Windows Words Worlds through a glass darkly (widows)

Windows Words Worlds through a glass darkly (widows)

After I’d written a bit and Badger was up we had some coffee and then we put a new window in in the living room. It went well. Then we went out to Lowes in Greenville and got a new toilet and some more beer and came back and started smokin that pork and he and I cleaned the bathroom together and installed the new toilet on the wax ring over the sewage hole and during that I heard a voice whisper the word yes up from the smelly sewer hole as we set the toilet down proper with a slap and a glurp and a wee bit o grace. We would get on a roll doing home improvement stuff in a kind and then drink and barbecue and play instruments and sing all night. Badger was a good drummer with some real power and funk n swing in his legs on the bass drum and hi hat, very strong yet fluid. The man had some real brains in his legs. He was a real jazz messenger with a hard bop.

It inspired me! And in the mornings I got up and worked on The Book Of Exodus Spring 2020 with Badger’s great gifts in the buckets of stars and transcendent slippopotamus memories he wrangled out of those drums still reverberating in the old man alien storyteller test taker chambers and laboratories and back alleys of my folded rolleded old soul. And besides that all tapered off as he started going back to the actual school to work (he couldn’t do much remotely because he had an unreliable internet connection) and started grad school online at East Carolina University, which was complicated by his bad connection so that he often had to go to his wife’s apartment or to the school he worked at to work on that stuff. I wrote a lot then and I still remember very distinctly how vividly the memories gleamed in the hierophantasmatic honeycomb of my own mind during that time. Stars and galaxies, signs and wonders, oh dear reader, living light.

The first draft didn’t take long. I only had wifi when Badger was home and let me use his phone as a wifi hotspot. I didn’t have a phone number or data plan at that time. Some nights I would do stuff online with my phone and it was on one of those nights when I reconnected with two old friends who’d once hated me. Through those two friends who’d once hated me I heard that Trinity my ex from Tucson had died, and to make things just a little stranger than danger, the woman I’d heard this from was the woman formerly known as Veracity, the transgender prostitute from this story. I think earlier I may have said I’d never see Veracity again, or maybe that’s just something I wrote down for a story in the Spring 2020 stories which is technically true because, as she informed me in a long email that began with her informing me of Trinity’s death by fentanyl overdose while drinkin moonshine and smokin meth and working. So like Trinity had died died but then Saguara went on to tell me that Veracity had died too, but she hadn’t died died, but that spirit had left her body, and I got confused. She explained to me that Saguara was a different person even though she still had “the same” body and “memories,” which was cool by me, I thought it was interesting, I was just weirded out by the surreal quality of it all because hearing of Trinity’s death had wounded and saddened me deeply. Life is a big dream cold hall of mirrors sometimes isn’t it. Saguara went on to inform me that Angel (the guy I met back in April) had been involved in the murder of another prostitute that Trinity and Saguara both knew.

So that was a pretty heavy email. Visions of the Archangel Gabriel playing Someone to Watch Over Me like Chet Baker on his horn. Then I see I have this other Email from my friend Hannah from Queens apologizing for a bunch of stuff she’d said to and about me online and asking my forgiveness and saying that if I ever needed a place to stay I could come visit. Then in the email she mentioned about how Angel and Mary Kate had broken up. This was the other Angel, the catholic communist transgender dominatrix, not the unsavory fellow who’d been arrested for being involved in the murder of a prostitute.

So I emailed both Hannah and Saguara back (not knowing at this time just how troubled either of them were) and then I emailed Angel, whom I hadn’t talked to since 2018.From what I could tell, judging by Hannah’s description of the situation, Mary Kate robbed Angel and then got her cancelled online. So I reached out to Angel to tell her she was better off without Mary Kate and that I hoped she was okay and she replied quickly, obviously crushed by the breakup though she knew she was better off having Mary Kate out of her life, though she also felt very wounded by what Mary Kate had done. I was nice enough to her about it even though she’d really talked a lot of shit about me telling people I was a pedophile and whatnot. Maybe I should go back into all that now for a bit. Pardon my digression but here we go. Come back with me into 2018 when I was less of a charming rogueish vagabond living by his wits in the weird human wildernesses of the American interstices and underspaces and more of a run of the mill strung out homeless guy stinking up the streets of Fair Lawn New Jersey and struggling with poverty and addiction and psychoses and the weird wide injustices that America heaps down upon it’s displaced and impoverished peoples all over the world. That was an interesting time. I made a fun album of psychedelic electro pop songs that might have been even better had I not been a scary old ragman living in a train station after being rousted out of that sweet squat I’d shared with old Jim. He’d even gone so far as to attack me with his cane! It wasn’t too damaging physically but the vibes were so bad I knew I had to leave and I left all my things behind except for my trusty black leather messenger bag which had my notebooks and my computer in it and I wandered out on the street emotionally distraught and had some money so I got some vodka and got drunk and passed out at the train station in Radburn where I’d slept once or twice before and ended up living in for a while, the details of which I will get into in just a moment.

But so in August 2018 I’m in the little train station in the Radburn section of Fair Lawn New Jersey. It has radiator heat overnight and air conditioning during the day. The bench is wood, I’m living in shorts and t shirt. I’d slept in this train station once or twice before and ended up living in for a while.  Over the course of my adult life it had become easier and easier for me to see myself as a homeless person living on the streets. I understand it now, but it’s still kinda strange and mysterious to me that it got to the point where I had to figure it out. Anyway I woke up at 5:45 am as the time-lock doors unlocked with a loud clack and the squares started shuffling in. I felt dehydrated and threatened and I had a panic attack and my imagination spiraled out of control and I hurried into the bathroom and I vomited and only then did I remember in a vivid pulse of charged memory a dream I’d dreamed about St Anthony of Alexandria who’d lived in a desert hut and wrestled demons, and about the archangel Gabriel, the Angel of Death, who still had his horn but was not blowing it but clapping his hand over the shining bell of it. After each clap he raised his hand as a loud deep syllable emanated from the shadow in the bell of the horn and vibrated so strongly that it shook all the mountains in every direction, as well as St Anthony’s hut, which also shook with all the demon-wrestling that he was doing in there. I could tell that the syllables all combined into a word and that the word was very meaningful but I did not know what the word meant and I grew afraid and then woke up and came to and was washing my face and drinking cold water and I thought I saw Angel in the reflection in the mirror and turned quickly around but did not find her there and I got confused and hurried out of the train station into the warm humid morning obsessed with the idea that Angel had put a curse on me and sent demons into the desert hut of my suburban New Jersey squat and that she had done so through the performance of certain rituals and the recitation of specific syllables that formed powerful words whose meanings I didn’t know but of whose power I would inevitably become all too dreadfully aware. If you’ve never experienced this kind of thing, the overwhelming sense of conviction and obsession can unexpectedly drown out various forms of good judgment, commonsense rationality and self awareness that one might normally be said to possess by others who knew one well. But this was one of those things that I knew not to tell anyone about because they’d think I was crazy, but I felt that I was not. I felt Angel and I had access to the sourcecode of reality and that things had simply gotten out of hand. Angel had spoken of her interest in magick with a k and how as a dominatrix she’d used special syllables to exert power over clients.

I remembered all that in a flash as I walked to the new CVS on Fair Lawn Ave to steal some soft drinks and cough syrup for the walk down to Dunkerhook Park where I could try and make music or nap, though I didn’t do either of those things, I just walked very quickly and obsessed over how I might ward off daemons that Angel had sent. I became convinced that the syllables in my dream had been a revelation of Angel’s curse on me and I looked up at the sky and I saw the sun and it was like the horn of Gabriel blowing some vast demonic syllable down upon me yet it was not the archangel but some hatefully irreverent demon mocking the archangel, and I realized that I had to find somewhere with a lot of shade to sit down and fuck around on my phone, which might not have been a good idea at all but like I said my judgment was pretty drowned out and I felt a strong need to issue some countersyllables electronically because someone Angel kept saying I was a pedophile on Twitter and I was too weak and stupid to just let it go. I’ve already gone on too long about all this as I sit here editing in November of 2022 this shit I typed up recently from my field notebooks when I was out in the desert in southern Arizona in May 2021 the Year of Our Lord 2021 at the Speedway gas station and convenience store roughly (sometimes very roughly) a mile away from the tent where I occasionally wrestle with my demons sometimes in noticeably vociferous fashion, hiding in the shade from the apocalypse horn of the angel of death southern Arizona sun, reminiscing back to 2018 because of something I reminisced during a reminiscence of 2020. And now like I’m typing up the handwritten notebook page of this in 2022. Layers chords strata of memory and life and all that. How the hell am I still alive? I wonder if I will ask myself that after death.

But so that all was why, after Angel wrote back to me about her breakup and how she was getting cancelled online because Mary Kate who was eleven years younger than Angel who at  24 years old had said that Angel had groomed her when she was younger and convinced her to get into sex work which she’d never wanted to do which had seemed dishonest because  among several other things which I’d rather not mention in any further detail for reasons which will soon become obvious Mary Kate had talked to me quite a bit about the phone sex work she did and she seemed to take pride in being better at it than Angel was and had told me of her regular clients who were all into dark terrible stuff, her favorite being this one man who she knew was flying to southeast Asia regularly to indulge in depraved acts of necrophilia and sexual violence toward children that Mary Kate helped him act out over the phone so that he could get off sexually and like her angle on why she did it and even enjoyed it was that she was taking on his sins and trying to save him and all little children but it seemed obvious based on how she described him and the experiences she had with him, there was an underlying morbidly prurient interest in the man and his fantasies and his life and acts. But you know like, should I be wondering if Angel made a monster of Mary Kate through some unspeakable pimp processes of turning her out? I’m not going to right now.

But so Angel was upset about getting cancelled because she wanted to get out of sex work and be a creative artist and entertainer and now Mary Kate had ruined her reputation and taken over their Patreon crowdfunding account and their podcast and was just going to let them wither on the vine as she, Mary Kate, moved back in with her rich suburban parents and got really into lying about having brain damage online.

But so I replied to Angel’s reply with, “all those people you were sucking up to by smearing me as a pedophile, what do those people think of you now?” That would be the last time I talked to her and she would die not long after in late January of 2021. I feel ashamed that my last words to her were petty and vindictive.

While I was staying in Motel 6 on Benson Highway right next to the motel where the God Bless You Guy (probably) stole my phone in 2020. When Hannah died a few months after Angel I would also find out about that death while staying in that same Motel 6 on Benson Highway right by South Park Avenue and Interstate 10. Those would be two separate stays with a lot happening between them but I’ll get to all that later. I’m sorry I’m skipping all through time and space and don’t mean to be confusing. All my life I’ve been struggling with unruly memories and shitting my pants and whatnot. I think of my friend Tommy Salami who knew too much about transubstantiation and whose name echoes through the skulls of those who dare not speak it.

But so the emails from Saguara and Hannah and finding out about Trinity’s death and Angel going to prison because of that murder (the first Angel, from Trinity’s, not the Angel whom I’d known earlier and fixated on during a stress induced psychotic break) and my email exchange with the other Angel (the one that I had actually fixated upon) who I would soon find out died (like Hannah by intentional overdose suicide…) these things all kind of did a number on me psychologically for some reason. It got so that I seemed very obviously distracted while working with Badger fixing the windows he’d broken during violent outbursts while haunted by his own violent past and lashing out in a haze of potentially lethal 21^stcentury booze and surgically accurate chill pills earlier that summer, and as I’m doing this already psychologically significant and poetically symbolic fuckin metaphorical home improvement work with Badger and like – and I’m not sure because I don’t know, I’m not a doctor it’s just something I felt intuitively— I think those very same pills which we consumed perhaps injudiciously during our work with regard to degree causing me to become constipated for several days because I stopped shitting. I’d been doing the other shit I usually do to make myself shit nice and regular like living almost entirely on beer and coffee but unfortunately I just wasn’t digesting or processing things properly on the physical-gastrointestinal or the emotional spiritual-level. So I was all bound up and distracted and having trouble staying present mentally and I ended up busting a gut right there, rupturing myself and suffering a damn inguinal hernia while trying to help Badger put the window in. The initial tear in my fascia or whatever was painful but not overly so as busting a hernia can sometimes be from what I’ve heard. But I had to be careful from then on about exerting myself doing manual labor. I felt like my constipation had been a factor and that my constipation might’ve had to do not only with my diet but with my issues with my bowels that had to do with stuff from when I was young. 

I stopped doing anything except lying on the couch upstairs taking laxatives. They were effective! I really broke in that new toilet we’d installed oh dear reader light of my life stretching through aeons across the vastness of interstellar space and let me tell you something it really smelled strong and aroused feelings of disgust that became so intense that they became briefly beautiful and the seemingly contradictory feelings of beauty and disgust seemed to fuse together into a greater whole as I sat on the bowl over the hole wiping my own hole feeling whole what is the difference between a hole and a whole why it is the difference between a word and a world? This can be demonstrated algebraically and I mean this very literally the eucharist is no mere metaphor transubstantiation is not a myth I remember Tommy Salami but anyway. Sitting there over the scum hole as I was the beauty and the disgust fused into some whole greater than the sum of its parts and I was in a sense overwhelmed and briefly worried I might drown in shit and then I felt uplifted and reassured and experienced a sense of being whole as well as part of some greater whole and it was sublime and kind of infinite and time stretched out into centuries and aeons and beams of light radiating through the universe in a grand symphony of affirmation and I finished wiping my shitty asshole and in a blink time became more like the usual thing that it is again and it occurred to me that Badger might smell the divine stank  and I was in a kind of state of exultation and awe and then I heard Badger hooting and laughing and cursing and exalting the divine stank. Never before had a toilet felt so like a throne. I began to laugh in such a way as I had never laughed before such that I felt the very cosmos itself jiggle in tune with the jiggling of my body as I laughed and then in a quick moment and a zap of abdominal pain at my hernia I kind of snapped out of the dream I was in. I was still laughing and so was Badger I could hear him through the walls (no wall in the wide wild worded whirled world could keep our laughters apart at this time our laughters at this time were poldy and molly yes etc) and we both laughed as I finished wiping and I was thankful that Badger was a nurse and a teacher and a sympathetic empathetic man if also sometimes mad and violent and flawed and things kind of resolved back to normal and we both became concerned about my injury with regard to how it impaired my ability to help him do the kind of manual labor we’d been doing.

This hernia was pretty emasculating for me dear reader light of my life tender teardrop on my tongue. This hernia had made me effeminate. This rupture had opened up like some weird vagina inside me. This hernia had really made a woman of me.  Now I was two gendered. These things happened. This is the story of the Fisher King The Keeper of The Grail with the wound in his crotch welcome to the wasteland of the real. I talked to Badger about the hernia and being a nurse and he explained it all to me and said don’t strain etc and of course he understood that I couldn’t be as much help doing the home improvement stuff and told me not to worry about it and explained that I should be careful but see how well I could move about comfortably and then explained what kind of thing I should consider an emergency. You can basically live with a hernia if you can’t afford surgery I know this because I have indeed been doing it a while now as I write this howeverlong later with the same hernia still bulging down there with my guts tumbling into my ballsack and all but like if you get your guts in a knot or something and develop sepsis thing can get very painful and deadly very fast.

Over time I got pretty good at tucking my guts back in, which I had to lie down to do and gently guide my guts under the skin from the bulge in my lower loins that was encroaching on my scrotum back up and through the rupture in the lining of my god given gut hold in place located more properly in the abdominal region more above the nutsack. Tucking my guts back in would in the future become part of the rhythms and routines that served to suture the constantly reopening wound of my life back together over and over again. But so this thing happened psychologically where even though I knew Badger understood that I had to be careful about what manual labor I did and didn’t begrudge me my couch time at all, especially seeing as he was always encouraging me to write more. Badger was a big Faulkner guy.  He was also a big me guy. A fan of my earlier writing.  That’s how I ended up living with him that first time and why I was back with him now. He’d read my books and I’d ended up living with him that first time in 2018 and was back again with him in 2020.

It was hard to get past the feeling of being emasculated by my wound, my hernia, and developed a complex about it, so that I felt ashamed and lowly at the one end of myself but like also conversely I overcompensated down at the other end of myself, like as I wrote the seven chapters of the Spring 2020 diaries or The Book of Exodus feeling some need to prove myself that I hadn’t really felt in a while, and it kind of hurt, but it made me feel young and strong and virile and creative which helped me cope with the feelings of shame and brokenness and emasculation on the other side of the seesaw of my soul. Sometimes at night we’d play music. I felt like I had something to prove again musically too. And that was satisfying, and Badger was a beast on the drum kit, he’d been practicing for months before I got there.

But howevermuch I may have extended myself creatively as a matter of compensating for my feelings of inadequacy and emasculation there was no evening of the scales, just a seesawing of emotions that became the more hectic and harried the heavier the two sides both got, because, and I don’t quite know why this is but, it was like in my attempts to overcompensate I would hit some peak and be encouraged and excited by it but never so much as to relieve me of this sense of inadequacy and humiliation . And the fact that this was so served to compound my sense of inadequacy. And even though I was aware of how insecure and neurotic I was being I could not just chill and accept my fate, so as my inadequacy compounded and redoubled so too did my foolish and futile attempts at overcompensation. This was all a lot to deal with but it really did push me to grow as an artist and level up in terms of my creative work. I ended up writing and rewriting the The Book of Exodus quickly over a three week period in June 2020. During the last week I had the house to myself and plenty of food coffee and weed. It rained every day and every day I bathed in the rain. The dog was gone with Badger but I spent a lot of time with the cats.