Walkman

Walkman I didn't mean to quit drinking, it just sort of happened. I'd always assumed it'd be difficult, or not difficult, exactly, but impossible. Then one New Year's Eve twenty years ago at the VFW, Craig and I were drinking beer from brown bottles, peeling the labels off into little confetti nests. In Mexico the previous New Year's Eve, I'd started drinking again after a year sober. I traveled by myself in Oaxaca for a month and had at least two beautiful experiences. The bus I was on broke down in the mountains and I watched the stars blink on with a Mexican girl who later sent me a letter I never answered. That's one of the experiences. The others are secrets. We left the VFW at a reasonable hour for once. I never took another drink. I'm not sure why not. I don't think it had anything to do with me. I think it was a miracle. Like when the hero at the last second pulls the lever to switch the train to the track the heroine's not tied to. I was always broke in those days, whereas now I'm just poor. I brought a Walkman and a backpack stuffed with cassettes to Oaxaca. I was sick of them all within a week and longed to buy a new tape but couldn't spare the pesos. I listened to Live Through This at the Zapotec ruins of Monte Alb‡n, Rumours on the bus to DF. At Puerto çngel, my headphones leaking tinny discord across a rooftop bar, I sat watching the ocean. An American man about the age I am now asked me what I was listening to. I said Sonic Youth. He asked which album, I said Sister. He chuckled and said "I'm Johnny Strike." It probably wasn't a miracle, but I couldn't believe it. Here was the guy who wrote Crime's 1976 classic "Hot Wire My Heart," which Sonic Youth covered on their 1987 classic, Sister, which I was listening to on my Walkman at the end of Mexico in the sun. Except actually I was listening to Daydream Nation, I change it to Sister when I tell that story. But it's a beautiful story even without embellishment. That's another of the Oaxacan experiences I mentioned, but the rest are secrets. Oh Mexico, as James Schuyler wrote to Frank O'Hara, are you just another dissembling dream? Schuyler was too tender for me then, but now he is just tender enough. I love his wishes. That "the beautiful humorous white whippet" could be immortal, for instance. But I can't always forgive his Central Park West tone, his Austrian operettas and long long lawns, though he wasn't rich and was tormented enough, God knows. In the summer of 1984 in Salida, Colorado, I had Slade and Steve Perry on my Walkman. I drank milk from jumbo Burger King glasses emblazoned with scenes from Return of the Jedi. You can't buy tampons with food stamps even if your mother insists that you try. Salida sits along the Arkansas River, whose current one hot afternoon swept me away and deposited me in a shallow far downstream. It was the first time I thought I was going to die and didn't. The Arkansas and everything else are mortal. My mom had been born again, to my chagrin. But lately I find I do believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: and in Jesus Christ, his Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost. How the hell did I become a Christian? Grace, I guess. It just sort of happened. I admit I find the resurrection of the body and life everlasting difficult, or not difficult, exactly, but impossible. There is no crazier belief than that we won't be covered by leaves, leaves, leaves, as Schuyler has it, which is to say, really gone, as O'Hara put it in his lovely sad poem to John Ashbery. But hope is a different animal from belief. "The crazy hope that Paul proclaims in 2 Corinthians," my friend John wrote to me when his mother died. The Christian religion is very beautiful sometimes and very true at other times, though sophisticated persons are still expected to be above all that sort of thing. Well, I'm a Marxist too. Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor. On his new album Dr. Dre says "Anybody complaining about their circumstances lost me." At the risk of losing more billionaires, complain about your circumstances, I say. I listened to The Chronic on my Walkman the summer I worked the night shift at Kinko's. I was dating Deirdre, who when I placed my headphones on her ears and pushed play said "Why is this man cursing at me?" Said it more loudly than was strictly necessary. A crazy man would come into Kinko's around two a.m. and ask me to fax dire, scribbled warnings to every news outlet in Denver. He wanted to let people know that God would punish the area with natural disasters if the county succeeded in evicting him from the land he was squatting on. He'd ask me to help him think of various extreme weather events that God might unleash. I'd say "Typhoons?" though we were in Colorado. He'd scribble typhoons. Scraps of dirty paper absolutely covered front and back with ominous, angrily scrawled black characters: attn. nbc nightly news there will be fires tornadoes typhoons. I would help him compose his screeds then fax each one to Denver's major TV and radio stations, the Denver Post, and the Rocky Mountain News, which has since stopped its presses for good. Except in fact I would only pretend to fax them and then refuse his money, saying I was glad to help the cause. What if he wasn't batshit but a true prophet? The Denver metropolitan area was not visited by disaster at that time, but this proves nothing. Look at Jonah and Nineveh, that great city. I don't believe he was a prophet, but Kinko's is beautiful at two a.m. even if I hated working there. The rows of silent copiers like retired dreadnoughts in a back bay, the fluorescent pallor, the classic-rock station I would turn back up after my coworker turned it down. Did the guy sketch amateurish floods, tornadoes, etc., on his jeremiads or did I imagine that? I wish I'd thought to make copies for myself. I wish I'd kept the Mexican girl's letter. I wish I'd kept the copiers with their slow arms of light, the lights of DF filling the Valley of Mexico as the bus makes its slow way down and Stevie sings what you had, oh, what you lost. Schuyler and his wishes! "I wish it was 1938 or '39 again." "I wish I could take an engine apart and reassemble it." "I wish I'd brought my book of enlightening literary essays." "I wish I could press snowflakes in a book like flowers." That last one's my favorite. I wish I'd written it. I would often kick for months until driven back to a bar by fear or boredom or both. I saw Tomorrow Never Dies-starring Pierce Brosnan, the second-worst James Bond-in Oaxaca and came out wishing my life were romantic and exciting and charmed or at least that I had someone to talk to. So I stopped at the first bar I saw, and someone talked to me. It's so sad and perfect to be young and alone in the Z—calo when the little lights come up like fish surfacing beneath the moon and you want to grab the people walking by and say who are you, are you as afraid as I am. And you don't know that twenty years later you'll be writing this poem. Well, now I'm being sentimental and forgetting that in those days I wrote the worst poems ever. "I held a guitar and trembled and would not sing" is an actual line I wrote! The typhoon guy could have written better poetry. Today I want to write about how it's been almost twenty years since I owned a Walkman. Just think: there was a song that I didn't know would be the last song I would ever play on a Walkman. I listened to it like it was just any old song, because it was. The Deep Heart's Core We must stop feeling things in the deep heart's core. That's where the lies live. If you would see what's behind you, close your eyes. Shut your mouth if you want to send people to hell. You have to want to go to hell. Deserve's got nothing to do with it. Yet hell has a waiting list. Well, that's how dumb I am, feeling my way to hell one name at a time. You Haven't Texted Since Saturday You haven't texted since Saturday, when I read Keith Waldrop's translation of Les Fleurs du Mal on a bench by whatever that tower is on the hill in Fort Greene Park until you walked up late as always and I do mean always in your dad's army jacket and said "Hi, buddy" in a tone that told me all I needed to know, although protocol dictated that you should sit next to me and spell it out and we should hold each other and cry and then pretend everything was fine, would be fine, was someday before the final trumpet, before heat death, zero point, big rip sure to be absolutely perfectly completely probably fine. And though it wasn't and wouldn't be, I walked you to the G then rode the C to Jay Street-MetroTech. Just now I took a break from this retrospect to smoke one of the Camels in the sky-blue box marked il fumo uccide you brought me from Italy and page through a book on contemporary physics. "Something must be very wrong," it said, and I agreed, although it turned out the author meant that "no theory of physics should produce infinities with impunity." I'd point out that every theory of the heart produces infinities with impunity if I were the kind of jerk who uses the heart to mean the human tendency to make others suffer just because we hate to suffer alone. I'm sorry I brought a fitted sheet to the beach. I'm sorry I'm selfish and determined to make the worst of everything. I'm sorry language is a ship that goes down while you're building it. The Hesychasts of Byzantium stripped their prayers of words. It's been tried with poems too. But insofar as I am a disappointment to myself and others, it seems fitting to set up shop in almost and not quite and that's not what I meant. I draw the line at the heart, though, with its infinities. And I have to say I am not a big fan of being sad. Some people can pull it off. When we hiked Overlook, you went on ahead to the summit while I sat on a rock reading Thomas Bernhard. I'd just made it to the ruins of the old hotel when you came jogging back down in your sports bra saying I had to come see the view. But my allergies were bad and I was thirsty, so we headed down the gravelly trail, pleased by the occasional advent of a jittery chipmunk. You showed me pictures on your phone of the fire tower, the nineteenth- century graffiti carved into the rock, and the long unfolded valley of the Hudson. At the bottom, the Buddhists let us fill our water bottles from their drinking fountain. We called a cab and sat along the roadside watching prayer flags rush in the wind. I said the wind carried the prayers inscribed on the flags to the gods, but Wikipedia informs me now that        the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread       good will and compassion into all pervading space. So I was wrong, again, about the gods. Wherever you are, I hope you stand still now and then and let the prayers wash over you like the breakers at Fort Tilden that day the huge gray gothic clouds massed and threatened to drop a storm on our heads but didn't. Shed I wish I had a shed out back of a house in an open place and I'd sit in the cold shed on quiet nights when all the televisions go out and the wires and the other wires sing, and wonder what the small things think about. A bitumen boat in a royal tomb and a snake and an angel too. Away from loss prevention officers and 11 Secrets to Refinancing Your Student Loans. I don't mean some romantic Unabomber shit, just a shed. The light from a candle in the shed's single window tosses a golden square upon the snow that I now see should surround and shroud the shed. I hate winter, so these snows must be aesthetic. The December before last I didn't leave my apartment except for bodega runs to stock up on Diet Coke and peanut butter. I watched every Anthony Mann Western and spent half a day trying to arrange Cheez-Its into the form of Jimmy Stewart's face, then ate the face. Some sorrow is so baroque you look back on it and feel like a schmuck. Just yesterday the CBD Lifestyle Station clerk asked how I was and I said "Good, and you?" like you're supposed to, like they teach you in disaster simulations. I know how to feel in my shed, away from these statues of assholes on horses, and I let the shed field the questions. Even in my shed I want a shed. When Didn't I Know It I was born without language and thus without the ability to formulate a plan. It was a few years after the moon fell to an American incursion. I was smaller then and prone to fits of pique. I began to learn things about dinosaurs and the way a bag of vending-machine chips will sometimes get stuck on the Slinky-like contraption that pushes it into free fall. And there is no remedy; according to the system a fair transaction was concluded. I learned that airplanes hang on wires from ceilings. I feared wasps. I remained outside most churches. I required stitches. I was an expert on Bigfoot, a reputed hominid called s‡sq'ets by the First Nations peoples. I watched the moon precisely blot the sun on the wall of a shoebox. As for Sea-Monkeys, they did not, in fact, ride one another like cowboys on ponies or follow a candle beam as if hypnotized. Cobalt gives off-scientists say "emits"-electrons. I read that. I read about little houses, big horses, assistant pig-keepers, red ferns. In those days of products without clocks, I called a number to hear the time and temperature.