She was never really my girlfriend. She was my occasional hook-up, I guess, my sometimes companion. Nothing more than that. A girl, true enough, but I don’t think she was ever really any kind of friend.
This story isn’t about her, anyway.
I was a month-old New York newborn, a 39 year-old infant who could only find Manhattan if I started from the F train stop at Smith & Ninth in Carroll Gardens. That’s where I lived – had been living – I’d just been booted, kicked to the curb. She needed some time to herself, some space to recover from her latest trying ordeal. I’d been in New York a month. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any place to go.
Those arguments were pointless, really, irrelevant and besides, her parents were visiting. Couldn’t I just be nice? I didn’t think I could, so I sealed myself up in a bubble of iPod ear-buds and went for a walk. Sunday night in Carroll Gardens – what could be safer?
Carroll Gardens is brownstones and baby carriages. Right? It’s tree-lined streets and charming cafes, old-school enough for the Italian men to still sit in lawn chairs on the sidewalk and wave like they know you but gently gentrified to the point where newcomers can wander the streets after sundown, oblivious to all but Billy Joel’s mournful, melodious ode to the girl who done him wrong and their own angst-addled thoughts.
Billy Joel. I guess I was asking for it.
When I was four years old, I was a wee little lad. To pee standing up, like a big boy, I had to stretch up on my toes and lay my little winkie on the lip of the commode. Once, in mid-micturation, the toilet lid fell and mashed my burgeoning manhood like a porcelain hammer. My dad ran into the bathroom in response to my hysterical hiccupping and valiantly suppressed his laughter long enough to comfort me. I thought I was dying.
My father loves that story. That night in Carroll Gardens, he called while I moodily marched up and down Smith Street. He wanted to know how I was doing, wanted to tell me how happy he was I’d finally moved to New York, wanted to tell me, even though I was a grown man and he was sure I was safe and smart, it was hard not to picture that tiny little kid with the wounded willy all alone in the great, big city. He sounded far away while we talked. He sounded old.
I told him I was fine, thanked him, dropped the phone in my pocket, and started back toward the apartment. I’d paid rent through the end of the month. Uncomfortable or not, it was the only place I had to go. I replaced the ear-buds and turned up the iPod as loud as I could take it. Lost in thought, head up ass, comforted by Billy’s declaration that “she’ll promise you more than the Garden of Eden / Then she’ll carelessly cut you and laugh while you’re bleedin’,” I started down the dark street beneath the elevated train tracks.
When I woke up on the sidewalk, two years sober, my very first thought was: “Am I drunk? How did I get drunk?” Then I saw the puddle of blood on the pavement, felt it dripping off my face, heard the ringing in my ears, the absence of music.
Educated
In the emergency room later, the nurse counted the wounds. Three blows to the left side of my head, the temple, my nose, the jaw. That was probably the one that took me out, being made of glass and all. And of course, there was the big bleeding knot on my forehead from pitching forward onto the sidewalk. The bloody bruise on top of my head, it seemed to her, could only be the result of someone kicking me while I was down.
I never even heard them coming. Didn’t see a thing except stars (really, just like in the comic books) and then a whole lot of nothing. I remember the electric buzz when they ripped the iPod out of my pocket and the earphone cable disconnected (they were still swinging from my ears when I woke up) and I remember hands, but that’s it. They got my iPod and my Zippo, but not my wallet or my phone. What I got was a $900 hospital bill, a concussion, and the surprised assurances of the cop and the EMT that “This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. It’s Carroll Gardens.”
The lesson I learned there on the sidewalk that summer Sunday night is one I should have learned thirty-four years earlier, one I think my dad was trying to tell me when he called, a hard lesson, but one I don’t think I could have done without. In life and love and living in New York City, it’s best to avoid situations where you are going to get your dick smashed.
All wrapped in white linen
Today, as uncounted multitudes throng the streets of Los Angeles for reasons both obvious and oblique, we here at All God’s Lonely Men would like to take this opportunity to express our condolences, as well, and mourn the passing of an entertainer extraordinaire, a showman the likes of which this world may never see again and, in doing so, perhaps reach a level of understanding that can help contextualize this great performers impact on, not only our society, but on our collective culture at large.
Joe Bowman, 84, of Houston, Texas, died on the road – as he had lived – just hours after completing a performance near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had stopped for the night in Junction, Texas, some 700 odd miles out of Albuquerque, 300 miles from Houston. He was almost home.
Joe Bowman was “The Straight Shooter.” Joe Bowman was “The Master of Triggernometry.” Joe Bowman was a sharp-shooting, fancy-roping, card-tricking teller of old west stories, a cowboy. And the world is poorer for his passing.
He could shoot out a piece of tape covering the hole over a washer thrown in the air. He could cut through the edge of a playing card at 30 paces. He could plug three shots into the center of a 50-cent piece in less than a second.
It was a heart attack that took him.
The Entertainer
Mr. Bowman was not born into a show business family. He was born the son of an auto mechanic. But as a child growing up in Asheville, North Carolina then later Houston, he and his older brother Mark consumed a steady diet of cowboy culture at the movie theater. They also consumed a steady diet of the cowboy code, of Tom Mix and Gene Autry morality, leading him to say later in life, “What I remember is the morality of the westerns and of the cowboys. That’s all that westerns were: morality plays.” Good and Evil (with the capital letters). Right and Wrong.
What did it mean to be a cowboy? According to Gene Autry (or at least the PR team who created content for his fan club) it meant 10 simple things.
Please note that #10 says “Patriot” and not “jingoist”.
Please note that cowboys are kind and gentle to small children, old folks, and animals. Please note that a cowboy respects womanhood and is free from racial and religious intolerances. Please note that a cowboy always tell the truth.
That’s not really that hard of a row to hoe, really, when you think about it. But in our present star-obsessed environ, where even the whiff of celebrity drives the crass culture-consuming public into some kind of love-hate ecstasy, made fat and angry by a steady diet of glossy tabloids and an internet redolent with tastelessness and barely contained hostility, the very idea of a man tipping his hat or helping a stranger or uttering those anachronistic examples of forsoothery, “Sir or M’am”, seems alien to us or, even worse, laughable.
Of Joe Bowman, his son Mark of Austin, Texas was reported to have said in his obituary, “Those old westerns were his whole value system. He lived by a code and saw things in a way that just doesn’t exist anymore.”
I spied a young cowboy
Even into his 80s, Joe Bowman was on the road, like a cowboy, perhaps lonesome but not lonely, entertaining, educating, enjoying. With two six-shooters, he could keep two targets in the air until he ran out of bullets. And when he talked, he told stories of a time, perhaps a golden-age as fictional as any, where right and wrong were subjects that mattered to men and the line demarking the difference was not to be crossed for pleasure or profit.
His son Mark said, “He could never quite accept a world in which Roy Rogers no longer counted.”
Gene Autry’s Code (along with other cowboy creeds including the vaguely disturbing The Lone Ranger’s Creed that includes the statement: “That a man should make the most of what equipment he has”) can be found at www.elvaquero.com/The_Cowboy_Code.htm
A memorial site for Joe Bowman: http://www.joebowman.com/
Foorsoothery may not necessarily be a real word, but I found it here to mean “an archaic term, especially as used in modern literature.”: http://phrontistery.info/archaic.html
God's Lonely Man
June 27th, 2009
All God’s Lonely Men
Today has been another New York Saturday. I got up early, around eight, took a shower, and left the apartment as fast as I could. I hate being in the apartment on the weekends. It’s too lonely. Just me and those books and the dirty floor and stacked up dishes. The loud music from the cars parked in front of the playground across the street, the mothers screaming at their children. Screaming at them.
I hopped the train into lower Manhattan, kind of the East Village, around 2nd and Houston, and watched Sam Rockwell in Moon at a really groovy indy movie theater. The kind of place Woody Allen characters go to watch movies and banter.
Listen, I love seeing movies by myself. It’s been one of my greatest private pleasures since I was old enough to go to the movies alone. But in the thirteen months I’ve been in New York City, every movie I’ve seen, theater or home entertainment, I’ve seen entirely by myself. I’m starting to find the experience more than a little depressing. I need a discussion partner, a banter-buddy. I need a Woody Allen character sidekick – the old Woody Allen, not the current, creepy Woody Allen. I need someone to talk to.
So I hit the streets and wandered. That’s what I do on the weekend. Get up early, get out of the apartment, get out of Clinton Hill/Bed Stye, get out of Brooklyn, hit Manhattan and wander. At least I’m around people. There’s not a lot of interaction, not a lot of talking, all though I have had a few impromptu conversations. Those are more along the lines of the cranky old man shaking his fist at some jack-hole driver and me shaking my fist, too, and then we walk down the block together commiserating about these damn drivers and declaring how glad we are that we don’t drive and then, at the appropriate time, we fall out of step with each other, one moves ahead and the other drifts behind and the moment is over.
This is my social life.
“You should blog,” my friend said to me last weekend (my real friend. Not an imaginary one. I think. I only see her once or twice a month. She’s never met anyone else I know. Her visits are usually preceded by moments of intense emotional stress. Sometimes accompanied by blinding headaches, the type that are so bad you lose vision in one eye. It’s like this: I have a terrible week at work. The stress hits me, reaches a crescendo, say on a Friday night, then some time Saturday, as I haunt the Met or poke around in the park, I get a text message and we meet in a bar. While I wait, the pain starts, the hot poker digging around in the meat of my mind, just behind my left eye, then the vision, a bright spot, painful and intense, and I sit there at the bar and grip the stool until she emerges from the flare, like she’s walking through a wall of smoke, like a ship breaking through a fog bank, she emerges and she says things like -)
“You should blog.”
“What the hell would I blog about?”
“I don’t know. All of that stuff you gripe about all the time. You should blog about that.”
Blog.
It’s a verb. It’s a noun. I still get irritated when someone uses “party” to describe something they intend to do instead of someplace they plan to go. Can I blog?
Am I blogging?
“People will think I’m weird.”
“What people?”
“The people who read my blog.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, a little head shake, a little smirk kissing the corner of her eyes, her hand drifting across my forearm on its way to her beer. “It’s your BLOG. No one’s going to read it.”
Moon was about loneliness. That’s what I think. The movie is about what happens to us when we’re left on our own for too long, when machines are our only companions, when we hold on too long to the scraps of a life that isn’t ours any more. I won’t get all spoilery. It’s a good movie. That’s what I think.
I ate pizza for lunch today.
I liked going to the movies.
It’s very hot today.
I’m not sad that Michael Jackson is dead.
Am I blogging?
Is this a blog?
I watched another movie about loneliness recently, the quintessential New York lonely boy movie. The hot summer, hot sun, hot streets wandered in desperation, I can’t sleep nights, I just want to work long hours, would you like to have coffee with me, loneliest portrait of any isolated character ever to chew his way across the silver screen movie.
Paul Schrader
In the DVD extras, Paul Schrader said when he was writing Taxi Driver, he’d spend weeks at a time without talking to a soul, crashing at an ex-girlfriend’s apartment while she was out of town, unemployed, just cranking through two drafts of the screenplay, channeling onto the page all of the alienation and isolation and despondent dejection this city has to offer the sensitive writer boy who thinks too much.
At one point in the film, during his nonstop, steam of self-conscious internal dialogue, Travis Bickle quotes Thomas Wolfe’s essay “God’s Lonely Man”, totally missing the point.
Travis believes no one else feels like he feels, he feels like no one can. He’s alone with his aloneness and only he can appreciate the depths of his separate state. He’s miserable, yet he does everything he can to make sure no one gets close to him. Travis Bickle is in self-imposed solitary confinement. And he likes it. As if his isolation makes him special.
Thomas Wolfe
But Wolfe’s point is that loneliness is universal, that it’s one of the cornerstones of human experience, that everyone feels it, feels it constantly. He said, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
So Travis gets it wrong. In our loneliness, we are united. In our loneliness, we are not unique, we are never truly alone.
According to Thomas Wolfe.
I don’t really get headaches before my friend shows up. I just thought that was funny. A little foreshadowing before I got to the Taxi Driver bit. It’s a legitimate literary device. Foreshadowing.
We are legion, we lonely many, we warriors of solitude. We are an army of wanders, locked in loose formation, gathered to fight the battle of intense introspection, haunting the streets and bars and sidewalks of this citadel of seclusion. We are all God’s lonely men. And we like it.
Am I blogging?
Is this a blog?
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.
There is one truth we’ve found to be self-evident when considering the entirety of God’s lonely men; they are all, inescapably, inevitably, in one way or another, fools for love.
It seems to be an affliction manifestly intrinsic in the species and one that will unavoidably expose an otherwise recondite Romeo for what he truly is – a big, fat pansy.
Witness the painful public enpansification of the soon-to-be former Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford. Plenty of politicians commit political seppuku because they compulsively crave the intoxicating ego stroke of extramarital dalliances. They’re politicians for Christ’s sake – they thrive on attention. And after their infidelities are eventually exposed by salivating citizens of the fourth estate, driven to frenzied apoplexy by the whiff of a salacious tidbit, they all stand up in front of the cameras and stiffen their upper lips and battle back a slight hitch in their voices and bat away tears that just won’t quite come (because they’re not that good) and ask for our collective clemency.
What they don’t do is go on and on about the object of their affections. That don’t sit down with the AP and breathlessly choke out purple pronunciations like, “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” the AP reports an overly (or overtly) emotional Governor Sanford proclaiming. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford wipes his tears
He almost had me there. There was almost a hint of poetry to his whiny declaration. If only he’d said, “ … but a love story all the same.” Or “none-the-same.” Or something. But, at the end of the day, he is still just a politician and not a poet so he will get a pass for his lapse of eloquence. And, more importantly, he is now exposed, to God and man, as being a great big sniffling sissy.
Who goes on and on about the woman who got away (or done them wrong or never noticed them)? Pansy men. Lonely men. Sissies. That’s who. And who will never get the girl of their dreams because they look weak willed and weenie-fied when they go on TV or show up and a party or stand on the sidewalk outside their apartments at three in the morning and cry and say things like, “You are my soul mate!”? Back-peddling jack-holes, that’s who.
When the Argentine love story broke, Sanford looked like a human being, a man torn by his undeniable love for a woman forbidden to him and awash in a sea of guilt over humiliating his wife and children. Then he descended into whiner mode which, admittedly, made him look a little pathetic, but we lonely men could sympathize, we fools for love could empathize. But now that he’s sliding back further, closing the curtain of born-again bullshit over the story and saying things like, “ … love is not a feeling. It’s a choice. It’s an action.” And admitting to further “indiscretions”, “mistakes” where he “crossed the line” with an unnumbered series of women, our sympathy dries up.
Listen, fools for love do foolish things, but they embrace their foolishness (even while often resolving they won’t get fooled again) and God’s lonely men ruminate on loves lost or un-won. What they don’t do is hide behind the veil of recrudescent romanticism when it suits them only to abandon their position when they realize they’re pissing away their political future. If you are a dreamy-eyed romantic, you are born one and you will die one (quiet possibly alone) but you won’t turn it on and off as it suits your public persona. You can’t.
The last time I saw him alive, He was standing up on the bride’s side Shouting his objections at the groom.
God's loneliest poet?
Next week: All God’s Lonely Men take a field trip to a distant, mystical land called The Bronx to visit the site of the penning of perhaps God’s loneliest poem by God’s loneliest poet. Things will happen.
I prefer not to.
This must be the week for quitting. Governor Sarah Palin (R. Alaska) announced at a hastily assembled press conference yesterday at her suburban Wasilla home that she was resigning as Governor 16 months before her term ends because she doesn’t want to put Alaska through the anguish of her lame-duck term. Though I suppose many Alaskans are relieved they will be spared Palin’s lameness for the next year and a half, for most casual observers, the move is a confusing one.
And back in the real world where things are infinitely less interesting but no less confusing, in the depths of the recession’s strangle hold on the economy, as unemployment continues its unwavering march toward a ball-busting, rusty brass-ringed 10%, I resigned my position at the swanky advertising company where I’ve been playing at grown-up, long-pantsed big-boy worker bee for the past eleven and a half months.
This is not in furtherance of my unannounced intentions to announce my intention to assemble an intention assessing assemblage to study the feasibility of a run in 2012. It’s not.
It’s because, in the words of perhaps God’s loneliest quitter in history, “I prefer not to.”
When Herman Melville wrote his baleful ballad “Bartleby the Scrivener” in the early 1850s, he was at the height of his literary prowess, fresh from en-tome-ing his peg-legged mad sea captain and his pale monstrosity of the deep and his not-necessarily-gay seaman in a moody, broody adolescent-reader-defeating treatise that would serve as a pseudo-intellectual breaking board for the next 150 odd years.
"Not gone!" I murmured at last.
Moby Dick was destined to be a flop in Melville’s lifetime and, when sitting down to compose “Bartleby” he may already have had a inkling of his own eventual destiny, banished to a customs house copy desk, efficiently, if listlessly, pushing documents from one point to the next, conducting papers through the business world’s passionless stations of the cross to feed his family and pay his mortgage and do … something. When Melville the professional man walked into the office on Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and hung up his topcoat and lit his lamp and unscrewed his inkpot, the professional man may have lived, but the writer died.
What was left was alcoholism and an unhappy marriage and rumors of insanity and, of course, after thirty years of office bondage and no writing, Billy Bud, but that ain’t exactly what you’d call a happy read. Authority wins, passion loses, and the sea captain, (Captain Vere – like veritas, like truth) acting “by the book” has the hero, the honest, Adam-esque, Christ-like Billy, executed. Hung from the yardarm. His last words, delivered without irony or bitterness, “God bless Captain Vere”
Once Bartleby ceases to do any work for the lawyer narrator, you would assume he would stop coming to the office. But he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t have any place else to go or, even worse, can’t think of any place else to go. We find out later that poor, doomed Bartleby’s previous job was at the dead letter office in Washington, DC where undeliverable letters (or unwanted writings) were sent to be burned. If that wouldn’t crush the soul of the sensitive writer boy, I don’t know what would.
Toward the end of Bartleby’s story, the lawyer visits him in the Tombs where he’s been sent for vagrancy and trespassing (if you don’t work there, you don’t work there) and finds him curled into the fetal position, pressed up against the brick wall of his cell.
“Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby.
“But nothing stirred. I paused, then went close up to him, stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping.”
"Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"
Much like the posture I’ve begun imagining for myself as I’ve felt gravity’s cruel grip dragging me from my ergonomically friendly desk chair toward the cool, dark space under my cube. I’m not wired to spend all day every day, ad infinitum, in the same office doing the same thing, filling out spreadsheets and leveraging my efficiencies. I may starve out here as sensitive lit boy, as God’s lonely writer lad, but at least I’ll starve doing what I need to do instead of what I’m told to do.
And perhaps that is how Mrs. Palin imagines her own future if she were to finish her elected term as Governor of Alaska, her promise dripping away daily like melting wax, her future dissolving as she sits there, day after day, vetoing bills and accusing TV personalities of baby-raping and mocking her special needs son, as she has to decline countless invitations to host hyperbolically heated television programs of her own. Perhaps she could finish out her term if she wanted, she just prefers not to.
