You bang your head
Against the Walls
That other people built"
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook three, somewhere
between pages 113-117.
Of course, this put me in a bit of a bind yet also afforded me my
own inherited flat, a luxury not many schoolmates could brag about.
I told no one of my mother's disappearance, insisting instead that
she was in bed suffering from the depression of my father's death
and some sort of intestinal flu when she missed the wake.
Given the heavy pall that had nearly suffocated me in that flat, I
can't deny it was a little more than liberating to realise that I
had the place to myself, that there was no reason to keep any of
their memories sitting around me like uncollected rubbish.
I had to make diurnal visits to babcia simply because she was still
in the neighbourhood but by god, it was stifling. The unrelenting
tears and babbling away in Polish that I kept insisting to her I
didn't understand, the foods she cooked for me whilst making little
croaking noises about the no good mother of mine rotting away with
some sickness in bed whilst I was left to fend on my own. I didn't
have the heart to tell her my mother had already disappeared and
frankly, I was worried what babcia would have insisted upon had she
known, so I kept mum about it and as she never really left her own
flat very often to begin with, it was a secret that lasted until she
finally gave in to the end of life herself several months later,
still believing my father, her son, was still out there somewhere, alive. She died believing it.
And although I still had the number and address, the Puerto Rican
side of my family who had once caressed me with unadulterated
fascination, vanished as though I had only imagined them all along,
perhaps conspiring guiltily with my mother or perhaps simply not
caring or even forgetting I'd ever existed in the first place. They
had their own troubles and didn't need me adding to them.
So I was alone and I didn't waste much time to relish in it after
all these years cramped into that one bedroom flat with my parents,
stifled into reclusion.
Oh, I kept the hi-fi, the records, and the photographs. I kept the
things that mattered to me about their existence. Month by month, in
secret rubbish sacks, I assembled bits and pieces of the past and
left them out by the kerbside for the homeless and the scavengers
and eventually, the garbage men. The bed and the sofa and the
kitchen table were all disassembled hacked to manageable pieces with
a hatchet I purchased from the hardware store on the corner and
carried out in the middle of the night to the kerb.
There wasn't much money left but I calculated roughly rent and
utilities, the cost of pedestrian meals on a monthly basis and how
long I could last on the remaining savings in between. Approximately
two years. My father had been quite industrious after all.
I stopped going to school of course. What was the point? I had
entire days, week after week into months with nothing to do, no
obligations, no one stifling their hatred and arguments for my
benefit, for the benefit of peace. It was everywhere this peace. I
started hanging out in the Public Library on 42nd Street, liberated
from strict curriculum to read what I saw fit as I saw fit, whenever
and wherever to educate myself as the desire arose testing myself
only against myself and how much I wanted to learn.
It had been a lonely existence when they'd been there yet somehow,
in their absences, I felt a comfort I had never known – relying on
myself was no novelty – not having to feign normalcy, was. But this
loneliness was no longer as palatable because there was nothing to
contrast it. Order needs chaos to be order by comparison. Now I was
without the chaos. Order no longer seemed like order. Chaos seemed
naturally internal now instead of external. It liberated an entirely
side of me I had barely known existed.
Alone there are no toes to step on. You are free to walk as you
please.
Unfortunately, not every memory of them had been removed from the house. There were two bottles of vodka and a crate of beer which I finished off in the first week. In seven days I experienced every degree of euphoria, desperate despair, boredom, excitement, lucidity and fog imaginable. I played their records day and night, drinking without few breaks but for to pass out, vomit, wake up and start again. This was my mourning and my toast to their lives, discovering the path to alcoholism. It's not like they hadn't left plenty of markers along the path to guide me to their legacy.
So the money didn't last as long as the Two Year Plan would have
indicated. And eventually the reality of needing to find some sort
of gainful employment began creeping in. I'd lost the only job I'd
ever had working for my father as an after-school and weekend
electrician's apprentice still several years short of competency,
and was rather stuck then for something to do.
What followed was a transient tide of part time jobs requiring no
skills and paying even less, jobs in restaurants as a dishwasher, as
a busboy, as a waiter eventually all the way up to a bartender
although even this was done with great mediocrity and depressing
incompetence, miserable Ukrainian dumps and delis, third world and
Old World juxtapositions in a workaday world of one uneventful week
after another.
And so on it went, year after year, futureless vista after
futureless vista, drowning my sorrows in my dead father's flat,
reading books bought from street vendors, mincing around in
Ukrainian and Polish pubs between worlds, listening nostalgically to
fading salsa records that mother had never bothered to take with
her, biding my time until one day perhaps I too would follow my
father's legacy into the East River.
But something happened along the way to give me a little kick, a
slight start.
I somehow happened across Albert through these myriad fluctuations and pointless meandering from point to point in no discernible pattern.
So what are you reading? He eyed me suspiciously. He let me know he thought anyone who read in a bar was highly suspect, an attention-seeker.
What do you mean, attention-seeker? I wanted to get out, it’s cold, the library is closed, I’m a little drunk, bored and socially inept. The book is my companion. It’s a collection of Donne I’m ready, by the way. I held it up for inspection.
He ignored it for the moment, snorting with derision. Your companion? What, your date? Hrrrph. Metaphysical poet. Look at you; watery Polish lager, 17th century poet….who let you out like that anyway? I’ll tell you what - I’ll loan you my copy of Ecrits sur l’art, this series of essays by Breton I’ve been reading, it’ll get your head out of the clouds. And in addition, I’ll buy you a short of proper scotch whiskey instead of that headache and gas- inducing Polish lager. But only if you hand over the Donne right now and allow me the pleasure of a sacrificial burning later on.
I have to admit, I was somewhat intimidated by him. Especially as I’d been planning on a quiet, solitary drunk punctuated later by a slice of pizza and a short walk home.
He stood there expectantly, slouching in his porkpie hat, a Winston hanging from his lip as he stared at some point in the wall in deep meditation over my head as though he‘d never spoken a word to me. He had a scraggly greying
beard and the appearance of a man who had just been pulled out of a
spider hole after 6 months on the lam.
My name’s Albert, he said suddenly, shrugging his shoulders when it appeared I wasn’t going to be capable of replying to his offer and extending a shot glass toward me, pulling a thin book from inside his coat pocket , setting it in front of me and slowly slide the Donne book from my hands across the table and slipping it into his coat pocket before seating himself across from me.
Now, he coughed into a clenched hand. Let’s get you sorted…
I stood next to him, sipping the beer and taking particular notice of the labels of every bottle on the shelf in front of me, becoming intimate with the names, memorising them and the order in which they ran, right to left. There was music playing from the jukebox, familiar music. Have you ever seen a dog watching you whilst pretending not to watch you? That's how I stood beside Albert.
There was another guy to my left who had been drinking quietly and smoking with fever who suddenly began muttering to himself, sparked apparently by the song on the jukebox which he found, he stammered, beneath us all, an insult to humanity. It was some catchy Motown song which elicited a barely familiar melody in my ear but filled this guy next to me with revulsion. Albert looked up from his dead stare into his ashtray when the guy croaked a few bars of Ein Deutsches Requiem by Brahms.
That was my father's favourite, Albert admitted unprompted. But I
always hated it. Nietzsche accused Brahms of making a fool of
himself by trying to pass himself off as the heir of Beethoven.
Delusional, false. He falls back lazily on the past, fooling himself
with the familiar rather than fooling the crowd into believing he is
uniquely the great modern style, like Wagner, false and fooling the
crowd rather than himself with this myth of modernity.
Albert's eyes are closed as he speaks. The smoke from his Winston
curls around his head, wafting upwards. When he opens them again, he points to the bartender, signalling another beer for himself.
The guy to my left appears uncertain of how to proceed. You could
see his eyes, one second filled with the lust of a great monologue
building, the next second, puzzled. He shrugs inwardly, almost
imperceptively and looks down at his beer, deflated. There was no
bark left in him as he busily tried to address the idea of the
delusional and the delusionist. Brahms and Wagner. He was like a man
enmeshed in a crossword puzzle, cranking out the words, one line
after another until finally, stumped, he puts the crossword down and
goes back to his beer.
The song was over and another began. There was no further
commentary, both back to their neutral corners.
Albert rocked back and forth on his heels, lighting another Winston
once the previous one had been ground out and took a victorious,
smirking sip of beer.
"Ridendo dicere severum",
The man to my left finally and suddenly erupted. Through what is
laughable say what is sombre. German composers are too serious
anyway. I used to teach Nietzsche at Manhattan City College. I
remembered reading that rubbish aloud, forcing those poor bastards
to memorise chunks of texts like Talmud students.
Albert stopped rocking, took a long puff off the Winston.
It is the ethereal we are looking for, he cackled uncertain for a
moment perhaps if he was even serious himself but pushing onward
anyway, carelessly tossing provocative statements in the air like a
bored baton twirler.
Like Chopin's Polonaise in A flat Major, Op. 53? I had cleared my
throat to make sure I wouldn't be misunderstood, looking first to
the man on my left and then Albert.
Precisely! Albert proclaims, finger in the air.
My father played that song every Sunday, during breakfast, for
years.
Interesting. My father was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic,
Albert exhaled, looking at me through smoke-squinted eyes in
re-evaluation.
My father was an electrician, I replied with the straight line.
My father was a Trotskyite! The man to my left exclaimed as if
releasing the secret of his life out of his hands to fly away.
I signalled the barman – another three beers, the first round of
solidarity purchased in a night wavy with empty proclamations and
beery toasts.
*****
By the time last orders were called, the man to my left, Gifford, as
it turned out, was swaying unequivocally like a man on a ferry
crossing across a choppy and disturbed sea. The jukebox was playing
Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit.
I've got to go, he muttered, feeling around his pockets for
unidentifiable objects, hanging his coat over his shoulders.
Wunnerful. Unexpected.
Albert and I were left contemplating last orders and what to do
next.
Of course, what to do next was a simple manner, in many ways. More
beer. More beer as though there was nothing else going on in the
world but the distance between this bar, the corner bodega and my
flat. Why? Why, you can ask yourself night after night wondering
when enough is enough, if it is ever enough. It never is. Just
around the corner, after the next brain cell has desisted, lies
peace. Numb and fluid.
*****
After that first night , which after hours of desultory poking into
one another's business, sharing histories; in my case, abrupt and
brief, in his, spiralling into core values, important books and
philosophical bends, political diatribes and hateful harangues on
fellow humanity which, even in the fog of drinking, seemed to convey
a bitterness so refined, so enmeshed that I wondered why in the
world he'd ever begun speaking to me to begin with, why he'd left
his own flat to venture into the herd, ended with what seemed
notification by him that I'd passed some unspoken examination and
looking back on it, perhaps the examination was more the artesian of
his potential protégé than mutual strangers venturing into a rare
air of grudging friendship, that is, not equals but symbiotic – for
him, the ego of finding an appropriate and willing student, for me,
the opportunity to latch on to someone not only sparing me an
indefinite sentence of continued solitude but providing me with the
materials with which to paint my masterpiece.
It was through Albert and only commencing from a period of time
shortly after meeting Albert that I began to sit up and take notice
of myself because of his excoriations on my listlessness and
pointless existence. He summoned me to take pride in myself, dazzle
myself with underdeveloped possibilities, tending to me daily like a
botanist discovering an unknown form of weed. He provoked me to
wonder if there wasn't something more to my life than this endless
series of dead end jobs and sweet memories of meringue music mixed
with Polish waltzes.
It was Albert, through his cunning and encouragement that compelled me finally to try and figure out a method of moving forward, forget all about the past and reconstruct a future out of the present beginning with now.
Dropping out is just another form of mourning, he told me one night
when we had spent the afternoon smouldering in dark, dank bars whose only populations were morose, intoxicated and hopeless. The intellect is the remedy, one of the few. The intellect stimulated by music. We are two musicians with one bass and one saxophone. Certainly, irregardless of the parameters of talent we possess, between us we should be able to find some modicum of releasing the mourning and embracing the feel of it.
You've got to have self respect to have confidence and to have self
respect you've got to have a reason, he went on, his beard speckled
with beer. Pride. So have some pride in yourself, stimulate
yourself, and get out of this rut, this cycle of dead end jobs and
emotionless drifting. And in the meantime, we'll begin our band.
That will be the release of the mourning. Work for self respect,
like your father did and just as he did, find your haven in your
music.
Are you crazy? Why would I want to emulate someone who drowned
himself in the East River? And what about you, I countered? You have no job.
And this was in fact one of the many pieces of the puzzle of Albert,
not only the air of self sufficiency, but the fact of it. Indeed, he
was unemployed and when I questioned as to whether he had ever
worked at all, in moments of brazenness when I asked how he managed to live this life of seeming self-reliance with his own flat, apparently endless financial resources and few constraints save for his fear of allowing his self-described original thoughts being suffocated by the collective of society, he would only frown as though I had violated an unspoken etiquette and indeed, had he been a stranger I would never have imagined asking such a question, but since we were spending so much time together and since so much of that time spent together bordered on manic intoxication, such inner protocols seemed ambivalent at best, unnecessary at worse.
Ah, but I've had a career, he dismissed one evening, the arm
attached to the hand which held the ever-burning cigarette falling
to the table like an uncontrollable twitch. It's necessary to give
perspective to a life of listlessness. Of course in my own eyes,
this sort of existence is quite the inverse of listlessness, it is
the damning reassurance of a regular, numbing profession which is in
fact the listlessness, the demands of working to the benefit of the
employer whilst simultaneously subjugating your own needs to that
employer, all for the purpose of having a sense of belonging, for
the purpose of some misery pay which you will scrape together a
living with, all conspiring equally to suffocate the soul, erode
desire that isn't desire for material goods assimilated through
thousands of hours of not-so-subtle advertising convincing
somnambulists to want to purchase goods they don't even know they
wanted in the first place. Listlessness is doing things simply
because you're told to do them. Report at 9 am in a shirt and tie
and sober, ready to do whatever tasks assigned to you. Leave when
you are told. Eat the foods you are told to eat because they are
good for you or because one company's food product has more
advertising revenue than another's. The list goes on and on but the
gist is you are not your own. You cannot think for yourself unless
you wish to think about ways to improve yourself which are
professionally and socially appropriate.
And yes, I'm quite fortunate in that respect. But I did at one time
subjugate myself similarly and I can say the experience, Witold, is
worth it. Because it is important to couch such knowledge in
empirical evidence – you should not take my word for it or anyone
else's and certainly it will have little basis solely by thinking to
yourself that you don't like the idea of putting on a noose and
hanging your life from the scaffolds of corporate brainwashing. For
it to matter, for it to compel you to revulsion strong enough to
reject the notion entirely, you have to learn to hate it yourself,
first hand and thus, understand why you hate it.
As for your employment history, these have all been jobs that were
simply menial labour. There is in fact, not enough demoralising
environment to drown in, the existence itself is more demoralising
than any environment can overcome. But place yourself in a corporate environment, Witold, and you will see the true nature and soul of the enemy be that it external or internal and you will know for sure whether or not you hate it enough to reject it.
And as you have asked countless times, how do I, with no apparent
method of supporting myself, continue to exist a life more
comfortable than a person leashed to the corporate mentality, the
answer is that I do not. With the exception of music, books, tobacco
and alcohol, I spend very little money at all. The flat is rent
controlled, which is a key element dyspeptic aversion to constant
employment, minimising unnecessary expenditures, and yes, I believe housing, given the obscene amount of revenue landlords generate simply by owning real estate to be unnecessary, and as for my sources of revenue, it was clever investment of stolen goods, a rather nefarious past I will admit to only vaguely but the truth is, I took what needed to be taken, not necessarily what I needed but what needed to be taken from others, excesses which bordered on the obscene.
Yes, I targeted expensive automobiles but some were targeted solely
because they were popular and easy to sell on the stolen car market
or were targeted because they HAD been popular once and thus their
parts were worth more. Sometimes these were not even the most
expensive cars. But there are many levels of criminal
ostentaciousness and yes, you might find it ironic that I would use
the word "criminal" to describe a person's ostentaciousness but not
an act considered by society to be criminal and you would be correct
but inaccurate, but briefly and at its very basic there are two
within the car market – those expensive enough those purchasing them are doing so to announce their wealth thus, the owners' importance and the other being the popular car which is never popular because it is cheap but because society has trained them to believe it is popular. I won't bore you with my analysis of advertising for automobiles, perhaps another time, but for the purposes of revealing a portion of my past to you and in explanation as to how I came to have the resources to sustain myself without working, I took other peoples' cars on a fairly mass scale in a city with unlimited resources of expensive automobiles and used such actions for my own profit.
It is viewed by society as a criminal act or in my case, a series of
criminal acts and yet, I feel no remorse for one because I don't
believe there is need for cars in a city with such expansive and
reliable public transportation and thus, those driving cars when
they could just as easily use such public transportation are
inevitably contributing to the darkening of the air I breath, again
an irony coming from a man who chain smokes but for those who don't, the air is already choked with pollutants so why add to it more simply out of laziness or a sense of entitlement when all those millions of working class people themselves are subjected to the trials and tribulations of a seemingly expansive and reliable public transportation system.
Owning a car in this city is in fact, mocking those who either chose
not to own one or who cannot afford to own one and that sense of
superiority in my code of regulations is as criminal if not more
criminal than my stealing such cars and turning them into my own
profit. Perhaps had I given the profits away to charity I would have
been able to make a better argument, based upon the nobility of the
action, that I was not in fact a criminal, but the fact that I did
not and used such profits to enable myself to avoid the same
drudgery as my fellow citizens, if anything, THAT makes me criminal
but I am willing to live with that. I am hurting those I wish to
hurt and my motives were purely selfish and yet I feel no remorse.
What does that say of my character? It says that I will do that
which is necessary to avoid that which I find unnecessary or
distasteful. All very convoluted, I assure you and as you will have
already noted by the irony first of describing those from whom I was
stealing as being more criminal than myself and the issue of added
pollutants in the air I breath when I myself am a chain smoker but
not all of life is logic, Witold, no matter how much the
rationalists would like you to believe it.
Despite immodesty and his drinking, Albert was in fact, quite
diligent in his pursuits. He would spend hours alternating between
reading and practicing his double bass which loomed in his spare
bedroom study like lover waking up from under the covers.
Whereas Albert had once been my drinking buddy, chess companion,
mentor in matters of literature and music, the older brother I never
had, as if he had rehearsed the same song my father and mother had
played, the departure theme, he too would one day be gone and when
he was gone I'd been busy making amends.
From him I'd learned to drink Guinness instead of gassy Polish
lagers, roll and smoke my own cigarettes, read and listen not to the
classics, but those writers and composers falling between the cracks
of the classics who often escape notice save by those who find it
compelling to stretch themselves beyond the classics or whose
interest brings them, perhaps like a scuba diver donning a wet suit
as opposed to a person sticking their toe in a body of water and
finding it too cold, retracting the toe with an embarrassed giggle
and never knowing the creatures existing beneath the surface. And
each day I would feel as though these unknown heroes of the sublime
were walking throughout his apartment, room to room. The walls would shake with their compositions, books were spread open to key passages, highlighted and underlined for my edification. Another world opened up that I scarcely knew existed.
There was a lot I learned about him in the interim and I would have
imagined by comparison there was very little he was learning about
me simply for the fact that I was undeveloped and thus, beyond a
brief history, there was little to know, much to learn. It was true
for example, that some of his teeth were rotting and I knew this not
because I had looked inside of his mouth but solely because on those
rare occasions when his breath was not masked in a camouflage of
alcohol and stale tobacco, the breath of rotting teeth was palpable.
It was true that he wasn't the most conscientious groomer. Not that
he didn't bathe or that he smelled foul – but he was consistently
dishevelled and I got the idea at whatever I might have appeared at
his flat, regardless of whether the visit was planned or
unannounced, that I had just woken him from a long sleep. His eyes
were alternately dreamy and intense, depending on the subject
matter. As you progressed through his flat the smell gradually
metabolised into stale beer and cigarette smoke clinging to every
fabric, deep in the years of abuse. There were tropical fish,
televisions set at different angles throughout the sitting room,
loud music at all hours which his neighbours came to express their
dissatisfaction for in torrents of abusive language and slamming
doors, beer everywhere, stained on the counters, in the cushions,
across album and CD covers, soaked in the rugs – a virtual
laboratory of misjudged beer.
The funny thing was no matter how much he drank he never seemed
visibly intoxicated. Certainly this was an illusion woven by years
of public drinking and functional alcoholism, but it was an
impressive trick he performed for me as my own head grew more and
more muddled by the hour.
Albert was a man of the Classics hidden in a drunkard's life.
And I, until he decided he wanted to experience some
fantasy of trans-American highway adventure, his prodigy.
*****
The experiment in finding a career was naturally, given my
disinclination for bowing to societal pressures and social mores, an
absolute failure.
I entered on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, the copy
machine. I choked a tie on every morning, ate a disgusting diner
lunch every afternoon and came home at night, salivating with the
thought of drinking beer to quench the tireless boredom.
We rehearsed sporadically. Usually we were at Albert's flat simply
so he wouldn't have to drag the bass to mine. We both worked on
compositions in our free time, compositions which bordered on being
rip offs of other with extended improvisations. The extended
improvisations weren't the progressions of ego but more lack of
discipline and they also allowed us time to practice without
practicing together.
We didn't have a particular philosophy of the music although we
usually followed a pattern wherein I would produce a melodic sort of
lead line, Albert would allow for some elaboration and then
introduce his own bass line. It made for a very mellow and lonely
linear sound. It was in short, as Albert coined, "thinking music".
After a few months of this regime, Albert free to carry on as he had
before meeting me and I going to the copyist's job in the
corporate's world to add depth to a thus-far shallow series of
experiences, none of which once my mother disappeared, had been
anything but avoidance of such miserable experiences, and the two of
us meeting with the excuse of rehearsing to drink.
On weekends, after particularly raucous Friday Nights, Saturday was
spent lying in bed with the hi-fi droning out melancholic blues and
jazz, sometimes sombre chamber music. Usually the relief of washing
the grime of that hideous suit and tie world where I was nothing but
a person treated with the simultaneous disdain and civility one
treats a retarded person in public, was a half day's work in and of
itself.
I didn't hate the work, mind you. It was simple. Document
duplication. Nothing duplicitous, like shredding documents. Just
reproducing them. And not in a Kinko's-style entity in the global
juggernaut matrix with a name tag and a fake sugar collegiate
how-can-I-help-you pasted-on smile but on the 37th floor of a
massive office building housed on Park Avenue just a short walk to
Grand Central Station.
Multiple page documents fed into a feeder, sometimes just a stack
left and pulled through on their own through the miracle of
technology. Then it was just the watching of the LCD digital display
panel counting off the copies made in a room lit adequately enough
to allow the reading of brief snatches of the newspaper pages folded
to wallet size and hand held, listening to patterns in the operation
of the copier, the click as one page fed into another, the
electricity formulating positive charges in the air above the
photoreceptor, then the purr of the machine as the beam of light
hits the photoreceptor and where that light doesn't hit the
photoreceptor, voila, the positive charges remain to produce the
desired pattern , feeling the low vibrations of the machine,
sniffing in the vague vapour and dust emitted from the paper and ink
cartridges as the negatively-charged toner is shaken over the
photoreceptor and the blank sheet is pressed against the
photoreceptor.
Sometimes I would revel in these patterns wishing I was allowed to
practice my saxophone at work to harmonise with the machine and
although I'd asked and the request had been denied presumably
because work is work, work is not fun, fun is fun and fun is not
working, and it's best for the work-minded not to confuse the issues
lest productivity suffer as a result, the first several weeks of the
job would send me home with haunting lead lines in my head based on a mixture of the copy machine noises and the vast idleness of the mind attempting to compensate for the Zen-like enlightenment in this life of menial service.
Of course, there would always be something to fuck up these smooth
harmonics. Papers would jam, the cartridge would run low or run out
of ink, the entire process would be stopped until the issue was
resolved and then begun anew.
At lunch I would go outside, removing my tie on the elevator ride
down to the ground floor to feel free and spend an hour wandering
the streets of mid town watching the go-go chaos of thousands and
thousands of people converging simultaneously upon already congested and over-squeezed streets and restaurants. It reminded me of a video I once watched about the wildebeest's clockwise migration from the Serengeti plains to Kenya's Masai Mara, amassing on the crocodile-invested Mara River and making a maddening crossing, some surviving, some eaten, some drowning. The metaphors were singularly and consistently crushed in the Spring once winter coats were discarded and leggy secretaries and assorted office personnel in all shapes, colours and sizes began to populate the streets when it became impossible to steer myself to the Public Library and instead ventured for strolls along Bryant Park watching the momentarily listless stretched out for impromptu picnics in the sun before trudging back gloomily to their florescent honeycombs of productivity.
This pattern went on for months although rather than developing my
disgust for all things corporate, rather than encountering the
nature and soul of my mortal enemy Albert had insisted I would
discover once that shirt and tie were worn, I found myself growing
comfortable within the role. Sure, I disliked being treated like the
office idiot simply because I hadn't wasted eighty grand on an
undergraduate degree, or, as the interview for the job had failed to
uncover, I hadn't even finished high school or bothered to obtain an
equivalency.
Instead I was amused that these poor little robots with human-like
qualities who had been spoon-fed their educations for years almost
longer than they could remember only to find themselves admitted
into a prestigious race against time to find quality before death or
before the effects of the anaesthetic drip of consumerist tripe wore
off and left them writhing in existentialist agony.
And when that five o'clock hour kicked off and I was out the door,
bursting like a handful of Chinese fireworks for the chance to find
the alternative; either out for a neighbourhood pub crawl on my
lonesome, fishing with a variety of lines, apnoeic and unoriginal,
for what passed itself off to the casual ear as hieroglyphic banter,
or recovering from the night before in the confines of the flat
listening to variations of Miles Davis' Blue in Green, double time
solos and Mozart's Divertimento in E Flat whilst reading with one
hand, Hesiodus or Kant or Kundera or Coelho and feeding chilli
burritos or fried noodles and fried pancakes into my hung-over mouth with the other, I knew, in the barren outposts of reflection that either alternative was better than herding on to another train with all those superior-feeling colleagues who loved looking down their noses at me who were ground down to chuck meat in a suburban hamburger palace in New Jersey or Long Island.
My apathy at my plight vexed Albert to no end some nights. During
those evenings of rehearsal he would be monitoring me, secretly he
thought at first, for signs that my embrace of this dehumanising
corporate culture was weakening and the doldrums of discontent were wearing thin my complacency. This was one element of his presumed experiment that wasn't going to plan. He wouldn't reveal what conditions he himself had been exposed to that had led to his own satori of hatred of the corporate world or what specifically had turned him from working for a living to working for himself stealing cars for a living to a premature retirement pickling himself in alcohol whilst simultaneously attempting to stimulate his brain with music and literature in a cocoon of complacency in his own semi-contained flat.
And so it might have remained for uncountable years. Perhaps we
would have developed from rehearsing in his flat to playing on
stage, perhaps we would have taken the neighbourhood by storm with our conveniently unscripted lack of talent. Perhaps I would have continued on indefinitely in this vein, going to this same job, pretending, like Albert, to flush the numbness from my skin with a potent cocktail of alcoholism and music and literature. We weren't going anywhere and like most else around me, I couldn't quite bring myself awake enough to care.
Not until one weekend when Albert announced we were going to
Washington, DC.
Why the fuck would we go there, I wanted to know, with the world's
greatest city beckoning like Gustave Caillebotte's Nude Woman
Stretched Out On A Sofa from every street corner?
Two reasons. First of all, change of venue. Changing your venue can
be as refreshing as a hot shower after a week without bathing. But
change for change's sake is a futile and meaningless effort.
Thus there is another, more pertinent reason. The other reason is
because I met Gato Barbieri last night in the lounge of the
Buckingham Hotel and after a rather awkward beginning, he confided
to me he was headed to there for a gig at Blues Alley in DC this
weekend. We chatted for nearly thirty minutes. Fascinating guy. Soft
speaking stream of consciousness sort of conversation. You know me,
my favourite kind of conversation. And some good stories. About
Argentina, Buenos Aires, how there were no instruments to buy when
he was growing up and had to wait for someone to die to get one.
Anyway, I think he was jealous of my irrevocable consumption.
Reminded him of the good ole days, perhaps. He told me how he used
to take a lot of coke and drink too much. Wore him away, he claims.
You wear away anyway, I corrected him. But he's like a child with a
new toy, him and this sobriety. He says he's stopped drinking,
started exercising and eating healthy. It would have been repulsive
but for the stories and the histories.
Anyway, Albert carries on, exhaling and sipping an espresso, staring
out at the leggy pedestrians on a warm spring afternoon near
Tompkins Square Park, he seemed to like me for some reason. I lied
and said I was going to be in DC this weekend anyway. He says he'll
put me and a guest on the list. So there you go. You and I to DC, to
Blues Alley, Gato Barbieri. Should be fantastic.
*****
So Saturday morning we get up and catch the bus down to DC. It's an
odd city. A museum of French government architecture in the middle
of a ghetto. We were due to catch the 8pm show but Albert had
brought a flask with him on the bus and we passed it between us with
such religious fervour we stunk of it by the time we got off,
already swaying.
There was no false pretension at playing tourists in the Capital of the United States of America. No sir. We could spot them from a mile off, cameras hung around their necks like ornithologists, Midwestern fat erupted from beneath their shits, fat flowed like lava over their waistbands. Baseball caps, stupid remarks about casual sightings. It wasn’t for us. We weren’t one of them.
I say we splurge, he says as we hop into a cab and ask to be taken
to Georgetown. I've been here once before. Let's get a nice hotel,
fuck it. Dressing pigs up in tuxedos. We'll stay at the Georgetown
Four Seasons. Imagine their disgust and imagine our pleasure in
stinking of this cognac, dressed like slobs, flippant at their gaudy
pretensions.
And so that's precisely what we do. We don't have any luggage. One
duffel bag between us. Change of clothes? Forget it. Clothes cannot
change what we are. We'll flaunt our arrogance with our apathy in
our appearance. Who cares? These people love clothes. It's a big
fuck you to their pretensions that they won't mistake.
And why make such a production of pissing people off? Why dress like
slobs when we are presented with an opportunity to dress out of
character, like cultured adults rather than subculture experiments?
Because we are desperate to prove our apathy about outward
appearances. We are determined to enunciate our disgust for false
pretences and to illuminate the value of the character within those
outward appearances.
We spend only a few minutes in the room before leaving, stopping in
the first place we could find that was open, a Brazilian café. We
drank Caipirinhas, entertaining the barman with our incessant,
meaningless banter, word associations – the kind of stunted dialogue
produced by tired minds, drunken minds. We mixed Brahma beers with the Caipirinhas, as though trying to prove some obscure point. When we mentioned going to see Gato Barbieri at Blues Alley, he asks, offhandedly, if we were going to the matinee show.
And this is what became our downfall, what began our plunge in the
absurd. The matinee show.
*****
We arrived by cab, dropped at the alley and stumbled up to the front
door demanding to see Gato.
There was no mistaking our potential hooliganism; we certainly weren't the typical matinee crowd. The door man listened to Albert's wind up patiently, indulgently waiting for a long sputtering spiel of off colour ramblings to come to a merciful end before politely informing that we were not on the guest list of the afternoon show and we would not be getting in. It helped not one iota that Albert became slightly abusive at that point, demanding credentials, demanding justice, demanding again to see Gato personally for discussion on this slender point. Another doorman approached cautiously and soon we were surrounded by linemen sized men who took us in at first as a curiosity but once the curiosity had been exhausted, quickly began losing all patience with us.
One of them took me aside whilst Albert continued his harangue to
another. Listen, he hissed, the two of you are disgusting. You're
drunk, you're loud and obnoxious and frankly, unless you're both
members of Gato's family, you wouldn't get in here even if you were
on the list for the matinee show. My advice is that the two of you
go sleep it off. You won't be welcomed here, not this afternoon, not
this evening, not ever, frankly.
And when the doorway was shut tight leaving us standing there
swaying in the alley with a gentle breeze, Albert suddenly slumped
as though the life had been kicked out of him. He leaned against the
side of the building and lit a Winston. Fuck 'em. We don't need
these bastards anyway. I've got a better idea.
And those next few minutes would prove to be well fateful for as he
spoke to me, pork pie hat twisted in his hand, he spotted a cab
driver on the lower end of Wisconsin Avenue getting out of his cab
to talk to another cabbie who was leaning against the hood of his
car reading a newspaper. I watched with interest as Albert pushed
himself up from the side of the building and sauntered over towards
the idling cab.
Then, without warning, he suddenly jumped into the driver's side of
the cab just as the other two took notice and as they leapt,
shouting after him, Albert threw the car into gear and sped off,
wheels squealing, up to M Street, hung a right and mingled into
traffic at speed. The two cabbies shouted after him before stopping,
noticing me standing there and vaguely recalling my presence next to
Albert only moments before, approached me cursing.
I don't know anything about it, I protested. I'm just as surprised
as you.
They weren't in the mood to debate and I could see the thought
pattern in their brains tumbling between grabbing me and chasing
after the stolen cab. They waved me off with foreign curses and hand
gestures, hopping into the others' cab and taking off down M Street
in pursuit leaving me there wondering what the hell had just
happened and what my next move was going to be.
Albert would later tell me that endlessly that he hadn't actually
"stolen" the cab perse. He was just bored and wanted a little
excitement. The kind of dysfunctional excitement bred out of
intoxication; senseless, without preamble, without premeditation. I
just wanted to pick up one fare, just to see the look on their faces
when they got in and I tore off from the kerb like a mad man. Just
one fare.
But he didn't make it that far. Naturally his driving skills weren't
very lucid given his consumption and before long, instead of a fare,
he'd run straight into a parked car, jumped out of the cab bloodied,
only to be overtaken by the two cabbies who between the two of them
and the help of another passer-by, managed to hold him down in the
street long enough, dazed and wounded, a burning Winston still
perched on his lips, until the cops duly arrived about three minutes
later, the moment of madness punctuated like the fluttering dropkick
of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35.
*****
Two years later, Albert says the judge was lenient. We had a little
joke in the court room. Either that or she was trying to find the
motivation for my seemingly random anarchistic and criminal act.
What are your dreams, she asks me at the sentencing. I gave her
several different scenarios. To tread water until my limbs grow too
tired to tread anymore and I drown. I thought I was being clever.
She shook her head. Are you still finding this a joke, she asks me,
incredulous. No, it isn't funny at all your honour, I sincerely
don't have any dreams. Not dreams that would be rendered coherent in an incoherent society anyway, your honour.
You said that? I took another swig of the pint, these repetitive
motions were all part of communication in the world Albert and I
were sitting in. He nodded his head enthusiastically. So what did
she say?
Nothing for a minute. Silence. Summing me up in her head. Clearly
she was impressed by me in some indefinitive way she was quickly
trying to calculate. Would it be more helpful if I told you it was
my dream to be the guy who assembles display furniture all day long
at an Ikea factory outlet mall? Then her eyes were like little
slits, comprehending I wasn't taking my sentencing seriously at all.
What did I care anyway. I know the maximum sentencing guidelines. I wasn't a murderer, I hadn't committed a violent felony. Four years maximum, free food, regardless of how shitty it might be, the experience of prison, time to work on my book, I could have gone on all afternoon about the exciting possibilities a small prison sentence would have afforded me.
By then, the judge wasn't interested in any of my answers. She'd
tried a tact, tried to be humane. Inexplicably, while my public
defender turned white with incredulity, she became almost jocular, leaned over the front of the bench. Too ambiguous, she stated, nearly inaudible and very slowly as though I had some sort of learning disability rather than genius.
How about an interpretive dance, done with feeling and emotion, I
offered. But the game was over. She slammed the gavel down, suddenly impatient and poof, sentencing was on. Do you know how many times I told that fucking story to my cell mate? How many variations, how many different tenses, different languages, different angles I've created that story into, sheerly out of boredom?
He pinched out his cigarette with an annoyed look on his face. I'll
tell you something Witold. It wasn't as bad as you might imagine
jail to be. No rapings, no beatings from prison guards. A lot of
long hours with nothing to do. It drives some people crazy but for
me, it was two years to think.
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