Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Not Sleeping Some nights you'd sit there tracking moonlight across the floor, or studying the garage roof next door as if it was a radar screen. Your mind on a very low flame, a few tired words alternately see-sawing in the silence or surfacing through the waves of static. You'd sit there barely conscious, but the moment you'd try to climb into bed and close your eyes the whole chorus would convene again with a vengeance. The variety show of hypnagogia. Channel surfing long before the advent of cable television and remote control. So random, stuttering, and relentless was your consciousness in those hours that you would make an exercise of trying to isolate a particular fragment, and then attempt to concentrate your mind on the fragment's origin, trying to trace it back, if possible, to its original source. Sometimes it would be a line from a book or a television commercial, other times it might be something you'd overheard in school, or a snippet from a song or a random conversation. You would find yourself obsessing about an outrageous pair of shoes you had seen on a complete stranger in a grocery store, weeks earlier. Ultimately, towards dawn, you were always left with nothing but the barely-beating heart of the sleeping world. The under-hum and throb of its basic operating systems. The furnace. The ticking of the clock. The world on the back burner, as close as the modern world comes to stasis: You were left with only you and what was left of the night, the retreating darkness, shadows receding on the walls, the cruel pinch of exhaustion, the terrible reality that you were going to have to sleepwalk through another lost day. What was that they were saying about what? Eventually, every night you would reach a point where you could not fall asleep but you could nonetheless not be truly awake. You were reduced to fumbling around, grasping, in a dense and hazy subterrannean no man's land, lost in the gauzy, impressionistic foothills of sleep. You would take a walk to try to resuscitate your sanity, to get clear thoughts moving again in your head. You moved in slow motion through a woozy, muslin-filtered border country, imagination and hallucination bleeding into reality. You heard what sounded like chanting. You heard the clanking of a cowbell. You heard the distant tolling of a clock, and a burst of faint music sucked from a car window somewhere out in the town. You heard a baby crying, then someone laughing, wretching, congested laughter. You heard a radio playing in a junkyard. You heard what sounded like a piano. You heard windchimes twisting in a backyard somewhere. You heard the barking of a dog, answered by another, in the next block. You thought of the men across town, in the slaughterhouse, exhausted on their feet in the slippery dead mess, blood bubbled everywhere, the tangy reek of animals being broken down into meat. You would go there from time to time to stand at the mouth of the tunnel that took the tired men to and from the slaughterhouse. You would stand there in the last of the darkness with a little collection can for UNICEF, and you would shake your can at the blood-soaked, broken-knuckled zombies as they plodded past blank-faced, clutching their empty lunchboxes, moving almost unconscious into the bruised light that was just then creeping into the eastern sky. 5:10:27 PM

My Wasted Years In Lawrence It took me a long time to find myself. That's the official family version, at any rate. And, sure, there was a period where I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I married a sea bass. My dog dreamed of climbing trees and did nothing but mope around the house all day. My neighbor kept coming over to the fence for what he called "little private one-on-ones, man-to-man stuff," which basically boiled down to when the hell was I going to mow my fucking lawn. I was in the Red Owl parking lot one day and some nut threw a can of beef stew at me and hit me right in the chin. I drove to the hospital for 16 stitches and the wound left a nasty scar. My wife grew too big for her dirty little tank and basically spent all of her time swishing around in the colored gravel at the bottom, a fish's version of running in place, I guess. I'd turn off all the lights and sit there on the couch staring at her as she trance-swam in the eerie blue-lit water of the aquarium. The dog seemed so depressed and lazy that one day I finally called this woman who I had seen on television who claimed she could communicate with animals. She didn't come cheap, I'll tell you that much; I had to fly her in from Santa Fe. And then she comes in and sits right down on the couch and says, "The poor fellow just wants to climb trees." "You didn't even speak to him," I said. "That was the first thing he said to me," she claimed, and then for like 45 minutes she just kept insisting that the dog wanted to climb trees. "I heard you the first time," I said. "That's it? That's all you can get out of him?" "That's all he'll say to me," she shrugged. "I'm sorry. Your dog has a one-track mind." Before she left she went over and exchanged hushed words with my wife, but I was pissed by this time, and since I insisted I wasn't paying her to talk with the fish she refused to disclose what she called the "private nature" of their conversation. 4:23:33 PM

My Old Barber Turns His Back On the 21st Century There's not much you'll see on a head anymore that I'm willing to do. An old barber is dependent on his regular customers, and for the last 15 years or so my customers have been dying like flies. I guess if you really want to ride the thing all the way out you'll make an effort to stay on top of the new hairstyles, but I'm one of those guys who doesn't like to cut what I don't like, and I haven't seen much that I like in the last ten years. So much of this shit is just beneath me. It's ridiculous. I'm not carving pumpkins and I'm not grooming poodles and I'm not fucking around with pony tails or braids. I get these catalogs anymore that have literally hundreds of different goops and gels and other such bullshit that will literally wreck the shit out of your hair. I don't intend to dye any man's hair any color other than the one God gave him, and if you want someone to play with your hair you can talk to your mother or your girlfriend. I'm a barber, not a hairstylist. I cut hair --I remove hair-- and if you want more than 20 minutes in my chair you're wasting my time. Some of these guys today are as bad as old women. They'll come in here and hand me a photograph of some actor or rock star, and I just look at 'em like they're fucking off their rocker. A barber's just another plastic surgeon, you know? Like I could make you look like fucking Montgomery Clift. Give me a break. It's all I can do not to crack some of these fruit loops with the damn clipper. If I could figure out what the hell is wrong with people I'd for damn sure be in a different racket, and maybe I'd actually have something to show for the last 40 years of my life. I've had people sit in that chair and spill their fucking guts --I'm talking stories that would make me blush if I told them to the bathroom mirror. You pick any old barbershop in this city, and if you had a videotape of every hair cut these guys ever gave you'd have a movie that would make people ashamed to be human beings. Honest to God, you wouldn't believe the garbage I've had to stand here and listen to every day. I've been saying this for years, but one of these days I'm just gonna pack up my shit and go fishing. 2:46:50 PM

My Brief History Of Magic (Continued) Oh, you can be sure, I've seen some dandy cigarette acts in my time. Make no mistake. That sort of thing is, of course, taboo these days, what with attitudes about smoking being what they are. But I still remember a fat redhead --for some damn reason I can't recall the fellow's name to save my soul-- who did a masterful bit he eventually marketed to the trade with the high-falutin' title, "Ireland Simplex Cigarette Production." And then there was Ed Marlo's brilliant "Cigars, Cigarettes, and Pipes" routine, which I saw a half dozen times in the early '70s. That guy did things with a cigarette I still can't believe are possible. As I was saying, I've always admired a man who can work without fancy props, stooges, or floozies. And despite what some of the Bible-bangers might think, magic doesn't have to be at odds with the teachings of the Good Book. I have fond memories of a fellow by the name of Joseph White, a magician who called himself "The Gospel Magical Midget," and did an entire act built around Bible stories and religious lessons. A very effective little production all around, a dynamite show, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly a holy man. Guys who could learn to perform basic routines with a Biblical theme or religious patter were guaranteed steady work at chuch funtions, socials, and Bible schools. I still remember when "Industrial Magic" was a new concept, and guys were learning that they could use magic presentations to sell product. In the mid-'60s it seemed like every trade show, convention, sales meeting, and grand opening featured a magic act. It was damn good business all around until the bottom pretty much fell out of the whole thing. These days they hire motivational speakers or they get half-dressed broads to stand around their booths to hand out promotional materials. I have a precise memory of the very moment magic first got me in its clutches. I was at a little carnival somewhere with my grandparents, and there was an aging illusionist who broke a slab of granite over the body of a catalepsed subject who was suspended from the backs of two chairs. "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Human Bridge!" the old magician shouted, and then he swung his sledge hammer. 12:05:09 PM

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