Lazy Friday in Lawrence
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clavonec@excite.com
Subject: Lazy Friday in Lawrence
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 14:08:36 CDT
Some days you have it and some you just simply don't. This is one of those "don't have it" days, so expect little from the Dickens and you'll not be all that disappointed.
But...a lovely day here in old Lawrence town. I rode across the bridge this morning around 9:30, and the light was marvelous to behold. A few bicyclists on the levee, no walkers. It's that time of year when the kids are hitting the books, dreaming of MBA's and fixed-rate mortgages. There are times when I can hear Joan Baez singing, "What have they done to the rain?"
I ran into Paul earlier, big-bellied Paul who always reminds me of the big-bellied oriental clown character. Jovan? And he is a clown, jolly, a drunk. Just got out of jail, he told me.
For what? I ask.
Just walking along drunk. Well, not drunk, but the cops said I was. Plus I had this little wooden pipe I found they said was drug paraphenalia. Hash pipe. You know how long it's been since I've run into any hash?
Awhile, I venture.
A gawddamn long time, he says.
And there it is again, that denominator so common to those who move at this particular level: alcohol.
Why do you drink? Cuz I'm depressed. Why are ya depressed? Cuz I drink.
That vicious little cycle which is unrelenting. I think of the description of the Terminator, how it is relentless, focused, alert, and how it will never, never stop until it utterly consumes and kills you.
I don't mention this to Paul. He knows all that in some kind of offhand theoretical way, but of course it really doesn't apply to him.
A month or so ago we heard a street person had overdosed down in one of the city parks. I'd, in fact, ridden by where the crime scene tape had been stretched out to keep the curious away; and I'd seen the outline of the body there on the grim concrete. So strange, a little white line-drawing within which a life could fit. Or a death.
At work someone said, I heard the guy's name was Paul.
So we all began thinking it was "our" Paul. First thing we knew someone was making plans to run out and get some kinda card and what kinda floral arrangement ya think we should git?
It wasn't our Paul, of course, but so quickly and easily our minds rolled down that little groove. It made so much sense. It could easily have been him.
I'm thinking these things as I sit next to him, asking all the right questions without being too intrusive. He is fair skinned, a light dusting of freckles. There was a time when he was someone's cute and darling boy, but those times are in the distant past and even more rapidly receding. Now he's a man of the streets, a master of the boxcar circuit, a guru in his own way, a marble rolling down a groove.
He's talking about this little center which has recently opened up.
Acceptance House, he says. Opens at 2:30 and you kin do yr laundry and they's coffee and you kin jist hang, y'know? Spent the night there last night. Cook even, if ya want.
And ya want coffee of a morning? Jist come on in, at's what I do. Ain't supposed to, but I do it anyways. Down there by the hospital, Maine Street. Yella House. Cain't miss it.
He's just out of jail, yes, and none to happy with the judge.
Judge sending me back to the damn meetings again. Gimme all these papers to git signed. Judge sez, I wanna see them papers signed or yr ass is going back to jail for 90 days.
He sighs. Well, guess I gotta do it. Don't wanna go back to jail.
Renee rides up, girl's bike, red, newish looking. She's way far gone in the pregnancy, remembers my name though we've spoken but a few times. Dickens, she says. How are you?
Renee.
She used to ride the rodeo, a tough little woman of silence and longdistance staring. She looks through people, walls, cities, decades, to something of interest the rest of us cannot see, dragging on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out ever so slowly.
I can see her in her cowgirl outfit, ten years younger and just bordering on beautiful, big ole hat, quirt, and a quarter horse from hell. I can see her whipping the reins on the withers, leaning into the turns, at one with that gawddamn crazy beautiful piecea hossflesh. Renee. She sits, lights a cigarette, looks decades away and through. Present but unaccounted for.
There's a story there, but one she will not disclose. There is a wall which goes up justlikethat. No one really knows what lies inside. She remains an enigma, another baby on the way. She looks away and through us all. Are we really here?
~~~~~
I thought last night about "Howling Boy," how somehow the computer chopped off the first two-thirds of it and just sent the fragment along to you. And the overwhelming image I am left with of that brain-damaged little ebony boy lying in the arms of Holding Grandmother is that of...Pieta. A poor man's Michaelango. Pieta.
And I continue to think of the Lawrence poem which simmers way over there on the back burner.
Yesterday, Lesbian Becky at the table eating a sandwich, crying the blues. Her lover Michelle tried to beat her up again a couple of nights ago and is now in jail.
Dickens, she cries. I keep trying and trying and she's just can't seem to get it. And every time she gets drunk she comes at me and tries to beat the shit out of me, and I am just so sick of that. I've been beaten up by her just one time too many. I can't do it anymore.
Michelle. Tall, strong, polite, soft when sober, harsh, cruel, sadistic, evil when drinking. Will the real one please stand up? And will the unreal one please just go away?
Square peg, round hole, I say.
We were housemates not that long ago. I've seen Michelle when possessed, just as I've seen her sober. From this, the Evil Twin metaphor must have emerged. Two totally different personalities inhabiting the same body.
In jail.
I'm not gonna lie about this, Becky says. The judge asks me what happened, I'm not gonna lie about it. She may end up doing a year, and maybe that's what she needs.
Perhaps. I don't want in this thing. I think Michelle ought to be locked up for at least a year, yes, and have some time just to look at where this thing is taking her. But it's none of my business and Becky would be sure to say, "Well, Dickens agrees that...." and Michelle would take that and hide it within where all her hurts and paybacks are hidden.
I want no more of it. I have felt Michelle's poison, even whilst she was sober. One of the rare few she emerged for.
And it's not quite two in the afternoon here; a great laziness upon me, and a sense of being not quite sure as to what to do with me for the rest of the day. I need to read poetry. There is a world of books which I need to read.
Last night Cathy said, your writing reminds me of Robert Creeley.
Who? I ask.
She reads a poem by him which I don't much care for, then another which I like a lot.
Well, I say, hmmmmmm. Amazing, the insights that come to me at times.
I have no idea where any of this is going. I received another letter from a lady in Tulsa who got around to writing nearly a week after I'd left town. And I've written a couple of ladies here in Lawrence and in the Kansas City area.
The Circle expands, and not all are happy about that.
I am tired today. Perhaps that explains it. Just Pure-Dee tired. Tired of the underbelly of Lawrence seeking me out, adjusting my shoulder just so, then laying their lachrymose heads upon it. Tired of being therapist to those who already know the answer. Tired of forever being there for them and being utterly unable to speak my heart to them. Wearied to the point of silence.
You're so quiet, Sandy said. Not the Dickens I knew. What is it?
I don't know, I tell her. I just seem to have lost something.
It will come back, she says.
Yes, perhaps.
In the meantime, there is what remains to do next. One foot in front of the other. Hut two three four and allthat.
I feel so utterly alone.
Even though now there are people everywhere I turn who know me, who talk, who sometimes even listen as I tell tales of Tulsa, Muskogee, Ft. Smith, and that which lies beyond all of them.
But to talk of those things is to exercise that sleight of hand. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He has nothing to say, anyway.
Ain't self-pity something else?
Grin.
Luvya,
Dickens
