There's a photocopy of a poem on the wall of my bathroom, eye-level, across from the toilet—
John Wieners' "Act #2, For Marlene Dietrich"—
I took love home with me,
we fixed in the night and
sank into a stinging flash.
1/4 grain of love
we had,
2 men on a cot, a silk
cover and a green cloth
over the lamp.
The music was just right.
I blew him like a symphony,
it floated and
he took me
down the street and
left me here.
3 AM. No sign.
only a moving van
up Van Ness Avenue.
Foster's was never like this.
I'll walk home, up the
same hills we
came down.
He'll never come back,
there'll be no horse
tomorrow nor pot
tonight to smoke till dawn.
He's gone and taken
my morphine with him
Oh Johnny. Women in
the night moan yr. name.
I first read it from my father's old (but pristine) student copy of
Ace of Pentacles. He had written about these beat (and post-beat?) guys as a graduate student in the middle sixties, which was pretty revolutionary and prescient, because the work was quite recent then (I believe the date of "Act #2" is 1959), and, through music and youth culture, the junky, lonely, discreet and isolated in the poetic world of the 50s, was about to become the smashingest of icons. Incidentally, Papa Able would become a music writer, a poetic confidant of icon-junky Lou Reed, usually so gruff and snarly with journalists (what can I say?--we Ables have a way about us...). So, I inherited this text along with some knowledge of the musics that followed suit from Dad-sums. But it was personal experience that brought me to love those lines--"1/4 grain of love" and "
Oh Johnny. Women in the night moan yr. name."
Last year, Pillow saw a high school boy of mine, a lanky, sweet awkward kid who had been in a noisy, awfulish band and loved me way too much for his own good (at seventeen, I swooned over guys that ranged from indifferent to cruel, not ones who sniveled at my doorstep). She said he was badly off, looked pretty strung out, and I know he's friends with a bunch of junkies and I know that Memphis can be an ugly, dead end town and when I heard this affirmation that he was a junky I was stricken and I figured it was hopeless because he never had anyone in his corner except for useless wastrels (and junkies).
Seven years ago, before we'd even been introduced (though I guess it didn't really work that way then), he made me a mixed tape wrapped in a 50 Cent bumper sticker and gave it to a friend to give to me. The first track was
"Blank Generation" (what a tale of 2002!). I forget what the others were, because, as I said, the boy didn't stand a chance with me (I probably neglected to listen to the whole thing). It's not that I wasn't in love with him--I remember exactly what I wore the first time I went to see his band play. To be honest, I still love him. I love him as a ghost (a thing I have a real talent for). I think about the song. I think about the length of him, his dire thinness, his tight, dusty pants, his mangled, paper t-shirts, his unwashed hair and loafing stoner friends and the brooding, stiff way he put his hands in his pockets and the chipping concrete of his miserable front porch and how he never had anything to say to me. I think that IN EVERY WAY, he was beholden to past icons of junk, to the East Village Richard Hell of his song choice or Lou or Iggy Pop or Kurt Cobain (or...droves and droves of others). When he bought these certain clothes and records, did he imagine that he was bound for the source experience, the "good sick." Probably not. Maybe one led to the other (your taste in clothes and music really is that powerful), but no one makes any official decisions about these things before they happen like "stinging flashes."
A few years later, I had been dating an addict. It was shortly after we broke up, back home from a long and heavy sort of adventure, that I read "Act #2." He, that troubled (but kind), much-too-old-for-me City ex-love, was "
Johnny." But then there were others. Others with whom love was conflated/afflicted with drugs and drink. Others who were cold, who left me "here. 3 AM. No sign," who gave affection fractionally. And myself, who romanced (romanticized) these bastards, sometimes was the bastard, leaving (with the morphine). Lately, this bit,
myself in the poem, rather than a stream of boys and men remembered, has seemed more meet. This spectre of junk (as well as liquor and cocaine lushness), indivisible from our notion of 'cool,' has had a deterministic grip on me for some time. These are powerful aesthetics. They led me to that high school kid before the drugs took hold, and in subsequent years they married the drugs, the substance and the style were as one. The drugs and the places one chose to be and a superficial means and method of attraction to people encouraged sloth, carelessness, UNhealth, self-harm, lowness, apathy
and histrionics.
I've been drifting, roaming, over the territories of my bad choices and, essentially, the way Rock n' Roll and New York (and Berlin and London) looks (looked). And I've neglected to mention that I never did junk myself. It was my one absolute, and we used to joke about it, me and Pillow and Pet and RR, that it would be the next step, the FINAL SOLUTION [read: with bad actor's German accent]. My incomparable mother, like a Cassandra from the front of those crashing, naive sixties, warned me to never get mixed up with two things: cults and heroin. They were the living deaths of her generation. And I saw it around me all of the time, and it was scary and dangerous and very, very cool. And I was never quite cool enough for it, cool enough to graduate from the stupid, chattering cokehead shallows. And thank goodness I guess, one so naturally prone to pensive and agoraphobic spells as I, may never have recovered once I'd begun. But the not doing it, couldn't shake the loving how it looked and the living on its fringes and the poem that was so evocative.
I could ramble on, but I'll probably just keep repeating myself.
(Oh—but here's a thing of
note, a sort of hilarious missive from 1986, a year of much crystal-toting recovery.)
