resurrected in a process that generates time itself that we tend to only glean from our small selves’ glimpses of what gleams in little things on the surface but stretches back into an infinite depth to the very root of the light of the soul like black American music so to speak you know.”
He cocked his head and chuckled at how I did that thing that I always do. “That’ll do pig,” he said. “That’ll do.”
Sometimes when Badger and I spoke we became giants from the time before humans and gods walked the earth and now I saw him shake some stars and trees out of the silver part of his beard and galaxies opened up in and a giant pecan fell out and landed in just the right spot and we returned to being two middle aged white dudes from the inscrutable east sitting out on a porch in North Carolina. Badger had been a fan and supporter of my writing for years. I’d lived with him before in the Autumn of 2018 after I’d had some issues with homelessness and addiction and psychosis and getting canceled over online scandals and whatnot. The usual. Regular guy stuff. You know. Back when I’d been convinced that Angel had put a curse on me. (Not the Angel I’d met at Trinity’s whom I’d written of earlier but a different Angel I’d known from before who I’d been friends and had a bad falling out with. She was a devoutly catholic ardently communist transgender dominatrix. Just had the same name like how Playin in the Band is the name of a Grateful Dead song and also what the guys in the band are doing when they play the song as a band together. Or like how Scranton Pennsylvania has the same name as Scranton North Carolina. Once you get to a high density of meaning the nuclear power of language like stars bursts forth. Poetry has that density. In poetry very few words can mean a very great deal and poem may be as small as a hydrogen atom but the light and the heat unleashed may be that of a star. And that light travels at the fastest measurable speed across the greatest possible distance and forms the bases of all life on earth and the photosynthesis at the root of the food chain. Badger isn’t actually a badger he just shares the name with the animal because he is compact and fierce but he is not really a badger in the biological taxonomical sense.) Most people are more familiar with Scranton Pennsylvania than they are with Scranton North Carolina where Badger lived and where he’d read one of my previous books and where I’d write the story with the story about the first Angel in it.
But so at that time back when I’d been convinced Angel had put a curse on me I was in pretty bad shape. I’ve had some bad times in my life. At that time I’d also been arrested in a high profile case in New Jersey and charged with lewd disorderly conduct involving doing something indecent to an American flag in a public library. I’m one of those people that people who are less American than I would call unamerican. Badger was of course okay with that stuff and it had been during that time when he reached out to me. It was a bit of a scandal. I think freedom of speech is pretty important but I’m not sure why it is just something I gleaned from the gleam. Anyway he was an artist and a wildman and he’d seen and done bad things but he had a good heart and understood and he took me in when I needed the kindness and generosity of another. I’d been homeless back then too. Strung out. Bad shape I said. But I digress I’ll try and get back to all this stuff later if I can. We were now in the truck listening to the Grateful Dead play Playin in the Band crossing over the border into Hyde County heading toward Scranton and I asked him if it was too late for us to start smoking some pork when we got back.
“Nah it’s too late,” he said. “But I can make sausage and peppers. I’m in the middle of redoing the kitchen and I ripped everything out so there’s no appliances exceptin I got the fridge in the dining room and I got a plug-in electric stove and a nice little gas camping stove. I replaced everything in that one closet and cleaned the weird mess out of it and I tore the tacky veneer off the walls in the kitchen and painted the walls and replaced the window by the door….”
“The old window used to get all those little frogs on it.”
“Yeah and I fixed the sink.”
“So you got running water?” I asked, kind of skeptical. I hadn’t expected him to have running water. He’d had long running issues with the pump not drawing from the well or something.
“No,” he said. “But if I did, the sink would work. I took out the bathroom sink and the old toilet and we gotta go buy a new toilet and put it in tomorrow.”
“Oh okay,” I said. I felt an urge in my guts. I sometimes had issues about plumbing and my guts and shit for various reasons. When I was young I had trouble controlling my bowels when I was young. I used to shit my bed when I had recurring nightmares where Fonzi did things to me with my dad watching and laughing. Once in a while it still happens and it inexplicably takes me by surprise. It hurts to remember people treating you very badly and convincing you while doing so that you are as bad if not worse than they are. But so I shivered and felt a pang of intense pain run through my body and my butthole tingled and I worried that I might shit my pants but it passed quickly and I asked him: “So where do you shit?”
“I use a spackle bucket with ditchwater and shit in it and throw the water and the shit back in the ditch but I throw the toilet paper in the trash and not in the ditch.”
“Oh right on I get that I used to avoid flushing the tp when I lived in an rv in Nv.”
“What?”
“In Nevada.”
“When did you live there?”
“I don’t know. At some point.” I gestured ambiguously with my hands. “What is time compared to light really.”
“How you gonna write autobiographical stories if you don’t know shit like that?”
“The shit you mean by shit bro?”
“Shit in a bucket motherfuckit,” he chuckled playfully.
“Listen I structure the story however I can manage and I think we do memories like that too and there are things involved. There are layers. There is logos and the speed of light. I’m the writer here.”
“When you gonna write a novel like Faulkner.”
“Freddy Faulkner from Hoboken? He was a bricklayer god rest his soul and as far as I know he could barely write his own name much less a novel but he had a good heart and was known to employ people who were very hard to do good things for owing to their bad behavior.”
“I worked for him!” Badger laughed, the light gleaming in his eyes. “He knew Tommy Salami.”
“My man you were one of the people who were hard to do good things for.”
“But you know what I meant.”
“No I was unaware that there was more than one Faulkner.”
“I’ll hit you.”
“Go ahead! I’ve seen substitute big brothers do worse.”
“Well just lemme know when you’re going to write the next Absalom Absalom okay.”
“You mean William Faulkner right?”
“Yes clown.”
“Not sure why people like him he was a bit high flown for my tastes.”
“You told me you thought he was a genius that time.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You got those memory gaps.”
“I’m unstuck from time like Billy Pilgrim on account of my trauma and my religious experiences ok but I just don’t think he was very good.”
“You lie!” he said, laughing warmly. His mole turned a manly yet motherly mauve. That warmth that you can come tells from very deep within. From very far away. Like sunlight like starlight, with a kind of blue southern music through a kind of red shift of deep distance.
“I do not lie in bad faith my brother I joke in good faith and you know it.”
“Oh man listen to Jerry here,” he said, referring to the music, then he kind of jumped in the truck seat and his curly hair bounced and the gray parts gleamed like some dense precious metal. “But you know what I mean. Don’t get started on all that crap you like to talk about on the weird truths of astrology and fiction now friend.”
“I spit mad truth,” I said. “I’m the white Rakim.”
“’I’m the white Rakim,’” he said, imitating my voice but saying it in a very white way, mockingly. I laughed warmly. He glowed. “Don’t get all religious on me right now bro I can’t take it.”
“You pretend to be an atheist and a skeptic but I see you my friend. And you know I’m not a Christian I’m a nondenominational mystic who doesn’t try to proselytize or whatever but listen: You are already a deeply religious man in ways that you yourself can scarcely fathom. I see the gleam on the surface and I know that that gleam stretches back through the depths to the very root of the light of your soul. I glean from your gleam my brother. That is soul music my friend, reaching across vast distance and empty dark from the sun of your very conscience to my own photosynthetic sensibility as I perceive you here.”
“Jesus Christ dude shut up,” he said, though he didn’t mean it. He wanted me to speak freely, he liked my free speech. “Listen I—"
I mockingly turned the music back up to interrupt him as he was fond of doing to me. Mockery is kind like punning when done warmly though of course when done cruelly it can really make one feel like shit. My dad used to mock me for crying a lot when I was young by doing a crybaby voice like if I cried over very little things. But then sometimes when there were very big bad things happening and I cried he just did nothing but stared in fear and horror as his own best friend violently raped me and called me a little faggot in front of him. Dad sometimes mocked me for shitting the bed too. I try not to think or talk about it too much but I try not to avoid it or pretend it didn’t happen either. Dad tried as hard as he could to pretend it didn’t happen and he went to great lengths to convince other people it didn’t happen and he and a lot of them actually went to great lengths to tell me it didn’t happen and sometimes I believed them because I simply didn’t remember sometimes which I suppose is a form of pretending it didn’t happen but I think it is understandable and I also understand why my father and other people behaved how they did though of course it sometimes still hurts me very deeply to think about in any way and I don’t talk to my father anymore and have not since the time I told him I forgave him and Fonzi but that I had to go and live another life from all that and be free of it if I could and all that and I might not mention it for the rest of this story either but I wont really resist mentioning it if I feel like it I guess. But so my mockery of Badger was not cruel and hurtful but warm and loving and Badger could tell and his eye gleamed with the knowing of it and he smiled and it was still the same song, Playin in The Band by the Grateful Dead, they really stretched that one out sometimes. I finished my beer. It was almost dark. The gloomy land humidly cooling. Finally the song ended and Badger turned off the stereo and suddenly we heard all the night sounds of the swamplands. Chorus of frogs and infinite rhythms of insects in layer upon layer rising up into the warm evening air. Strange ululations of a loon flying by overhead. We were in Scranton. We were almost home.