A strange and foreign place lost in a reverie and you walk nowhere or anywhere and think nothing. You’re prepared to see any sort of wonder or gape like an imbecile at the most mundane thing because it’s news to you. Wogs or supermen or ghosts or something live here. The stone is not just stone but hard stone and your foot wears it away like Caesar and Michelangelo and Savonarola and all the nobodies did. You look like you belong here but you don’t. You walk and you look at everyone and everything and here you’re the child who can’t even ask for what you want and don’t know what anything is for and everyone is your friend and a stranger all at once and you are in in their thrall.
Then there’s this carousel in the middle of nowhere if this is nowhere how would I know with no one on it and it’s just there with no hint of a reason for it there are no children. There it is a world spinning empty. It doesn’t belong there and you don’t belong there and you stand there accusing one another of nothing. It serves only to remind you that your children are out of sight across an ocean and you weep for yourself and you weep for a whole goddamn continent that sent its children across an ocean never to return.
{Author’s Note: I forgot all about it. What’s the chances anyone else remembers it? There is no editor.}
Would you like to take a turn? No thanks. Would you like some punch? Have some. My name’s Gil Mine’s not. Mind if I sit down? No more than you standing there. They have cake. I baked it. I like your dress. It’s my mom’s. I’ll tell her. I like your permanent wave. It won’t last. Your eyes are a pretty color. Both of them? I think I know your friends. Perhaps you could introduce us. I’ve got a job in the mill now. Your fingernails told me that. I was on the football team in high school. Good thing we didn’t dance. I… I… Ahoy, mate. Can I walk you home? I’m not leaving.
Ya see, the young man comes in and he don’t know nothin’. That’s a given.
Well, not precisely nothin’. He knows all sorts of things. It’s just that everything he knows isn’t so, or ain’t worth a fart in a whirlwind to know. Useless.
But a young man ain’t born useless. You got to make him so. A young man is born to be a boon to his fellow man and a credit to his parents, if his parents don’t pay too much attention to him and ruin him. Let him be.
They come all in here, extravagant of hair but miserly with manners. They want to start right in being something. Son, you’re an unthrowed pot. Stand up straight and listen.
You see, you ain’t born knowing, and you can’t learn it in a book. How you gonna know to put fabric softener in the steam box to make the oak come out of there real withy and limber? Your grammar school teacher don’t tell you that out there in the real world you gotta use the ceiling for a brace for the inner stem while you make down the bolt.
Oh the smart ones come in, though, not as often as you’d like but often enough, and just remind you how dumb you were when you were their age. They’re young and handsome and clever and the whole world stretches out to their horizon. You’re already on the horizon and you know it. And you think to yourself how wise that boy is to come in here and stand up straight there with the wrong clothes and a box of the wrong tools, and not enough of them, and his hands like his momma’s –smart enough to say “I don’t know nothin’ but I’m willing to learn if you’ll show me.”
{Author’s Note: And deeper in debt. There is no editor}
I wouldn’t put my finger in that change return slot if there was fifty bucks in it. The greasy handset, battered by a numberless army of salesmen and lovers, hangs like a murderer on a gibbet over the thing. Let the bums get it. She said she’d come. I’m not calling her any more.
I loved the feeling of the neon glowing on the side of my face in there. Don’t tell me it’s just light. I feel it like the sun. It’s the only sun I’ll ever acknowledge. The one in the morning rises alone. Mine rises when the manager flips the switch. It never sets on me, that sun.
Man, that scirocco of sweat and booze and cigs and breath like a welder’s tank. I feel like I’m born again, from a mummy’s womb. Straight on in, just like the music.
The stage is exactly three inches and a galaxy away from the dance floor. Dance? Please. Stumble around with a woman that ain’t your wife floor, I think. I like the old dude that looks like Batman’s butler or a fruity sort of baron or something that conducts or sways or whatever it is he’s doing. He’s possessed with it, same as me. He’s usually possessed of plenty of cake, a desire to buy a man a drink, and an aversion to arithmetic, too. The waitresses adore that.
The curtain is dirty from wiping your hands on it. Me included. It’s dirty like life is. Up high, it’s dirty with cobwebs and dust and corruption because you can’t reach up there. Down low it’s dirty with the grubby hands of all of us trying to wipe off the sweat and grease of what you’re doing.
I listen for the cornshucks of the brushes on the snare. He hits it, but I don’t care about that. In between — the faint circular sketching he does without thinking — that’s what I’m after. He’s lathering the dry face of the song so I can shave it with the sharp edge of the brass. The bass rumbles like thunder in the distance.
I can taste metal and blood and booze in my mouth. Tastes like life.
My family has cabin fever. If it was summertime we could go for a walk somewhere, and I’d waste all my time taking pictures, and the kids would run like colts, and my wife would herd us all. It’s just cold and dreary here and we rattle around in our house. I can paw through old artifacts of trips outside, if nothing else.
I’ve walked down Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island many times since just after the first picture, from the Library of Congress, was taken in 1963. My brother lived on various addresses on Benefit Street while going to RISD in the late sixties. It was ill-advised to help a college student move back then. All they owned was books and vinyl records, and they kept them all on shelves made from concrete blocks and planks. And they never lived on the first floor.
Benefit Street was a dump back then, and is very much not a dump now. I took the second picture on a walkabout a couple of summers ago. It’s gratifying to see old things that made it. We routinely lose structures like that to the wrecking ball or in a pillar of smoke from a renter’s candle.
This one is called the Harris House. 1767, or so it appears from various deed records. There was an assortment of houses built on the property, and references to this property might be talking about structures long gone. The 1960s picture shows a sort of vestibule that was is out of place on the house, a testament to the the occupants freezing in the uninsulated house in the winter and making concessions to practicality. It’s removed now.
It straddles the timeline seam between Georgian and Adam colonial architecture. The doorway is the most common Georgian door I could name. The small entablature over the windows is more common on Adam style. It hasn’t lost much, but it could use the shutters back. It’s got storm windows instead. Real shutters are fabulously expensive to buy and maintain now. People are used to not seeing them on houses like the Harris house, but I find it mildly jarring, like a woman that has shaved off her eyebrows. Shutters add an enormous amount of depth, shadow, and rhythm to a facade, and are an opportunity to add a dashing dash of color that the lonesome door must shoulder alone now.
Regular people used to design and build their own houses with little more than a few pattern books and some common sense. Postmodernism killed any sort of discriminating eye for architecture the general public might have had. Pastiche supplanted a set of rules, and we lost both the original knack for vernacular building along with the frame of reference that would warn the potential builder: this looks goofy. How many houses in suburbia will make any visual sense to someone 250 years hence? Not many. People like Stephen and Abigail Harris used to achieve it almost without thinking. I’m not sure we can do it any more, even if we tried.
We don’t really try. I’d pay real money to live in the Harris House, lead paint, sketchy wiring, intermittent plumbing and all. You couldn’t give me a snout house on a typical suburban lot, no matter how much plastic you bang onto it. A house is more than a box to live in.
Or, it used to be, anyway.
Month: February 2008
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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