Sunday, November 8, 2009

Koln & Paris



<--- Here's Montmartre, and here's a poem derived from my ill-famed trip to Europe. So far I have gotten four poems out of the trip, but I have several others in me. I have to have them in me. The vacation cost me about $3000... that's $750/poem. Ridiculousness. Esp. b/c I am going bankrupt.

1.)

Nightmusic (1st Published in Rusty Truck -- June 2010)

On a dingy corner across from the Moulin Rouge, this little beautiful madam takes my hand and draws me into the sadistic darkness of her strange ambrosial cave. S’asseoir.” I sit down on a fat sofa. “Something to drink, monsieur?” “Heineken, please…” Smoke tingles in a soft blaze of soiled lights, walls aquiver. A big, buxom African whore in clinging semitransparent lingerie moves under the chanting red globes. Something begins to diminish. The decomposing dribble of a moment jiggles via the infallible hands of timelessness, perhaps?

Here, the dead have dressed up in their oral traditions, god plays grim his violin, light fails, and the prostitutes hit the floor, shoving precisely though the pushandpull of orchestral despair, their bounding feet transfigured on a steep current of swollen logic. It sits at the end of some foreign tongue, volumes of dirty eroticism slowly expanding until the keen queen-of-all-kings coyly emerges. She hurls a handful of lilacs on the floor, spits, and as she begins pouncing on them with her happy jouncing feet, I observe the glad awful screaming of her profane flesh; the sweaty waves of palpitating flab among whose largeness even oblivion would be feign to blush. My beer arrives, green and glowing. It’s handed to me by some Turkish pimp of the dime-a-dozen kind, donned in large white collars and a black bullying blazer stuffed with shoulders, his gold tooth and earrings emitting sharp glints from the hellish neon, his face a dull retching of perfect
evil, like a serpent, or a toadstool. His loafer slightly pronounces itself, he pirouettes, one arm does a fat sweeping gesture, and the big African whore descends upon me, pink drink in hand. The pimp nods, nods again. “For the lady,” he says. “Merci…” she says. “On me?” I ask.

But he’s gone.

A cloud of silence covers her face. Immense, beautiful, perfectly insipid. She takes a sip from the straw. Two hungry thighs squirm before me and she unleashes her top. She cups the roundness of her heaving breasts and gives them a good upward squeeze, lets go. Plunk. Then her fingers find my thighs and I feel like all the others, hooked in the gill, waiting to be dragged along the wake and then eaten. The room spins its fuzzy red syllables. A purple curtain parts. A man in a cape begins to sob. Or sing. Or something. And I am the man in the cape. I have no home. Just this perverse little cave of a room, in my soul, or across from the Moulin Rouge, where a purple curtain closes, and gods play grim their violins.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Retrospect


I am back from my journey, and as I predicted, I didn't get around to blogging anything when I was over there. The reason is because I had to pay for internet service wherever I went and I truly didn't have the time.

I do have stories though.

I hung out with a rogue outfit of buskers (street-performers) in Cologne, got into a scuffle with some Turks in a whorehouse in Paris, and Amsterdam was everything I thought it would be, and not half as bad as the Bill O'Rielly's of the world want you to believe.

Not much writing was done, however. I did take a lot of notes and there were a lot of moments that were really deep and poetic (for me).

I mean, I spent much time in the cafes, alone, drinking beers and roaming around the streets of those three towns, going in and out of the cathedrals, on the trains and along the rivers, watching the people...

I'm still trying to figure out what happened.

But then, that's what being a writer is all about, isn't it?

Tempering the flame?

It's definitely a fool's game.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Oktoberfest


Ten days from now I will be on a plane bound for Dusseldorf. I'm staying in Cologne for the first three nights, then Paris (Montmartre) for three, Amsterdam for four and back to Dusseldorf for one. This is going to be the first time I've ever been abroad, and I'm going it alone w/o too many German/French-speaking abilities. I haven't studied any French. I have been studying German. I downloaded 6 CDs onto my ipod, and while I'm at work, delivering construction equipment around the Miami area, I listen: Wo auch immer er auftauchen mag, man wird ihnerkennen. Which is a little strange, esp. when you ease into a convenience store/cafe/place on Jose Marti Blvd., and get accosted by some Cuban-Chinese muttering Spanish & selling key limes out of a duffel bag. I mean, it's a little strange to hear "Entschuldigung, wo ist die Kaiserstrasse, bitte?" in your ear when that happens.

But... that's just the way it goes. Hopefully my trip will bear some stories and some poetry. I already have some ideas for both and I can't even pronounce Hauts-de-Seine yet.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

2 Poems



Here are two poems. The second one is in Calliope Nerve.



*****

1.)


Antique

Through the red window, smokestacks
gurgle in the rain. Trees lay their sobbing

shadows all around. "No vacancy in the world," says the sign.

I sit up in bed, a homemade knife
taped to the bottom

of my shoe. Across the room, the hood
of the executioner

falls off, reveals the face of a beautiful woman,

or is that a clock?

Is that a hearse
driving the wet streets backwards?

I rub my eyes.

My mind feels itself up
for thoughts.

Poetry is a wonderful old keepsake left on the side of the road
that no on else
wants.



2.)

the neighborhood watch

there he goes again, backing the ass
of his big diesel pickup truck
into his driveway
parking so the nose juts out just a little
past the holly bushes,
so its headlights peer out like eyes
of a rat that's just crawled back
in its hole...
i bet it makes him feel safe
i bet he thinks he's in complete command
of the game
letting us all know his jumbo-sized tonka
truck is out there
eyeing us, gazing into the very depths
of our souls, passing moral and definitive
judgments on us...
i bet it makes him feel superior
and a tad macho
climbing down out of his eddie bauer cab
striding up through his lawn
in his ill-fitting boilersuit
and all his
small-minded pride
he stomps his boots on the stoop, opens the screen
door and
scoots inside
leaving his truck in the driveway
to off-gas the egotistical facets of his personality
the world must learn to adapt
itself to. in a word,
i'm thinking about slashing
all his tires

Monday, July 20, 2009

feeling vs. thinking





It's been a couple months, but here I am, and without much to say. I'm thinking instead about what Hemingway said about Dostoyevsky in A Moveable Feast. Something along the lines of "how can a person write so poorly and make you feel so deeply?"

This is a beautiful question, and it only goes to show you how much more important the feeling part of writing is than the intellect part. Of course they join somewhere, but the best writing is felt; when you have to climb up into your brain (even momentarily) and think about what you're reading, the dream has been accosted and something's been lost in translation.

This is especially true in poetry and fiction. I'm not talking about anything else. I bring this up is because I consider myself a feeling (maybe overly-feeling?) person, yet for years I wrote for the mind when I should've been writing for the senses.

A terrible mistake.

Nothing ever translated
except a lot of bird-dung;
promise
I won't do it again.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Toccata & Fugues


I have found the lorazazzezzzz my lady has taken to hiding from me and I have taken them and I have drunk the wine today. Chianti (Gabbiano), and the bottle's almost empty, and the cup is to the left of me (left to me). It's like the blood of a sacrificial bull when I pour it in me, warm, dark red, flowing. Sometimes it's as good as beer. Sometimes it's better. Like now... sitting in my swivel chair, listening to the rain coming down and Bach's Organ Music. The house is dark, even though it's still daylight, and the wind outside blowing the palms around.

I take a sip of red... I'm in no rush to do anything, no one's waiting on me and I'm not dreading or expecting anything.

(shut that door)

Of course, this isn't going to last.

I'm just temporarily in abeyance.

Is that the right word?

And temporary like John the Baptist.

Anyway, bliss like this is always fleeting because it has to be.

Bliss has no memory.

Friction makes most.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

blind, deaf, dumb












the
best
revenge
is
often
just
avoidance
and
forgetfulness

no
one
needs
to
be
taught
anything

let
daisies
be
thy
dream

Sunday, April 5, 2009

if feeling fails you, vain will be your course...


when I look back on some of the stuff i've written in the past (i.e. before 2005), it makes me really happy that none of it ever got published. it didn't deserve to get published. i didn't either. "man, was i misguided... what wasn't i thinking?"

the stuff i'm writing now, on the other hand, i think is fairly durable. when i say that, i mean durable to me, as in something i can read more than once (long after the fact), and without cringing, without feeling like i was duped.

"for man must strive, and striving he must err" -- goethe

so, here's what i keep reminding myself:

*sarcasm/flippancy doesn't stand the test of time.
*humor does as long as it's natural and not forced.
my proof: caddyshack vs. knocked up, zoolander, wedding crashers, et al.
*you might regret never having written from the heart (in tongue and w/o commonplaces). "it is always a mistake to be plain-spoken." -- g. stein
*editors are often right. and form letters are often nourishment for the brain (as long as they don't come from some fee-simple jackass with a personal agenda, which occasionally happens).
*get used to being a lousy public-servant because you'll never make any money writing poetry.
*work on your soul as much as you work on your poetry.
it's your only chance, and it's a good back-up plan too.
*refer again (and again) to Ez:

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

*and then refer to the top of this page:

i.e.:

And should the thing be wanting in fire or taste
Blow into flame your little heap of ashes

Sunday, March 29, 2009

after reading meister eckhart...












if your mind
is a great sunflower
hunched over on its stem
just remember
what seneca said: "that man or
woman is wretched who does not
transcend
their humanity." and to this i would
like to add: self-love is the
fleetest animal that bears
you to
mediocrity.

(the spiders they
sleep on sunday)

Sunday, March 22, 2009

thanksgiving, 1986











After watching myself last night in an old home video, circa 1986, I am left feeling totally disgusted and ashamed of who I was at age 15. Talk about a person with an identity crisis. I was a mock-person, a mimic and a fraud with a bad temper, terrible acne and on top of that I thought I was funny, but my humor was only a cheap form of escapism & a tool used to hide my true feelings. Well, I guess some things never change.

"You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back" -- Horace.

But at least now my acne is gone, and I don't think I'm so much of a fraud. One thing I can say for myself is that at least I've always been willing to step outside of myself and form an semi-objective critique. Some people never truly see themselves, but I've always seen myself perhaps a little too deeply, and a little too self-consciously, which is probably why I drink and why I write and why I feel the horrors of life so much that I'm not afraid of dying. I am afraid of death though. Which was pretty much me back in 1986, when all of the forces of the world were just beginning to align themselves against me, and me just laughing (at everything and everyone but myself). I still do that sometimes, but at least now I know the final joke will always be the one that's on myself. The one that no one else tells better than me & which trumps death (and sorrow) (and you) (and me) every time.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Taz...



Last night, my good friend J..., who's also the co-owner of an Irish bar I sometimes frequent, starts buying the whole table Jagerbombs, one after the other, and then when happy hour ends, he dumps me on these three Studs Turkel (Turds Stuckel) characters I don't know from Adam (or Eve), and disappears. Then the napoleonic generalissimo comes forth. He of the angry aging face on which has migrated two thirdrate pieces of struggling mustachio, and his shirt decorated with flying marlins and thrust open to the sternum as to expose the four gold chains nestled comfortably in his silvery chest hair, his jeans being these loosefitting preshrunk Wranglers, and he's wearing steeltipped cowboy boots, the kind you find at that one boot depot off Yeehaw Junction, back behind the stand where they sell plastic alligators and bags of grapefruit and oranges.

At any rate, he befriends me, which is only natural, since I attract almost nothing but his kind. e.g. mutinous bottom-dwellers looking for someone who will listen. I will always listen. At first anyway. It went something like this:

"Hey buddy... c'mon over with us...
we're all friendly at this bar, ya see...
we're like family here...

What do I do? I move dirt for a living.
I'm a heavy equipment operator.
Dozers, rollers, backhoes...

Hey, buy this guy a beer!...

I was running Cats when they were still green.

I AM reality!... What's your name again?...

I'll drink anyone here under the table...
I'll drink YOU under the table...
Do you like stone crab?
I get the best stone crab known to man...

Oh yeah, that's my wife right there.
Look how pretty she is...
I got a pretty wife.
She's the first woman I've ever had who's free.
All the others I had to buy.
Know what I mean?...
You don't?
Think about
it.

Suicide? I never thought about suicide. This is the real shit right HERE baby! HAHAHA!

...and then I grabbed him by the shorthairs and jammed my .380 in his goddamned frog face and said "Don't you ever take a KNIFE to a GUNFIGHT!"...

But we're all family here...

Call me Taz... Pleasure to meet you.

Hey, tonight I'm going to go home and fuck my wife, then I'm gonna meet this guy for a load of stone
crab at three in the
morning... I'm meeting him down at the docks when he comes in with his shipment. He's my connection...

LOOK into MY EYES when I'm talking to you!

What's so funny?

I call everyone who's younger than me a punk-
ass.

Punk-ass. Punk. Ass.

I SaiD To thE GuY, DOn'T YoU EveR TaKe a KniFE To a GUNfiGht!

GET THIS GUY ANOTHER BEER!
Dontcha see? I take care of my people.

I used to smuggle dope through the blackwaters just south of the Bahamas. Back in the
70s.

Yeah I ran grass.

Hey listen, I AM THE TRUTH!

Ya always gotta be protected. That's why I never go anywhere without my .380. I keep in my
cowboy boot. Right here. Here's
where it
is.

Whaddya mean SCARED? Hell, I ain't SCARED!

I push dirt for a living. I don't got no employees. I'm self-employed.

Hey punk-ass!

GET THIS GUY ANOTHER BEER! ON ME!

Would you like
to be a part of the
FaMILy?

Huh,
wouldya
punk-ass?

Sunday, March 1, 2009

velazquez, bacon, matilda & you



Waltzing Matilda

So I'm at this waterside saloon yesterday sitting between a Romanian exboxer (who stands about 4 feet tall), and a Turkish usedcarsalesman. Across the bar, there's a couple in their fifties. The lady keeps straddling the guy, but the guy's playing it slo-mo & cool, fidgeting with his Blueblockers and grinning around a cigar in all his omnivorous buckteeth. She touches his (makebelieve) hairstyle, nudges his crotch with her knee, and I'm beginning to think I'm watching a Levitra infomercial until the band starts to play. It's a ragtag agglomeration of yokel huckleberries. The pivotman is this seething hump of whaleshit in leathers, a pissmop of yellow pseudowig flaring out from beneath the skullandcrossbones bandanna precariously unbalancing itself upon his tete. He keeps placing his Stratocaster up against his ear, strumming the chords and winking at the drummer and I'm like oh god oh please not again... not this... again. The harmonica player I do believe I know from somewhere. He's this washedup partially exhumed pile o' phytoplankton the Tet offensive neglected & Nixon left for dead because, apparently, when the shit hit the fan, he was out smoking from a RubeGoldberg-shaped hookah on a sunken ricepaddy somewhere around Hill 55 (without even knowing it). I watch, as his boots measure the sound. and this is all I need, I think... Jesus, this is all I need... but he actually surprises me. And the rest of the band does too. And when they finish their first song, the old man next to me says, "Play it again, Sam!" "They don't do that," says the even older man sitting next to him. "You watch..." says some thirdwheel in a shirt upon which swims several seacows. He yanks a fin from his billfold, waves it, then quickly stuffs it down his own pants and all is forgotten except for the Levitra couple dryhumping on the other side (over bud lights & against the leg of one strategically placed busboy). "Get a room!" someone yells & all our Blueblockers lothario can do is blow cigarsmoke on his knuckles like he knows something no one else does, except perhaps for the band, which plays Waltzing Matilda as if they all had her once.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

if every fool held a bauble, fuel would be dear


writing in the morning with tobacco & a cup of coffee is good, but it's not great. it's better to write in the night, with the night spirits guiding you. i write best after i've had a couple of lorazepams and several glasses of either chianti or german wine. heinekens help too, and maybe a tall glass of strong drink, like rum and coke or wild turkey.

anyway, the above mentioned concoctions i consider my muses. hemingway said he never wrote drunk, but for me it seems best this way... too much consciousness has always been the bane of my verse(s). it's better to write w/o thinking too much. in other words, semi-consciousness is the way. or one way. it's best to go back and forth. that way you have two minds instead of just one. both of which speak to each other.

bourbon and coke

out of the hustling hours and
into the ripe delicious languor
of my room i collapse upon
my couch, in a perfume of
frankincense and huddled
between these sumptuously
gasping walls, obscene flowers
of pinkish light spout from a
tiny lamp... the air is bathed
in damp indolence as the
voice of the city washes over
me its vague drooling waves
of purple thought... to which
i am wholly indifferent, and
wholly drunk, having come
here again, away from all the
dire pleasure beasts... away
from my hatreds, fears &
daily agonies, i fall deep into
the warmth of this solitude...
where deities mostly
dance, and night spirits open
unto me
the rare doors of perfect bliss


See ~ Underground Voices April '09

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

morning revision...




Here's the cleaned up version of whatever it was (?) I posted last night...

I started late at the literature game. I never read any fiction until I was about 22. And I didn't begin writing until I was 25. And I didn't take my writing seriously until several years after that. I graduated from Florida State with a Business Marketing degree. I majored in business because I wasn't interested in anything else & and it seemed like an easy enough degree to slide my way through. One of my mistakes was that I listened to what my parents said: "You need to have a degree... even if you don't plan on using it, you'll always have something to fall back on." It seemed like good advice at the time, but of course I didn't know myself back then. If I did I would've been more skeptical about my guidance counselors, and especially about my dad when he said "there's no money in an English degree!" He was right of course, but money's a fool's game when it takes the place of what truly interests you. And if I had lived by that "maxim" (e.g. fifteen yrs. ago) I wouldn't be thinking about this one now:

"You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived." ~ Gertrude Stein

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Sandwich Board



i was talking to my mom today, and she told me she had this great idea for me. she said some guy wrote some songs about the economy & a few other current events and received a huge response when he put his garble on you tube... she said i should do the same thing with my poetry/writing.

"people would probably love it," she said, "especially when they see your goodlooking face...etc., etc..."(a face only a mother could love???)
"it doesn't sound like a bad idea," i said. "the only thing is, it sounds like a lot of shameless selfpromotion, which i hate."
"well everything's about shameless selfpromotion these days... you have to put yourself out there... get people to notice you... that's the only way you'll ever make any $$..."
"mom," i said. "if i was in it for the money, i would've gone out long ago and bought a sandwich board and stood out in traffic on biscayne blvd to promote my 'works.' trust me...art for money's sake = art beshitting itself, every time."

anyway, that's what I'm up against where my family is concerned. my dad's always wanted me to be the next Mickey Spillane (who once wrote a novel in what two days i'm told?), and my brother's first question when i told him i have some stuff being published in some pretty good mags pretty soon was how much
(did you
pay
them?)

"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends." ~ M. Spillane

here's (1) poem...

Don't Call Me Frisco

See: Underground Voices ~ April '09

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

neither quixote nor taras bulba


I've developed this terrible habit lately of buying books, reading about half of them, putting them aside and then buying more books. Books and music are really my only extravagance, by the way. It's the wisest way to spend $$. And so, I have about twenty half-finished books sitting around my house. Some of them I put aside, never to be touched again (see: Blake, The Complete Poems - which pretty much soiled itself after The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). But there are others that I plan on getting back to. One being Faust Part 2 (I think this tale should've been the theme of this blog since I mention it so much). I read half of it in September, then moved onto Jung, E.E., Meister Eckhart, Amy Lowell, and a few others. I picked it up today again and perused it a little more patiently, and though it's a little slow-going and confusing at times, there's some really brilliant lines for the discovering. Here's one from Meph:

"To gain your end, the act must be your own."

And another, which I aim towards all children of loving and/or overprotective parents:

"For say, what guide of youth, will really tell us, face to face, the truth? Each will enlarge or trim with hardihood, now grave now gay, to keep the children good."

And finally this last, which I aim at myself, especially when I was younger, and my delusions of grandeur (which I blame on any and all of my German forebearers - I'm 1/3 kraut, and DofG is a wholly krautian trait...)

BACCALAUREUS:

This is the noblest call for a youthful soul!
The world was not, until I made it whole;
I raised the sun from the ocean where it lay;
(etc...etc...)
And who but me your liberation wrought
From bonds of philistines that fettered thought?
But I, a soul inspired by freedom's might,
Pursue with joy my star of inner light,
And swiftly, in rapture of my mind,
I speed to glory, darkness left behind.


MEPH:

Go, my original, your glorious way! -
How truth would irk you if you really sought it:
For who can think of truth or trash to say,
But someone in the ancient world has thought it?
And yet this fellow puts us in no danger,
For wait a few more years and things will mend:
The vat may hold a ferment strange and stranger,
There'll be some wine in the bottle in the end.


And so I say:

Soliloquy

is it not enough knowing
even genius is ill-spoken, and that the mind
will eat itself like a morning
cloud

is it not enough knowing
every loving relationship ends in tragedy

that there's no accomplishment
greater than death?

nothing's enough, of course.

but as for you, for whom the gods
make dying real
if you must sacrifice your life for anything
let there be this: grace

and remember the matadors
those noble falcons, remember Socrates
drinking hemlock and falling to one
knee

it's the ultimate rhythm of things
the dance and breath

to finally understand,
and afterwards, to understand deeply

a life given up like this
was never a life lost

and to turn away from man
the sun and self-love,

without holding on, finally -

that's best.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Crocodile Boozehound




Merry New Year! Here's the more than less final version of my Boozehound story. I think it's pretty good the whole way through, but that's for you to judge.

If you haven't read it since my original posting, you may want to read it again, as things have changed.


(1)


I first heard about him in the Spring of 1992. I was living in a shack in Tallahassee and hooking up with Cathie. We used to lie in bed in the afternoons (I didn't wake up until the afternoons back then) watching movies and trading war stories. I had some pretty good ones. I liked hers too, but they always seemed to involve cow-tipping, the picking of mushrooms, or some mythical creature who called himself Boozehound.

"Who the fuck is this Boozehound?" I finally asked.

She didn't have an answer. She didn't really know him, she said, only the stories she knew. And a few of them I still remember. One especially. It was about Mardi Gras. There was a discrepancy over a bill at a bar on Canal Street, and later on a patrol officer discovered him in an alleyway, passed out drunk in back of a stolen ambulance, with a dead deer lying beside him. It was a six-point buck, and no one knew how it got in there, not even him. He didn't even know how he got in there.

They were both wearing beads though.

Anyhow, a couple years after Cathie I became a fixture at a pub on Tennessee Street called The Higgledy-Piggledy. I went there for the beer specials. Every Wednesday and Saturday it was $4, all you could (should or will) swill. Thursdays it was $5. I used to go in there with about $8 or $10 and space out the tips. $1 for every five or six rounds. It wasn't much, but being in and out of college and on financial aid at the time, without too many pots to piss in, and living in an apartment whose most elaborate furnishings consisted of a fleabag mattress and a third of a worm-eaten sectional couch, it was enough. Maybe not for the keeps, but for the soul of the bar, it was enough. I was one of the most consistent drunks in that dump. Another constant being the guy who inhabited the barstool by the taps. He was there more than I was. He looked like a Ponzi schemer or a coffin salesman. Dark hair, delicate hands and always impeccably groomed, always adorned in his scientifically pressed button-down Polos, pleated slacks and sleek loafers that clicked faintly when he minced around the bar.

It turned out this was Boozehound.

I talked to him a few times, and I remember sitting next to him once. There was something about the burbling of a hurdy-gurdy though, and a white string of drool which left an impression on me. It spilled out of his mouth when he was flagging down the keeps and I wondered if he was as good as his moniker (and legend) implied. I had my doubts.

1998

I left Tallahassee and forgot about my lovely days with Cathie, and $4 drink specials, and all about the Boozehound too. But my brother was still there, and I suppose he and Boozer hung out once or twice. Then they graduated in the Spring, Boozer from graduate school, and when they moved back to South Florida, they exchanged phone numbers or something and somehow I got involved.

It happened on a Friday. At first I thought it was a joke. I lived in a tiny apartment in one of those crappy gated communities South Florida teems with. When I got home from work that night I looked at my caller ID and there were seven missed calls from the guardshack, plus three from the payphone outside 7-11. The last was only a couple minutes before I checked it. I thought about it for a moment, then opened the fridge and got a beer out. I got a bottle-opener out of the drawer which was right under the window and that's when I saw it. I saw a dark bag topple over the concrete wall bordering the complex (the compound rather - gated communities are more like compounds). It rolled into the mangrove trees, and then another one landed and a man nimbly followed, hurtling himself over the wall and snatching up the two bags. He slung them over his shoulders and darted down through the gully and up the street. I watched as he dodged between two cars in the parking lot and disappeared behind a van. Then he emerged, still sprinting, bags swinging at his sides. He scampered all the way down the sidewalk and disappeared again behind a row of shrubs. I looked to the other end of the parking lot and there they were, two rent-a-cops in golf carts veering around the bend. The Gestapo.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

My whole apartment squirmed. I went to the front door and looked through the peephole. Nothing. "Boom! Boom! Boom!" A face quickly rose up and as it drew close, the nose grew larger and the eyes narrowed. Boozehound. He looked the same as I remembered except for his hairstyle, which had reduced itself to a combover (fit for a politician). I opened the door and he bowled past me with his bags.

"Shut the door! Shut the door!"

I shut it.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked.

"Hold on," he said, panting. He set his bags on the floor and put his hands on his knees, then looked up at me. "Didn't your brother... tell you... I was coming?"

"What?"

"Yeah, we talked about it last weekend..."

"Huh?"

I found out later they did talk about it the prior weekend, but there were never any plans made. Anyway, that was all moot now. Boozehound had come all the way up from Miami and needed a place to crash for the night. That was alright with me. It was just... "Who is this desperado?"

The Gestapo never found out either.

(2)

We drank at my apartment for a while, and ended up going to this dingy little honky-tonk in Davie (because it was cheap, one of Boozehound's themes). We drove his BMW there and parked in the gravel lot. It was dusty and full of pick-up trucks, motorcycles, RV's. When we got out of his car, he wiped his fingers on the hood and showed me the dust.

"I just waxed this thing," he said with a wry grin.

"Oh yeah?"

We went inside. We sat beneath the big American flag at the horseshoe bar and waited around for the barmaid. Finally this burly-looking biker-broad in stretchpants and a lime-green tube-top appeared.

"What'll it be sweetheart?"

"Two Turkey and Cokes," I said. "Doubles."

We waited some more. She was fumbling with some glasses in the sink. Then someone else got her attention and she sucked a heavy drag from her slender Menthol and started talking to him. I got up, checked the juke - Merle Haggard, Tex Ritter, more Tex Ritter. Hank Snow. The machine presently shook a little and the lights on it went out. A skinny redneck wearing a t-shirt with Dale Earnhardt's face jumping out of the front had the cord in his hand. He grinned.

"Band's about to play," he said.

I sat back down and the drinks were there. But I think the barmaid forgot to put Coke in them. It seemed like it anyway. Fire water. We started off slow and worked up the pace.

"Ya think I'm overdressed?" asked Boozehound, adjusting his collar. He was all pleated and pressed, looking every bit the errant tax-accountant. Everyone else in the place was dressed casually - shorts, torn jeans, rags, including me.

"Nah..." I said. "They'll never know."

He nodded, peered around cynically. He gulped his drink. Then he went into this long spiel about his wife. He told me all about their storybook wedding, all about the idyllic honeymoon in Cancun, and the father-in-law who hated him and how the marriage quickly devolved. He was in Tallahassee and she in Miami when it happened. "The coup de gras," he said. He'd gotten a rotten hunch in his gut and suspected something, so he spent an afternoon or two guessing passwords. Finally he figured it out. Something about FSU, Chief Osceola, and a birth date. He clicked through her emails and there it was: "Oh Max, I can't wait for you to hold me in your arms. Our bodies are so perfect together. As soon as I get out of this fool marriage of mine, I promise you..."

"It's over now," he said. "I'm just waiting for the papers to go through. Here she is..." He dug his fingers into his wallet and pulled out her photo.

"What do you think?"

"She's pretty," I said.

"She's alright," he countered. "She looks a lot better in real life. She never takes good pictures. It must be that her soul comes out in photographs. The camera must somehow capture her soul."

Next to Boozehound sat a brutish-looking oaf with a head like an hog. He kept peering over at us and twisting up his lips, his big lantern-jaw pummeling a tiny wad of chewing gum.

"What's up?" I said.

He chomped. "I've had this gum in my mouth for two days straight, huh."

Boozer and I laughed.

"I'm serious," he said. "Longest I ever went was four days..."

Just then, the bar dimmed and red and green footlights lit up the stage. The band, which was a ragtag trio of yokels, had a lead singer who looked like a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Don Knotts. In basketball shoes.

"Y'all like David Allen Coe?" he shouted.

"Raaaawwwwwwooooorawww"

He strummed his guitar and the drums pounded and the sounds whirled. The dance floor quickly filled up with bodies. They leaped and swayed and pranced around, any number of fairies, gargoyles, carnies, yetis. It was as if the soul of the bar had suddenly expressed itself in a throbbing ring of half-lit subhumanity.

But the hogshead had its mucous-colored eyes affixed on Boozehound. He jabbed his own chest with his thumb. "I used to be a pro-am boxer in my twenties," he said. "Name's Guy... Bogart."

Boozer smiled politely and looked away.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, huh! Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

Boozer looked.

"Watch this..." Guy wrapped his big meatfist around his mug and chugged his whole beer... Only a small streamlet of froth dribbled onto his shirt. "Huh?"

I congratulated him for his "feat" and offered to buy the next round. It came pretty fast, this time. The three of us toasted and again he rested its eyes on Boozehound.

"Like I was saying... I boxed pro-am. I could rearrange that whole face of yours if you wanted me to..."

"No thanks."

"Ya think I'm lyin?"

"I never said that, I just said no thanks..."

Guy reached up and wrapped his large mitt around the upper portions of Boozer's face and a good part of his combover. He jiggled it slightly. "All this?" he said. "Nothin." Then he let go and stuck out his thick index finger. He pushed it deep into Boozer's chin. "But this?" he said, tapping sharply. "This here's nothin but glass, ya see."

A couple minutes later the two of them were standing up in the corner and Guy was giving Boozer a boxing tutorial. It looked more like tai chi though, or libido-charged grappling. It went on and on.

"There ya go... now bend your knees a little, huh... ya know what a rope-a-dope is?"

"It's you," I said.

I got up and went off to the bathroom. There was a long line at the urinal and some guy was crapping in the stall, which had no door. When I finally came out, there was a small stampede rushing towards the corner and a ring around Boozehound and his tutor. Guy, whose loose large mouth had blood leaking from it, rolled up his sleeves and was setting up. He took a heavy swing and missed. Then he came back with two swift uppercuts and Boozer, whose drunken feet seemed rooted in the floor, whose expression was utterly dead-pan, gyrated his torso about and in one fluid motion, dodged both shots. It couldn't have been choreographed any better.

"I'll kill you, you sonofabitch!" shouted Guy. "Huh!" His entire being oozed with fury. He came back with a straight jab and another uppercut. Boozer ducked both and spun around. He slipped through a hole in the crowd behind him, and I plowed my way around the horseshoe and wrapped my arm around his neck.

"He's really drunk," I announced. "I'll get him out of here."

We waded through the people and got in his Beamer and skidded out of there. Apparently Boozer had accidentally landed a shot during his "lesson."

"I think you're my hero," I said.

I was finally beginning to understand. Something.



(3)

Boozehound hung around at my place that whole first weekend, sponging beers and playing poker, and then he disappeared for a couple of years, mostly. I think I saw him maybe two or three times. In the meantime, I met Shannon, and she and I moved into a little 1950's Florida home in a little waterjerk town that called itself Boynton Beach. I liked it much better than living in a gated compound, but there was one thing I did miss - the gate - which, with the exception of desperados like Boozehound, was pretty good at staving off not so much criminals (I had nothing for them), but rather The Unwanted, Unannounced Visitor.

It became a problem.

I was an unabashed lover of solitude, and often, when I was alone, I would shut all the blinds, turn off the phone and escape into my own faraway thoughts or those of my favorite scribes - Seneca, Montaigne, Goethe, Schopenhauer, etc... It was wonderful when it lasted, but alas, there was always and invariably and to-be-sure the inevitable jackass who'd come along and murder the dream. And since this person (whoever it was) couldn't climb through the phone and get at me that way - sometimes for several days - he would take it into his head that my love of solitude was really loneliness, and that I was somehow craving his companionship, that I'd benefit from it even, whether I knew it or not. The truth is he didn't give a good goddamn what I knew. The truth is he was just bored with himself and needed someone to offgas his deathly inertia upon.

The real problem was my carport. If I had a garage, my vehicle would've been hidden away, and he never would've known my whereabouts. But he always seemed to know. And for some reason - at first anyway - when he came knocking on my door I felt strangely obligated to answer him. I'd invite him in for beers sometimes.

It was my fault. I was too accommodating at first, and didn't quite understand the mind-set of the pest. I didn't understand that if you give him something which appeals to his senses (beer) you will never get rid of him.

He will keep coming back again and again, like an invasive species.

In the end I just played dead in my room and stopped coming to the door. That pretty much solved it.

(4)

It was a Friday afternoon, and I'd gotten home early from work. I pulled the blinds, turned my house into a cave. Then I went deeper into my cave. I climbed into bed and threw the sheets over me. I tried to sleep. I couldn't. I couldn't write either (sometimes I wrote in bed). So I grabbed a tome off the dresser - Schopenhauer's masterpiece and my sort of bible, The World as Will and Representation - and thumbed leisurely through some of the finer passages...

Then it happened. There was a knock on the door and I ignored it. Then there was more knocking and nothing and then a loud bang resounded from the kitchen and the jalousies rattled.

"Hello?"

The voice was in the house. I heard crisp footsteps clicking across the terrazzo floor. They got closer, and then my bedroom door flew open. Boozehound had the knob in his hand.

"Que tal...?" he said.

He dropped his bag (his anchor), and there was nothing I could do.

We drank beers in front of the TV for a while, and a little later, when Shannon came home, we decided we'd all go out for dinner and drinks. First she had to get ready though, and while we waited, Boozehound, who had been telling me all about how his latest relationship folded, discovered a slight crease on the front of his shirt. He tried to smooth it out with his hand, and when that didn't work he requested an ironing board. We didn't have one.

"I don't believe in them," I said.

"Then how do you iron your clothes?"

"I don't do those kinds of things."

"Iron?"

"No."

"What?"

Shannon eventually scrounged him up a little traveling iron and he took off his shirt and as he went to work on the kitchen table, I came to understand that ironing was a magical and sacred pastime for him. It was full of gamble, and all sorts of glorious half-hidden horizons. It made him feel like he was truly in charge of the game, laying it on just right, giving every last uppity crease its proper dressing-down...

When he finally finished, he slung the shirt over a chair and let it cure.

Then he strode through the house in his wife-beater, his big swishing bags of immaculate slack, and these thin blue socks.

"You look really fit Boozehound," Shannon said.

She was sitting with me on the sofa and we were waiting for him to finish up. He grinned and thanked her, then grabbed a comb out of his bag and went for the bathroom. When he came out he did a running slide across the terrazzo, ala Tom Cruise. He did it three more times, each one less necessary the last, and then he threw on his shirt and we left.

(5)

We went to a seafood restaurant at the marina, and sat where we could watch boats as they twinkled up and down the intracoastal. Some of them glittered with Christmas lights and garlands and wreaths and the people all waving as they passed by.
We ordered conch stew and king crab and beers, and Boozehound regaled us with tales about his latest girlfriend, a school teacher. He spoke of their arguments and her idiosyncrasies, like how she collected coasters and snow globes and dragged him to yard sales every weekend. And there was a problem with her grammar. She often said "me and my friends," for instance, instead of "my friends and I," and he embarrassed her once by correcting at dinner-date with some friends, telling her, "mistakes like that are impermissible for a school teacher."

But she was the one who ended it, it seemed.

Something about vanity and the sex wasn't very good. He just wasn't that attracted to her, he said. She had a really pretty face, but this outsized rump he just couldn't get behind. And then the minute little blond hairs striding across her upper lip and how once when they were kissing, he felt a slight prickling sensation and made too much of it when he couldn't make it work.

Still, he considered himself a perfectly marvelous lover, what with his big uncircumcised crank, but he could only maintain these partial erections, he admitted, and that was part of his appeal: "I'm one of those guys," he said, "who can go all night long... without so much as coming."

Shannon seemed a little put-off by that comment, and I knew what she was thinking, but she liked at least one thing about Boozer - that he could open up about the minutia and goings-on in his relationships. Most men couldn't. I couldn't. I was never any good at that. I preferred thinking about other things, and letting my relationships slide. I was selfish like that, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't interested in matters of fact. I found them depressing. It was much easier playing the writer and hiding in my vices and artistic pursuits. That's why Shannon was good for me. She understood, and wasn't too demanding. She was also ultra-independent.

Anyhow...

Later that night, when the restaurant started clearing out, the bill came and Boozehound, who'd also been telling us about his job with the state and how profitable his rental properties were, offered to pay. But when he pulled out his wallet, he saw there was no cash in any of his secret nooks and crannies and asked if an ATM was nearby.

"Don't worry about it," said Shannon. "We'll get it."

"You sure?"

We were sure.

"Just on thing," I said. "You might wake up tomorrow morning in a stolen ambulance next to a dead deer..."

The legend of Boozehound.

He'd never live it down, he said, and to prove it, he snagged the Santa hat off the waitress's head and waved it around. Then he sweetly crooned to her:

"Maybe it's the clothes she wears
Or the way she combs her hair
Oh that makes me want to tell her that I care
Don'tcha know that she's just my style?
Ev'rything about her drives me wild..."


(6)

I saw Boozehound only sparingly in the following weeks and months. We had a minor falling out and it happened like this:

I saw him out at a bar in Ft. Lauderdale one night and we were both drunk and he needed a ride home. He didn't want to spend the money on a cab, so we piled into my car and as we drove down Federal Highway, I mentioned something about philosophy. I tended to philosophize sometimes when I was drunk - a bad habit by almost anyone's standards - but I had this theory about possessions and clinging to things... that there was death in that, and he didn't agree.

"The most important thing in life," he said, "is comfort."

"Comfort's overrated," I said. Then I gave him a few undeniable examples, and he kept playing the role of the devil's advocate and trying to berate me, which was alright, but his motives were obvious.

"I know you're just a country-clubber at heart," I said.

He didn't agree with that one either, and eventually he tried to turn the whole thing into an argument. An angry one. Finally I said, "Just forget about it... I was only throwing something out there... let it go..."

But in the Taco Bell Drive-thru, it only got worse. I pulled up to the menu-board and ordered my regular soft taco, chicken Chalupa and beef Meximelt. Then Boozehound began placing his order. I say "began" intentionally. For him, there was a beginning, a middle and an end to the placing of any order. It was a never-ending process: "I'd like a chicken Gordita, but if you could hold the peco... no wait, hold the lettuce... you people always put too much lettuce on your stuff. Oh, and... I'd also like a taco supreme, uh, no sour cream on that... extra... peco, uh, and...could you please...?"

I couldn't take it anymore. "That's good enough!" I said. I jumped on the pedal. "No Mike! Nooooooooooo!" I slammed on the break and skidded up to the window. Then he brutally shoved me aside, cursing, and ordered everything again just the way he liked it.

But after we left, there was a problem with hot sauce - his little delicate cakehole couldn't endure the treacheries of hot sauce - so I grabbed all the mild and opened up the window.

"Nooooooooo!"

I let it fly.

(7)

2007

I ran into Boozehound several times over the next few years. Once at the Hollywood Casino, once outside an Ethiopian diner in Miami Beach, and I saw him at a few different bars a few different times too. He was going through some kind of personal crisis. I heard about it from a mutual friend of ours. It had to do with his vanity. He was turning forty and having a really hard time with it. He kept getting into petty disputes with people in public places, and one of his former colleagues tried to choke him at a city commission meeting. Also, he'd become somewhat of a serial internet dater. He had his bio and a few photos of himself smiling out of a heavenly backdrop (they were taken in a portrait studio), plastered up on various websites and he was trying his hand that way.

The last time I saw him was at a Saint Patrick's Day celebration in Delray Beach. I was in a little Irish bar a couple blocks from the parade, when I noticed him tooling through the parking lot in a new candy-apple red ragtop Jeep. A few minutes later, he strolled into the bar. He was all got up in safari clothing, pockets and strings hanging everywhere, wide, bullying waterproof pants, his feet shod in a pair of big golliwog jungle boots. Gone were the days of pleated trousers and Polo shirts, replaced by what appeared to be his newfound admiration for fur trappers and the bludgeoners of game.

"If it isn't Crocodile Boozehound," I said.

He smiled at that one and sat down beside me. But when I introduced him to the barmaid as Boozehound, he corrected me, saying he preferred to be called Matthew now. The Boozehound thing was passé, he said.

"An old college nickname," he told the barmaid.

Then he ordered a chicken potpie and a draft. We drank several drafts throughout that afternoon, and our conversation was mostly amicable at first, but eventually it turned speculative and something turned on itself. It began when he said that people are going to keep getting smarter as time goes on.

"How do you figure?" I asked.

"Because there's gonna be more to know. More history, more technological innovations. More information for the mind to acclimate itself to."

"And distract itself with," I said. "Too much information can be distracting."

"How so?"

"If it's not processed correctly, and used wisely, it's useless and distracting. Wisdom is more important than knowledge."

"Yeah, but who says you can't have both?"

"You can," I said, "but most people don't. Most people would rather know how many poisonous snakes there are in North America, than understand what Pascal had to say about salvation. It's just the way it is. People don't want to think. They want to know. They want diversions too. And the more accessible they are, the dumber people will get.

He didn't agree. He said his theory was more in line with Darwinian thinking,
and mine was only "half-baked," and didn't hold water.

"Have you read Darwin?" he asked. "Well I have! I've read Darwin!"

"The people will get smarter as time goes on!" he insisted.

When happy hour was over, the barmaid, who had bought us a couple rounds, tallied up our final bill. She gave it to me and I showed it to Boozehound and he gave me a twenty, which covered his entire tab plus roughly five percent for a tip. Normally I wouldn't have said anything. Normally I would've paid the difference without even thinking about it, but I could see Boozehound was trying to slip one in, and I was sick of his penchant for chintzing out on bills.

"I think you owe a little more," I said. "When you're adding up your share, you can't forget about the taxes. As it is you're only giving her five percent... and she bought us a few rounds..."

"Oh c'mon..." he said. "You're gonna sit here and itemize the bill? Just pay it and lets get on with it."

"Listen, Boozehound..."

"It's Matthew. Call me Matthew."

"Listen Matt..."

"No you listen!" he said. He leapt off his barstool and shoved his wallet into his pocket. "I'm out of here." He pivoted around and stormed out the front doors. Then he barreled through the crowd and shouldered out into the opening. And when he crossed the walkway, he came out into the lights of the street and a heavy wind ruffled his combover, his hugely voluminous corn sack pants dancing with anger.

"Call me Matthew!" they seemed to scream.

End of legend.