(S)wine: Fiction…Sometimes

[This was the window from which Mal allowed the world to pass, with or without comment]:

With:
“I once saw Abel Ferrara doing an acoustic set outside some trattoria in Rome. This was back in . . . I don’t know, I think maybe 2011? 2012? I don’t remember any of the tunes he did except for Dylan’s Blind Willie McTell. He played acoustic guitar on that one. The others, he played harmonica. I almost went up to him after the set and asked to buy him a drink, but I forgot that he had been sober for quite some time at that point. He was drinking from a bottle of water and seemed concerned about his young daughter being out so late and having school the next morning. I think he was shooting a film. Willem DaFoe was there and Asia Argento, too. Do you know any of those people from the movies? It’s all right; if enough time passes, the people who matter—in any kind of way or another—become trapped inside parentheses. Kind of like those other songs Ferrara was doing on harmonica. Couldn’t tell you now what they were. But Dylan? You’ll always know Dylan. You’ll never find him ensconced within anything. You’ll have him with you until you yourself get stuck in between those two curvy bookends and become a memory to someone. Even after. And you’ll recognize the difference between being immortal and not.”

“Poetry is a raging elephant—a gun that will go off by itself and kill at fifty paces. You know, speaking of killing at fifty paces: all martyrs are happy. I’ve thought about that. Maybe there was a nanosecond when they realized that they had possibly made a mistake. Maybe. But overall, where they are . . . they’re happy. Every time you crack an egg, you increase the entropy of the universe. The egg once had order; the broken egg has less order. The non-martyr, alive, has order. You remember him (or her) because he (or she) is well-organized, so to speak. I mean literally, flesh-and-bones-wise. There is organization there, right before he (or she) blows himself (or herself) up. And . . . then . . . voila! Entropy. Every time you move, you create entropy. Every time you disorganize the organization, you create entropy in the universe. SO STAND STILL, LADDY!”

“In Sacramento . . . Sacramento was where I went first, after all those years in Maine . . . in Sacramento, home of the esteemed Joan Didion, I lived in a trailer park in Sugarfield. One of the homes there, I say homes but they were really just squared-off cylinders, one of the homes in the trailer park had the strangest sign in the little window by the door. It said ANALOG ASTRONAUTS ONLY. And it had the period there at the end. I liked that. You would expect an exclamation mark but no. It was a period. Bold choice.”

Intermission 2: Napoleon Takes Account

(Speaking before the Court of Something to someone about something something regarding something and someone who received favors during the siege of Somethingopole, which involved empress Josephine as being part of a fraudulent financial war scheme involving contractors and siphoned funds for something with someone who was one of Napoleon’s best lieutenants and with whom Josephine was having an affair, Napoleon—answering the question: How much did your coronation cost, Mr. Bonaparte?—divulged: 196, 436 francs. This was nearly four times the original budget. )

In the autumn of 1993 I drove up into New England by myself to see the foliage and get a very vague idea of what that area of the country looked like. I had lived in Philadelphia for nearly two decades and never once got farther north than Port Chester, New York. I thought after all those years it would be, at the very least, only fair that I familiarize myself, even briefly, with the upper Northeast of America. I was soon to leave for California in my rusty VW to try and break into the film industry, flaunting my newly acquired university degree in film studies, so before saying goodbye to the East Coast, I thought it wise to see whatever I could muster of New England.

In Boothbay Harbor, Maine I had my first ever lobster—a two-pounder. Lobster was never an attainable meal for our immigrant family, growing up. We didn’t frequent chain restaurants that offered these crustaceans for somewhat decent prices, we certainly couldn’t afford to buy lobster retail from grocery stores or farmers’ market fishmongers, but finally my first taste of this bottom-dwelling garbage disposal machine came appropriately in the state in which one is supposed to have lobster properly, and at the ripe-old age of 32. I recall I was very nonplussed about the experience and the taste, given the price. It was sweet. It was drowning in butter. And it was difficult, messy work to remove the meat from the shells. They gave me a white plastic bib with a bad illustration of what I was about to eat. The bill was astronomic for a two-pounder, even in 1993.

Boothbay Harbor was just closing down at the time I passed through; it was late October and most businesses and tourist traps were in the beginning process of hibernation. It was nice being one of the few stragglers in a mostly shuttered town before the real cold blew in. There was no one on the streets; there were hardly any cars around town; most boats were anchored down and bobbing happily and cluelessly of what storms they were about to endure; what waves were about to batter them. That night I looked out over the water from my hotel room and thought about how on earth Stephen King could have lived in this state for so long, with all the bitter cold, winds, and short winter days dragging on for nearly half a year. It was a strange thought to come across, looking at the frigid waters in the 4 p.m. darkness.

From there I drove south to Kennebunkport about 2 hours to try to catch a glimpse of the Bush compound. I stopped in at a local used bookstore before I hit the beach to snap a photo for my parents, who were avid Republicans and even more avid fans of George Herbert Walker Bush, our recently dethroned president. Before making the drive, I had promised them I’d get a picture if I could make my way to Kennebunkport from Boothbay.

At the little dank-smelling bookstore I picked up a fairly slim paperback called One Hundred Years of Apples for seventy-five cents. It looked brand new and smelled like boat diesel, oddly. I liked the title because it harked back to Marquez’s famous novel, but between the untouched cover photo of an orchard pregnant with fruit, awaiting the seasonal pickers to come and relieve it of its burden and the title itself, it carried a kind of whimsy that I thought I might enjoy, if I read it. It was written by someone named Mal Trafford-Leigh. I couldn’t discern the gender of the author from the name only. And there was no photo or even a brief biography of Mal Trafford-Leigh at the end of the book. The author read British to me. I imagined it was a pet project, self-financed by some bored brethren spawned from aristocracy harking back to the big island across the pond. Mal Trafford-Leigh, I imagined, had nothing to do in life save for writing this little ditty. The rich always seem to have time to write books, go sailing, learn to fly, live in Kennebunkport in a castle on the beach.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts I stopped in to see the Mayflower II—a replica of the long-gone original boat that somehow made its way across this vast Atlantic. Because it was late fall and the museum was closing for the season in a few days, I had the boat all to myself. “It was built in England in the 1950s,” the woman at the ticket window said. “It was a gift to America.” From the way she said it, I discerned that this was a well-rehearsed act; almost a reflex, because she did not look up from her crossword puzzle once. I couldn’t imagine how bad in England it must have been for these pilgrims to want to board a rickety vessel and traverse the ocean, in order to start anew.

Rolling down I-95 towards home, I couldn’t find a motel vacancy anywhere. Finally, close to midnight, in New Haven, Connecticut I pulled into a Days Inn that had a ground-floor single-bed room with a stained bed cover and brown cigarette-smoke walls available for $19.99/night. The bathroom faucet leaked all through the night. And one time I thought I caught the image of a fleeting old woman in the corner of the room mirror—a ghost, maybe, written by Stephen King, up there in hibernating Maine.

I finished the little book of apples by Mal Trafford-Leigh sometime next evening at home in Philly. It was mainly a history of apple orchards found all throughout eastern Maine, complete with incredibly detailed statistics about tonnage yielded from each farm and the history of seasonal migrant workers picking apples and making cider in that area, throughout the decades. It wasn’t a fiction book, but it also wasn’t a non-fiction book. I’m not sure what it was; it almost read like a very long poem that didn’t rhyme. At the end of the account, the writer (or narrator) strangely embarks on a road trip to southern California to get into “show biz, honey . . . it’s the only biz.” It was a peculiar personal ending to a work that read much like a moral fable; something old-fashioned that one would find in the archives of a small town, or a farmer’s almanac with a moral precept, or something along those lines. It was a strange confession; almost a breaking of the 4th wall kind of thing. And it appealed to and connected with me, because I was getting ready to make my own road trip out to Los Angeles that year in 1993 to try and change my life.

It certainly didn’t read like anything that would be written by someone named Mal Trafford-Leigh. I decided to take this little book with me out to the Promised Hollywoodland awaiting my imagined contribution to its cinematic history. I was taking a few boxes of books and cassettes, some clothes, and I wanted to re-read this little strange account of apple edification on a different coast, next to a different ocean.

That year, after the apple-picking season was over and the migrant workers went out west to California’s canneries to stuff legumes and de-stoned drupes into pipe-shaped containers, Mal stayed on in Boothbay. She wanted to spend a winter in Maine before she was to move on to her own canneries out west, to Los Angeles, and try “show biz, honey . . . it’s the only biz.”

Mal was ordinary. That’s not at all what the world said; it’s what she believed. The world says nothing. It does not care about anyone one way or the other. Nor does it care that it’s celebrated, villified, contemplated, destroyed, or searched for meaning. The world cannot be destroyed, anyway.

“God loves rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations. That’s why He made so many of them.” It was a private joke between Mal and the universe, and she liked saying that to herself quietly many times when life got difficult. Which had been, so far, many times for Mal. At the end of the season, after the migrant workers went west, Mal started a novel she would call One Hundred Years of Apples. It wasn’t a take on Marquez at all—Mal didn’t know the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez from “Paul Pemulius.” She just thought the title was apropos of the number of bushels that the orchard yielded in any one season.

[Who eats all these apples?]

“What do you know about that,” Mal said and wiped her upper lip with the sleeve. She was hovering over a young boy not in a menacing fashion but more a motherly one. “What do you know about incineration?”
“My dad’s a mortician.”
“So he’s a mortician. He puts liquid up stiffs’ bums and makeup on their face. What’s that got to do with ashes?”
“They do cremations, too” said the boy. “It’s part of their job. The tubes and liquids and rouge, yes. But we also have an incinerator.”
“Well, what do you know about that,” Mal said and wiped her upper lip with the sleeve. “Rouge.”

There is a murder of crows that comes every morning to my neighborhood and lands on top of the street lights. I’ve been feeding them for a while. And now that’s their M.O. And many times, if I take a walk up or down to the cul-de-sac, some will follow me. And will caw-caw to one another that I’m out and about. And maybe, probably have some peanuts for them. One day I should wear a mask. See if they recognize me. And still follow me.

I really, really, really like Isabelle Huppert.

One day I would like to have my own business to compete with Hallmark. I would call it “The Hilarious Greeting Card Company,” and it would cater to macabre senses of humor. Another name I’m considering is “Gallows Humor” but I like the first one a bit more. It sweats sarcasm.

Lean cat savage cat.

“Is this it? This is all of it?”
“Yes,” said the mortician’s boy.
“Are you sure?” Mal looked at the box. It was maybe 10 inches high. About 5 inches wide. “Are you sure we shouldn’t get your father?” she said again.
“Absolutely.”
“He’s in there, all of him? Bones and all.”
The boy started to say something but Mal corrected herself: “I mean, I know there’s no bones that could fit in there. I mean, all the bones and everything . . . that’s all there is?”
“Yes.”
“All that man . . . right here in this little box. What do you know about that.”

The mind is a monkey.

She waited about six months before she took her father from Boothbay down to Kennebunkport. The boy said when she picked up her father that he would carry the box over to her car, if she wanted a bit more time before she’d have to be alone with him. Mal said she’d be all right; that she’d manage just fine carrying her father herself.

There was no good reason for Mal to wait all that time—except maybe for the Maine winter—but there were more than a few good consecutive weather days that season for Mal to make the 90-minute trip down to Kennebunkport. Her father had said nothing about a particular place of burial, but she took it upon herself to drive him to the beach down there and bury him in view of the Bush family compound. Her father had been a Republican all his life, and he thought quite highly of H.W. Bush, despite all that “read my lips, no new taxes” fiasco. He respected H.W. for having been the head of CIA, especially. For as long as she would live, Mal would remember that George H.W. Bush was director of CIA.

And so just before dawn she dug a shallow hole into the sand, close to the water, knowing the tide would creep in soon and wash her father away when it retreated. It was in full view of the Bush compound there in Kennebunkport, about a mile south. That’s where she emptied the modest plastic bag filled with her father’s ashes that had spent the last half year in an equally modest box.

Love is an achievement of intelligence. But love mixed with just the right amount of bitterness and hate is the achievement of longevity. These two have to always be available in enough reserve to be able to be confronted by one when the other begins to dominate. Yin and yang, just like everything else. If these two aren’t in some kind of fair co-existence, then either one will blind us and catapult us into stupidity, rigidity, religion, and mainly fear.

Last night I dreamed I was trapped under a horse.