One mystic described the myth of the Medusa as a template of the lower mind. Should one stare too long at the hissing serpents, the sight reifies one into mechanical repetitions of one’s past. Thus, turning one into stone.
Imprisoned and petrified, one’s interior voice expresses its ever shifting vacuities in fanciful grotesquery, defrauding the better mind. Terrifying and draining as these chimeras can be, they have not even the substance of the chirping of crickets in the Andes.
And so it starts with crickets.
The first cricket chirps: "I can’t talk right now, my nose is falling off. I must be Michael Jackson."
Despite Olympian thrashing to slap it away, the phone corkscrews into my ear like a chubby rat through a narrow drainpipe.
Many women describe my small bedroom, lined with a jumble of book stuffed milk crates, some wire and some red plastic, piled five high, as claustrophobic. They have told me this in sniffing or plaintive tones that indicate I should be grateful for their goddess like presence when they sleep with me. I am.
I punctuate their clutter (the cartons, not the women, of course.) with three mismatched shit brown Salvation Army dressers. My closest concession to Feng Shui is that I placed each at the approximate center of the three walls which besiege my bed. Said bed occupies the remaining wall.
None of the drawers in varying shades of tan quite shut. Socks flap out of the middle ones like amputated tongues scolding me for my negligent contributions to disorder. Although I can find anything I want at an hour’s notice, usually I need anything in less than a half hour.
Since my dreaming mind is far more orderly than my conscious acts, it takes one glimpse at this, and says to hell with the phone/alarm. I gather the comforters around me and curl into a fetal ball. It’s never too early to sleep late. My soul returns to higher orders of magnitude of disorder to put in order.
The second cricket chirps: A horde of gnats bites straight through the hallucination: lost in Summery Venice with a sun radiant brunette in a violet flower waltzing print summer frock. Her cheekbones are exquisite porcelain, and her green eyes beckon. Her smile is all daisies and stars.
I peer out from under my cozy chaos of blankets and comforters. A torn yellow shade covers the basement bedroom window. It faces west. This is a room where shadows rule in the morning. A night owl by nature, I like it like that.
A couple of red plastic milk crates stuffed with this month’s bedtime reading constitutes the headboard. Paradise Lost, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and Hometown Hookers: The Very Very Best of Hustler’s Reader Photos were last night’s entertainment. My bed itself is nothing more than the slats of a broken futon frame I dragged in of the streets.
Where the hell is the damn thing? It was just at my ear. Well, I guess God wants me to ignore all external stimulations, and get back to that receding dream whose tendrils still tickle my brain.
The third chirp: The gondolier is an Elvis impersonator singing Heartbreak Hotel.
Yet again, I curse myself for getting a phone/alarm that sounds exactly like the mating cry of the seventeen year cicadas that infest the trees in my neighborhood. Ever since their racket has taken over, I have slept through three wake up calls that cost me three write ups for lateness at work for the Greatest Music Retail Operation in the world.
But I am not late today. The big red LED tells me it’s not even seven yet. Probably a wrong number. Ignore it. I want my dream back.
The fourth chirp: I can still remember. We were speaking fluent Swiss and the words keep turning into flying steeple clocks with mozzarella feathers streaming behind. Venice turned into an Astoria Queens cul de sac tormented by dog feces, wind rustling newspapers, and corroded auto tailpipes.
I open my eyes again and think that if clutter were Indians, my name would be Custer.
The fifth chirp: I wanted her to understand how much I yearned for her and wanted to go to bed with her forever. The canals smelt like roses, so by now I know this has been an unusually compelling dream in its imploding death throes. The surest sign some fresh whiff of hell is dashing its way into- .
The sixth ring: My eyes finally completely half open to their breakfast of my dirty sheets and an overflowing ashtray.
"Hello?" Yeah and who put the hell in hello?
"It’s Norman the Neck, Weasel. We gotta talk. Now."
"Norman, what time is it?"
"It’s time for us to talk. Now."
"Norman, how long’s it been since I even thought about you? What are you doing just calling out of the blue? "
Jesus, Neck, it’s quarter after six in the fucking morning! Have you started smoking the crack your customers used to push?"
"Listen Weeze, it’s only been maybe five years, and I’ve loved you in my absence every fucking minute of them, but I gotta talk to you face to face."
"Yeah, sounds like you’ve been keeping an upstate sentence address. Allright already. Meet me at the bar over on fortieth when it opens at nine, for chrissake. Lemme at least wake up for this shit, whatever it is."
"Weeze, just throw anything the fuck on and get the hell out right now. I’m waiting in front of your house in a green teal Mercedes."
"A what?"
"And make it fast! In this shithouse you call a neighborhood, I’m sticking out like a six pack at the Mormon Tabernacle."
I jump out of bed. The Neck is not a Mercedes guy, so this has got to be shit deeper than a…just how deep is the ocean?
The guy’s one of those 300 pound naturals for a Cadillac, and built like a six foot five Mack truck. An acne scarred football for a head decked with a graying mullet stacked on top of a barrel of a body. Jesus, teal? He never even knew the meaning of the word last time I saw him. Probably would have figured it to be a sex act.
Yeah and what kind of guy is Norman? He called himself an entrepreneur. Nobody even knew if Norman was his real name, and nobody seemed to want to ask him. His last name seemed to change with each of the various business licenses he kept on file in the back. Come to think about it, I can’t even remember any of the fake names he used. You had a feeling for what you didn’t want to remember about him. That kind of guy.
He ran a bar in Greenpoint, Norman’s Nautical, and fed me for a year. Gave me gigs when "everybody else" said I was too crazy to employ. Of course, crazy is a term that often is applied when somebody does not want to admit superior originality. More mundanely, I was noted for professionalism and reliability. So much for crazy.
If I were a successful musician, I’m sure I would only have been eccentric. But poverty meant I was delusional, and should have been engaged in meaningful work, like flipping cancer burgers at a fast food restaurant.
To be honest, in some ways I suppose "everybody else" was right. The irony now is that six years later, most of "everybody else" is dead. Except me, and now, apparently Norm.
Two survivors of a part time low end eighties crew that numbered as many as forty in its heyday. A short, skinny two fingered jazz/rock guitarist, with a hollow cheeked, pasty face that makes you think of prison pallor. Flabby of belly to boot.
And Norman the Neck, proud owner of the Huge Red Cadillac of the Apocalypse. A true battle wagon of unsolved Brooklyn felonies. He didn’t pay me all that much for the gigs, but I didn’t draw that much as an artist.
However, more often than not he drove me home in the Red Monster, and bought us breakfast on the way. These journeys were not without memorable doglegs. Confucius say, thug who owns bar is thug who owes money. And thug who owes money is a thug who will be doing a lot of thugly favors on a phone call‘s notice. More often than not the threat proves mightier than the execution. And both threats and executions are after midnight affairs.
When you are looking at the favor driven job pool at this level of the crime food chain, only about one in ten will need more than just a confrontation and a verbal warning.
A typical example might be a business man who has developed a bad drug and gambling problem. He has had years of history before hitting the steep skids to the bottom. Beating him up will just give him excuses for other people he’s in the hole to. By and large you just stop in and pick up some collateral from his house.
On easy runs, which usually occurred after my musical gig at about four in the morning, Norm would wait with the car running in front of someone’s house. I would ring the bell.
On the strength of the sight of the dread red battlewagon of the Brooklyn felony Apocalypse, I walk away with the keys to the poor guy’s BMW, or some equivalent. They pay up in a day or two, and I get to drive for free.
Probably been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul for at least a half decade. It was Paul’s turn, and he was running late.
Get a good chuckle over coffee, and look forward to the payment for services rendered. Norman usually slipped me a fifty for the easy stuff.
Now and then came the ugly stuff. Here you were earning your money, and God help you if you got caught. Worst job was a scum from Staten Island. The man was a successful landscaper who made about 100K after taxes in 1987. Pretty good money indeed, unless you had gambled away 250K of it.
The gambling debt rolled into a loan, and within three months the loan was unmanageable. He still kept gambling. Norm’s boss confronted him about the money and offered him a pretty reasonable schedule to surrender collateral assets and eliminate the debt. I might even say generous vis a vis criminal precedents.
Trouble was this guy was way over on the dark side. He negotiated an extra twenty five thousand dollar line of credit against his interests on a twenty two year old prostitute. Basically a sex slave he claimed was an illegal he bought off the Jewish Russians over in Brighton Beach.
He showed him a collection of sexual action photographs that proved her to be beautiful beyond a doubt, unusually limber, and an erotic virtuoso. Norm’s boss went for it, and fronted ten thousand cash against delivery.
Trouble was that the chick turned out to be fifteen and was the bastard’s daughter. He’d had her turning since she was eleven. On top of that, Daddy had been doing her himself since she was ten.
Norm’s boss, Vincent, "The Razor", Razzivanno, wasn’t such a bad guy as thugs go. When the Staten Island asshole dropped his daughter off at the office so he could sample the merchandise, he did not expect Razor to talk to her afterward.
Nor did the asshole know that Razor had picked up by osmosis the soft spoken interrogation style of the old school Mossad from some of the Jews he did business with. He could have you singing your whole life story before he even realized what he was doing.
Which is what happened. She gave a pretty convincing twenty one, erotically precocious and old before her time. The whole little horror would have worked out, were it not for the Razor’s propensity to want to chat with any woman he spent any time with at all.
Her bogus accent fell apart, and after that, the poor kid was spilling her guts before he had even gotten his pants back on. The next thing was that Razor was on his knees puking his guts into the office toilet. He’d never done a kid before, even when he was a kid, and he was always very proud of that. Felt like his whole sense of honor had been violated.
A month later, Norm got the call.
"I want you to fuck this Staten Island asshole, like it’s Prom Night in Prison. I‘ve kept him on ice in Paterson while we repossessed everything he ever had. Even got his property signed over to that poor kid. Did I tell you I‘m thinking about adopting her? Anyway, I got him in locker twenty four in the spice warehouse over on North Third Street. He‘s wrapped up in a carpet and sleeping off a hit of heroin.
Pick him up and do him evil. Take him slow. Maybe you can get that weird little geek you use for music over there. Didn’t he do a couple of years in Belize on counter revolutionary shit? Have him do a Central American number.
Usual proof of performance, head and hands. There’s twenty five long in it for you. Maybe more if you get some videos, too."
More than once I had to steel my stomach with screaming mental reminders that appetite defied is puking denied. Talk about luck being superior to goodness.
Everyone else? Dead of the usual aggravated idiocies: drugs, bullets, AIDS, automobiles, and deals too good to be true. Moves that left no forwarding address.
A searing black hole of anxiety is tying knots in my empty stomach. And, yes, that is a tightening ring pole-axing me right at the last stop of the great Weasel digestive express. My past is back, and it’s a pit bull biting me in the ass.