Yet Again

But sometimes, if you are young enough, if you are lucky enough again to start over, to do it all once more, all of it, there is the pleasure, the pain.  

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

W.B. Yeats, "Politics"

We are in Manhattan still, again. Glorious days, fantastic nights.

Here at the Oak Bar.

A Sport and a Pastime

Old Spring and a broken love. But the image remains. Wet New York, many years ago. They were at the peak of their romance, stars among many. One offense, though, leads to another. Healing leaves scars. Then retribution. It is impossible not to make that one wrong step, the first that sets all others into motion.

She was his, not mine, but I miss her still. Phillip Dean and Anne-Marie. The unnamed narrator, a photographer. "A Sport and a Pastime." James Salter. If you haven't read it, you should. Of course, you will realize how hard it is to live a life fully.

Sunshine, Birds, Flowers, Etc.

The country’s been broken, see, only hills and rivers.
In the city here’s the lush growth of spring.

These times are splashed with tears before flowers.
Grieved at parting, birds startle the heart.

etc.

Tu Fu

My One Good Eye

I went back to the retinologist to have my exploded eye checked. I hate going to doctors and dreaded this, knowing that I would suffer the eye drops that would cause me to see weirdly all day. They used drops to numb my eyes, then two sets of drops to dilate the pupils. Then they left me in the dimly lighted room alone while the drugs took effect. I have an active imagination, maybe, but things began to change. First, I blew my nose with the tissue that I had just wiped the excess fluid from my eyes with and got Lanocain or Ibocain or Novocain or one of the -ains into my nostrils. In the half light, the floor seemed to turn liquid, sloshing and puddling all about. And my teeth went numb. When the doctor came in for the exam, things seemed fine, and I knew better than to tell him what I am here telling you. He is a nice man who asked my advice on literature. He said my eye was healing nicely.

Here is a photograph from 1976. Two of the people in the photograph are now dead, father and son. I'll call this one "Mouth Breathers."

in Just-

"in Just-

spring" 

e.e. cummings

Memory and Desire. Here, at least, in my town, it is beautiful. Crystal air and a sky so blue it hurts your eyes. I am not equal to it, a source of discontent. My heart is bound by duties. Obligations and Work.

Tennessee Williams and Me

Here is another of those old, lost photos from 1975.  I had forgotten about this photograph until the other day.  I was talking to some students about famous people we had met, and I told them this story.  

One day walking by a bookstore, I ran into a crowd of people, and I went over to see what was going on. Tennessee Williams was autographing his newest book. I think it was his autobiography. There were guards at the door keeping the crowd on the sidewalk. I walked up with my camera hoping to get a picture and nobody stopped me. Inside there was a long line. I walked around it and sat in front of Williams and snapped about ten photos. He and I talked a bit, silly stuff. I met him again a few years later in Key West. He was with a couple companions, young fellows. Again we spoke. I always tell people that I was drunk and said, "Hey Ten, give me five," but it is not true. What was true is that I was younger than his companions and that he liked me. He seemed to be a very nice man and he had the most wonderful voice I ever heard come out of a human mouth.

Observations

Here are some photos by a tremendous photographer, Jan Bernhardtz, who has a website called Observations which I have added to my links.  Jan also has a folder on the F Blog that contains many images from 1967-1973.  Take a look at those, too.  Great pictures made greater by time.  Time doesn't always work that way.   Often, it shows up what was fashionable rather than that which possessed true content and style.  Jan has captured an era and continues to do so.  As I've said before, you just can't make old photographs (though I continue to try).  

Over Now

It's all over now, I think: the equinox, the full moon, Mohamed's birthday, the resurrection of Christ, snowstorms and floods.  I looked to the animals alright.  My cat would not leave me until the sun came out and the gentle breezes blew.  I saw an osprey dive completely into the water, struggle below, and come up with a very large bass.  I saw a bald eagle chase and harass him until he dropped that fish; he caught it mid-air.  I watched a twelve foot alligator drift toward me where I sat at the end of a dock.  I lifted my legs back over the edge.  I worked hard and spread eighteen yards of cypress mulch over three large driveways.  At night, I ate and drank alone.  I read until I fell asleep.  

Perhaps now some peace will come.  Maybe I will regain some creativity.  If not, though, I will keep working.  Sometimes, it is all we have.  

Carnal Equinox

First the Vernal Equinox, now the Full Moon, the Full Worm Moon it is called.  I have not slept for two nights.  Warm wild winds blew in Spring, wind and rain beating on the windows and roof.  Last night, I took a pill, but it did no good.  Certainly this juxtaposing of things is at fault.  That and my own sweet madness.  Rough change is in the air.  I will look to animals for direction.  

The Human Blockhead

I went back to the fair one more time. I was in college, and I went with my girlfriend. This was not the nocturnal trip of my spotted youth with an entry over the hurricane fence surrounding the back lot, but a mid-afternoon visit on a sunny day in March. We paid and entered with everybody else through the front entrance. Some polish is gained with a good state school education.

I was a walking narrative, I'm sure, as we strolled down the midway. I don't remember (and I probably wasn't cognizant) if she was fascinated or horrified. When we came to the tents that housed the sideshow gang, I stood out front and recited the barker's recorded invitation word for word. Perhaps to shut me up, she agreed to go inside.

I was a zoology major and was losing some of the old superstitions. I no longer believed that horsehair snakes were the result of spontaneous generation when horsehairs fell into the watering trough, even though I could not convince my mother. I still held out hope for the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti. It is difficult to lose all the religious beliefs that sustain you through your youth.

But this day, inside that tent on that beautiful spring afternoon, my world would turn 'round yet another time. We watched as the "freaks" performed, the sort who have trained themselves or who have exaggerated their own peculiar physical talents, first the twin albino sword swallowers, then the Rubber Man, a contortionist with seemingly no bones in his body.

The next act was the Human Blockhead. In my youth, he had been an old man (I always thought he looked like a grizzled sailor) who would run long pins through his cheeks, wiggle his belly in an exhibition of strange muscular control, and then drive nails into his nose. But this day, it was not the old man but a young boy who I recognized. A BOY WITH WHOM I HAD GONE TO HIGH SCHOOL! I had always known that we were freaks, but here was rock hard evidence. I didn't remember his name. In a school full of marginal people, he was on the outside, someone you saw but never heard, someone who you couldn't recall if he actually graduated. There he was, an obvious rookie, his voice vibrating with a nervous tremolo, his body stiff with fright, a boy become a man to perform as a human freak RIGHT HERE IN HIS OWN HOME TOWN. How could he do it, I wondered? Did he practice in high school? Did he, too, sneak over the fence on dark nights only to come face to face with the Siamese Twins or the woman with no arms? Had he been frightened by midget clowns in his youth? How close, I wondered, had I come to this, to becoming a sideshow performer, a human oddity?

The answer still eludes me, but I do know that the answer is not so clear cut. There is no Manichean divide between those on one side of the stage and those on the other. In another year, I would become fascinated with the photography of Diane Arbus who showed most clearly what freaks we all are.

I don't know. The whole thing still hangs over me.


Here are some photographs that Sasha has sent me to illustrate my stories. He says he is making a series. He is a wonderful young photographer, and he is listed under my links. Aliaksandr Veledzimovich. This is just more of the wonderful ballad of Kate and Sasha.

Luck of the Irish

Standing in a line that wound out to the parking lot to get into an Irish pub.  A bagpipe band is playing.  That's not Irish, I said.  Nobody cared.  Three girls in line before me dressed in green with green tiaras that said, "Kiss Me, I'm Irish."  One wore a short green skirt with a black crepe slip peeking out, a bold black belt, and a green bustiere that did what it was supposed to do.  Black knee boots.  I don't get out much any more.  After standing in the line that would not move, we decided to get corned beef and cabbage elsewhere.  

I've become Clark Griswold.

Luck of the Irish.  

End of the Road

Ulf and Marcin, the editors of the F Blog, have put up the last of my road photographs.  I want to thank them for showing these "lost" photographs.   As I've said before, they are two of the nicest people in the world.  

Anonymous in SoHo

I still have not taken a photograph this year.  I will soon, I keep saying.  Soon.  

I went back to some photographs I took last year in SoHo.  I liked them then, but I wasn't sure anyone else would, so I didn't bother with them.  I bothered with them yesterday, and I think I like them.  But I still am not sure if anyone else will bother with them.  

Bed Bugs

Back from Spring Break. What a mess. All the small hotels are being leveled for big condos. The hotel I have stayed in since I was a young boy is now gone. It was the last left on Singer Island, the old Rutledge Inn. It was one of those two-storied hotels that is built around a central pool. A good diving reef sat just off the beach. There, a remora once tried to attach itself to my father's belly. He went nuts. I had never seen him afraid before. Frederick Exley used to drink at the outside bar and set one of his novels there. It was a classic. Now it is gone.

I had to find another place to stay, so I went to a hotel at a big marina. We stayed for three nights and got eaten by bedbugs. I refused to believe it, but when we came home, I looked them up. We fell asleep in the afternoon and woke up and found the little fuckers in the sheets. This is a mess. I've stayed all over the world in some pretty rough places and have never seen anything like this. I will have to write something clever about this soon. But I am not feeling clever right now, just itchy and somehow unclean.

Spring Break

OK. I've come to the end of the small narrative that I have been writing this week. It is Spring Break and the weather is beautiful, so I am going to the beach. I won't be posting for a few days, but I hope to get some pictures and some stories.

Selavy.

The Last Fair

I was seventeen and it was the last night of The County Fair. I was at my friend's house, a ten by fifty-five foot mobile home in one of those old southern parks where people brought brought there own trailers and rented the site. There was every sort of trailer you could ever want to see there on the banks of a giant lake. My friend lived with his mother, step-father, and little brother and sister. It is a miracle they managed. The step-father worked in a bottling plant that would close from time to time, so he would collect his unemployment checks and live a life of leisure until he got the call to come back to work. But once in a while, when the opportunity arose, he would take some temporary job that paid him under the table. And this night, he had an idea. It was late and the fair would be closing soon, and he said we could go and hire on to help break down the rides. How did he know such things, I wondered? What sort of life had he lived?

We entered the fair in the usual way, and I was amazed when my friend's step-father jumped over the hurricane fence with us. My own father, I thought, would surely never do such a thing. Already, I was out of my usual realm of experience. We walked down the midway that was for all purposes now closed. The fair was over, the crowds gone, and there we stood in the murky light, the din receding, the rides stilled, the glitter gone. The step-father told us to wait while he went over to talk to a man, and when he came back and said, "C'mon, we're gonna help tear down the Zipper." I had no idea what I was doing. The only work I had ever done up to this point in my life was mowing my parent's lawn and serving a brief stint as a magazine salesman when I was fourteen. What was I doing? I didn't need the money. But stiffly I moved to follow with frozen joints and stiff muscles, my peripheral vision strangely gone. I could feel rigor mortis setting in.

We joined a group of hard looking shadowy men and made our way under a the giant steel skeleton of the ride. Men with big wrenches and hammers began loosening bolts and it was our job to move the metal parts onto a truck. I wasn't very good at this, and I am certain I did little. I had just noticed that a man with a leather flight jacket had a small holster strapped to his side like I'd seen in detective show when a nearby voice said, "You'd better move." I looked up just in time to avoid a hammer that was dropping toward me. As I stepped aside, I saw two men high above on the steel skeleton of the ride laughing to one another. The hammer hit the sawdust with a dull but forceful thud. Rattled, I moved away. I wanted nothing to do with this, I thought. I shouldn't be here. And I hurried over to a clearing where there would be nothing over my head.

As I stood there contemplating the strangeness of things, stood there watching the mystery stripped away before my eyes, I heard some talking and laughter behind me. And when I turned, there in the midway was a group of people playing ball. Among them were the sideshow oddities--The Siamese Twins, The World's Tallest Man, The Alligator Woman--some of them playing, some of them observing. The ground seemed to shift beneath my feet. I tried to figure out the rules of the game, but these didn't seem to be fixed. It was some sort of dodge ball, kick ball, hide and go seek. The Siamese Twins, boys joined at the waist, sat eating popsicles. One wore big, black horn rimmed glasses. When his brother had finished his, licking the last bit of frozen, sugary water from the stick , he leaned back, bent it, and popped him with a tiny, stinging smack. And then they were fighting, swinging at one another, fending off each other's blows with nowhere to go, joined as they were. I watched World's Largest Man rise on oversized arthritic joints, a giant with obvious physical ailments. This was their time. With the crowds gone, there were only my prying eyes.

I don't know how long I stood there, but it seemed only an instant before my friend and his step-father stood beside me with a handful of bills. "Let's go," he said. "They don't need us any more."

And so we left by the entrance, the way we hadn't come, and walked through the late night chill. I could feel the dew begin to settle. I didn't go back for many years.

Initiation

The Fair came and went, came and went, until I was in the throes of adolescence. Fourteen and running with a pack of older boys. Juvenile delinquents. Certified. And on those two weeks of March nights, we would hitchhike to the fair. I had been hitchhiking a good bit by then. It may have been dangerous business, I don't know. But we always got rides. It was easy.

Delinquents don't use main gates. Ever. And so we did what was obligatory and jumped the big hurricane fence that enclosed the fairgrounds in back where all the tractor trailers and Airstreams were parked. We did this again and again, trying not to tear our pants or flesh on the jagged, wobbly tops that inevitably would sway as we crested and throw us the ten feet down on our faces or backs. "Quiet, quiet," we would laugh. One night, we almost learned our lesson when we came over the fence in the dark and found ourselves facing a man's back. He seemed to be washing in a basin, at least that is how I remember it. We stood still, not knowing what to do. And when the man turned around to face us, it was Jojo, The Dogfaced Boy. Whoops and hollers, and everyone at once jumped back over the fence, scratched, bleeding, but safe back on the outside. Then the bravado, screaming and laughing. But we did not go to the fair that night.

The county fair had burlesque shows back then, "Hoot Shows," we called them. Outside the tent, a rough barker would speak low into a handheld microphone promising unmentionable things in giant innuendoes. I had passed these with my parents as a younger boy. My father would linger before the stage in front of the tent on which the barker paced, and sometimes the barker would call out a sequined gal who would stand placidly in fishnet stockings with one leg cocked as a challenge. But we would stay only as long as that, and then my father would look at my mother and we would move on into the night.

At fourteen, I was not old enough to buy a ticket into the Hoot Show, so my friends and I rolled beneath an opening one night in the back side of the tent where we got our first glimpse of the forbidden world. Honky Tonk music blared from an old PA system while an ancient woman paraded with boas around her. We were afraid and did not stay long. I am not sure if we were afraid of getting caught or afraid of what was going on inside. As scary as hell is, it still intrigues us.

When I was sixteen, we dared to try to purchase tickets to the Hoot Show. To make ourselves look older, we all lit cigarettes and slouched as much as possible. With a furtive glance, a worn out man took our money and told us to hurry up and get inside. The thrill of wrongdoing filled me.

On stage, a short fellow who looked like Red Buttons dressed in a plaid jacket and a porkpie hat was telling dirty jokes while a woman wearing shiny tights walked through the crowd carrying one of those old fashioned cigarette trays filled with "illegal" French Ticklers, dirty playing cards, and strange rubber devices for which I had no words. And then the man introduced the first dancer. She must have been fifty, a one-time burlesque performer now reduced to this, doing the bump and grind at the county fair for rednecks and hillbillies--and young boys who had yet to see such things. And when she was done, there was Tara the Tassel Twirler, a younger woman whose main talent was swinging the tassels on her ample breasts, first left, then right, then, for the finale, in opposite directions. By now, even at my age, the absurdity of all this had begun to set in, but it seemed somehow lost on these older men who hooted and hollered as if they were rooting for the home team. And then, for the piece de resistance, we were introduced in more solemn tones to a woman who worked with giant fans, revealing bits of flesh here and there as she moved her props back and forth, up and down. Apparently, from the pious reaction of the rag-tag crowd, this was what passed in some circles for serious art. And then it was over and we were gone, uncertain of exactly what we had seen but knowing we had seen something that we were surely not supposed to. We had been initiated. We felt we were now what might pass for men.

It wasn't what I expected.

When the Going Gets Weird

As kids growing up in what was then a sleepy southern hamlet of a town, we all looked forward with great anticipation to the county fair that came for two weeks each March. The first kids to go would come to school with fast tales of weird fun, of freak shows and wild rides and food you couldn't get at home or anywhere else that we knew for that matter. I was never in this first wave of fair goers, but eventually my parents would take me, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Night, it seemed to me, was the only time to go. There in the dark, the flashing colored lights and strange high-amp sounds set you off kilter, twirling you into some nether world of the senses.

The rides were one thing that you had to endure. They were cruel, a terrifying conglomeration of giant bolts and tracks and gears and chains and hard, cold metal. Every kid knew a plethora of apocryphal tales of beheadings and amputations, of cars flying off the tracks or Ferris Wheels gone wrong. Greasy men who lived in tiny Streamline Trailers and were wanted by the law would load you into rides like The Bullet where your head would be driven between your shoulder blades and your stomach would force its way into your throat as you were hurled at pre-Disney speeds around and around and around.

But as I said, these were things to be endured. Maybe they were fun, but I appreciate them now only for the sense of criminal danger they added to the night. Better were the Games of Chance where you could win cheap trinkets or, if you spent enough of your money, a large stuffed animal that you would then be cursed to carry with you for the remainder of the night. Throw the nickel on the Lucky Strike, the wooden hoop over the Coca-Cola bottle, the basketball through the smaller-than-normal hoop, or win the race by driving your horse around the track using a water gun. And more. But your money really went quickly at the games, and too soon you had to move along the midway. And there, toward the back, were the carnival tents. Jojo, the Dogface Boy. The constant call of electronic barkers. "See them Live, see them All. Come see Sparky, the Human Dynamo, as fifty thousand volts of electricity race through his living body. See Sara, the girl with feet so big, so large, she never wore shoes in her entire life." There were Siamese Twins and the World's Largest Man and the Human Blockhead and the woman with no arms who combed her hair and put on her makeup with her feet. Oh, God, the list went on.

The first Human Oddity my parents deigned to take me to see was the Bearded Lady. We entered an ancient tent with a quiet, almost devout group of curiosity seekers and stood before a small, dimly lighted stage, waiting nervously until a man walked out and explained to us what we were about to see. And then he went off stage and came back leading a woman to a chair. She wore a burlap bag over her head with eye slits cut into the cloth and a hole for her mouth which moved strangely as she began to tell her story . "I was born in Huntsville, Alabama of normal parents. I have two brothers and three sisters who are all normal. . . . " And when she was finished telling her story, she reached up and removed the bag from her head. Her face was covered with long black hair and she simply sat there looking shyly around the dark interior. You could feel the awkwardness in that working class crowd, these unsophisticated freak show goers, and before I knew what I was doing, I burst out in nervous laughter. And quick as a shot, I knew I was wrong. The crowd shifted a bit and heads turned toward me, faces of disapproval and horror. Hot blood flooded my face, my neck, my shoulders and arms, as my feet went numb, legs cold. I labored to breath. And then it was done. We left the tent and entered the cool, dark, forgiving air outside. I vaguely remember my parents telling me that it wasn't nice to laugh at other people's troubles.

But the hook had been set. There was much more to see.

THE FEAR

Skip ahead. I am nine, ten years old. We have moved to a new state and into a house with INDOOR PLUMBING. It is the early sixties and the new thing is the Shopping Center. They were springing up all over the country, and we had one. The Cuban Missile Crisis has turned its parking lot into a combination Carnival/Bomb Shelter Expo. Going in and out of bomb shelters had me pretty freaked out. They sat there above ground like big silos with big chimneys one would crawl down to get to the big pod sunk deep in the ground. There were giant air filters that had to be hand cranked to bring air into the pod from above ground, filtered, of course. The thought of being stuck in one of those things, living underground with cans of food and no place to play, wore me down.

Across the parking lot, there were a few rides, a Ferris Wheel, some Crazy Cars. And finally, when my parents were done looking at the big, shiny doom and gloom, they said OK to my constant complaint, "I want to ride, I want to ride the Crazy Cars." My mother handed me some money and away I ran at top speed covering the distance like somebody on fire until I got close enough to see the midget selling tickets. My father said I looked like a cartoon character as it approaches a cliff, legs running in reverse, body leaning backwards, slowing with that screeching sound as forward motion continues. The midget asked me if I wanted to buy a ticket. "No thanks," I said. I'd been scarred.

Skip ahead. Twelve, thirteen years old. I'm staying with my aunt and uncle who are manning an Amway exhibit at a smallish county fair. The evening winds down, and just before the fair closes, they let me go explore the midway, a small oval up and back. I wander against the crowd as they make their way to the exits, moving into the darkness and quiet of the far turn, puddles of light and shadow, the blinking of colored lamps. I stop and look at jars filled with human oddities, babies with fins and gills and tails, bleached, puckered homunculi floating in a galaxy of formaldehyde, bent, constrained. Near the end where the midway began to turn, a bored man stood before a sign advertising "The World's Smallest Man." I lingered a moment as he stared away toward the retreating crowds. Twenty-five cents. I approached him timidly with the coin. He took it silently and waved me in. I entered the tent slowly on a sawdust floor. There was a box with cutaway sides on a table. Inside, there was a giant reel-to-reel tape recorder, a microphone on a table stand, and looking off over the opposite side, a tiny man with a giant head. He had not heard me enter and I did not know what to do. I stood for a while, confused, looking at him looking out at the crowd. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I thought about the TV show, "The Wild, Wild West," remembering the dwarf's companion, the Giant as I stood there in the dim tent alone. But the smallest man in the world must have felt me there, felt something, for suddenly he whipped around to face me, giving out a tiny shout of surprise, me echoing him exactly a millisecond behind like reverb. And there we stood, looking at each other painfully, my twelve-year old brain not prepared for the etiquette required. Then he waddled over to the tape recorder that seemed to be as big as he, and with both hands, he turned the switch with a dull clunk, and the reels began to rotate. With his tiny hand, he pushed up his horn rimmed glasses that made his eyes enormous, and then spoke to me in a small, miserable voice: "Is there anything you would like to ask me?" I was paralyzed. I shook my head back and forth with too much emphasis, then turned toward the exit, legs stiff, spine rigid.

But weirder times were coming. On my birthday in 1964, the Beatles appeared live on The Ed Sullivan Show. But that's enough for now.

"Wee Pea" And the Natural Order

"The discourse on what is considered 'unusual' and 'extraordinary' has long been recognized by anthropologists as an important clue for understanding society's main cultural assumptions and classifications. . . . In this context, attitudes toward human freaks--those abnormal in form, such as a three legged person, or in size, such as giants and midgets--and the beliefs concerning their coming into existence, make an interesting case."

Yoram S. Carmeli, "Wee Pea"

When I was very young (say four or five), my parents took me to the circus.  It was one of the old three ring tent circuses, not the thing that they call a circus today that goes on in Amway Centers across the country.  We were very rural, living in a part of the country where most people were related and had out houses, as did we, and going to the circus was the highlight of the year.  I remember this circus very clearly, at least I have clear images, though surely they cannot be accurate.  But they seem incredibly true.  I remember the smell of the canvas and the strange sound of pipe organ music and the crowd of people (pants and legs, of course--I was small) and the enticement of "circus food", cardboard boxes of popcorn and cones of shiny blue and pink cotton candy.  My mind raced, overtaxed, saturated.  I wanted a souvenir, not that I thought of it as a souvenir, a metal airplane attached to a stick by a string.  Of course, my parents bought me a little pair of binoculars instead.  

We sat in a low wooden bleacher about three quarters of the way to the top, and when the show began, I remember going to a lower row to get a better view.  All those deep reds and oranges and yellows were surely enhanced by whatever lights were used in that tent.  I remember putting the binoculars to my eyes and looking around the ring, scanning left to right, right to left, when suddenly a very large head filled the lenses, a hideous thing, white and blue and misshapen, and to its eyes it brought two tiny hands pretending to hold binoculars, the little fingers of each hand bobbing up and down, up and down, the mouth rounded in sarcastic surprise.  I can still feel in my chest the terrified scream that burst from my throat and lungs, can still feel the wrongness of the thing I had just witnessed, the terribleness of it.  First there was, of course, paralysis, and then the mania.  And when I had flung the binoculars away, there stood a little fellow no bigger than I.  Well, bigger, but not taller.  He was dressed in a pastel blue suit with big cotton ball buttons, a short, pointed blue hat with a cotton ball on top, and big blue shoes and in all that red light-- it was just horrible.  

When my parents would tell the story as I was growing up, they would laugh until they talked about the poor dwarf clown who was mortified, they said, at my reaction.  I don't remember any of that, but I picture him in my mind's eye standing there embarrassed, grown more freakish by the act, a horrifying man, a dwarf, a terrorizer of children, afraid of some public outcry, perhaps fearing a brutal public beating, imprisonment.  Surely there was something in his past that he wanted to hide.  

For years, I was terrified by midgets, dwarfs, and clowns.  But this is only the beginning of this story.  There is so much more to tell.  

"Changed concepts of nature and human freaks also evolved in the sphere of popular culture. Freaks were still popular in the 19th century fair, exhibited as nature's wonders, 'Real,' 'All Alive!' curiosities. They gradually became marginal, however, with the introduction of mechanized games and rides. . . . It was out of the dwindling fairground that the traveling circus developed in the first quarter of the 19th century. . . ."

Yoram S. Carmeli, "Wee Pea"

On the Margins of Things

A rather serpentine fellow I barely know approached me the other night on the street, and out of the side of his mouth he said as if we were being followed, "I've got just two words for you." I stood still, looking expectantly at him. And at length, he came closer, glanced around, and quickly proferred, "Gelato." He stared directly into my eyes. I waited a minute, then said, "That's one word." "What?" he murmured. "I said that's one word." "What do you mean?" he shot back. "Gelato--that's one word," I tried to explain. Things were getting weird. Finally in some sort of primal frustration, he whined ruefully, "I'm just saying."

It reminded me, for some reason, of a beautiful afternoon at a sidewalk cafe where a pretty girl sitting at the table next to mine delivered to her companion, in the course of a high-pitched conversation, her culminating tour de force: "Well, it's like daddy said, you've got to take care of yourself 'cause it's a doggy-dog world."

I don't know whether the fellow in the street was drunk or just trying to fuck with me.

We all have characters on the margins of our lives who we can scarcely remember, whose names we don't know. It is best to make note of them, I think, lest it all be lost.

I'm just saying.

Transience

Life is made up of these moments, glimpsed in the half-light, caught between one act and the next, without specific meaning, but these are what we remember when we dream, the way mother drew the bath, the smell of her toiletries, the mysteries of her paraphernalia.  We remember in dreams.  

How Is It Done?

Somehow, I have found entire books on Google, not old ones, but new ones. How do they do this? Here is an example.

Hunter S. Thompson, A Generation of Swine.

I Am Well Now. However. . .

"Opium teaches only one thing, which is that
aside from physical sufffering, there is nothing real"
André Malraux
(1901-1976)
MAN'S FATE

When I was a child, every parent was able to go to the local pharmacy and purchase with only their signature a small bottle of Paregoric, a camphorated tincture of Opium which would ease the pain of illness and stop the runs.  Opium is the world's oldest and most common medicine, but somehow in the U.S. we've settled on other, more harmful and less effective, pain killers.  I thought of this much as I suffered through more than two days of pain and fever, and knew that with just a smidgen of codeine, I would sleep peacefully and awaken cured.  But the danger of addiction has been too deeply fixed in the public consciousness, and so I suffered, able only to take Tylenol PM with its toxic mixture of synthetic chemicals certain to cause me renal failure, heart irregularities, liver damage, hypertension, and an enlarged prostate.  But not addiction.  

I am no fan of drug addiction and believe everyone considering recreational drug use should be required to watch "Requiem for a Dream" over and over again.  I grew up around drug addicts and was early cured of that romance.  But holy mother of god, when I am sick, I WANT MEDICINE.  I want to live in a time when the doctor shows up at the house, retrieves his syringe from a little black bag, and says, "I'm just going to give you this.  It will help you sleep."  

You know--Civilized.  

Surely, my parents gave me Paregoric when I was young, and it didn't hurt me.  

Jungle Fever

I have been laid up with a fever, as they say.  I could stand to do nothing but lie on the couch and come in and out of consciousness.  Strange memories, strange dreams--seemingly forgotten things--came back vividly.  After two days, though, I felt in need of something, some company, as I had been "quarantined" by family and friends, and so I decided to download an audio book from iTunes.  I knew better than to try anything complex, and so I bought "King Solomon's Mines" by H. Rider Haggard, the 19th century adventure tale that resounds with colonialism and empire.  How awful, I thought, to endure illness in the wild, sick with fever, without comfort or luxury, and I tried to imagine what horrors one could face.  And then I remembered I had.  And so, here I jump ahead in my Peru Tale to somewhere near the end.  Jungle Fever.  

I had been with Brando and his two groups of travelers for a month, and when they were all ready to return to the states, I took a plane to Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian Amazon for one last week of adventure.  There I was to be met by a guide arranged for me by the guiding group in Cuzco.  He would see me into the jungle.  But when I arrived at the airport, it was another man who met me, a Juan Maldonado, who said that my original guide could not come but that he would take me wherever I wished to go.  A fellow on the plane, an ornithologist from a prominent  New York zoo, told me he had used Juan many times and that he was very reliable, that with Juan I would have no worries.  And so, deal arranged, Juan took me to his house so that he could pack.  We would begin right away.  

Juan lived in a village of loosely jointed huts joined by a vast dirt courtyard.  When we arrived, a young boy with a rifle was shooting at a hawk that was circling in the patch of sky above.  Juan's children came out shyly to meet me as Juan quickly packed some wet laundry from the clothesline into an old canvas bag.  Juan spoke to his wife, telling her, I supposed, what we were up to, and then we were gone. 

Puerto Maldonado is, or was then, a mining town reminiscent of the old American "Wild West" (for a vivid depiction of it, read Peter Matthiessen's "At Play in the Fields of the Lords" or watch the film made from the novel).  From all over the jungle, people came to sell their gold and everyone was armed.  Through the dirt streets, men walked with holsters past saloons and general stores and restaurants.  Here Juan bought provisions for the trip and we sat down to lunch in a ramshackled cafe.  Juan said we would hitch a ride to another town, Laberinto, where we would catch a boat.  I told Juan that I had read that in the tourist areas, there were really no animals to be seen and that I wanted to go where the animals were.  "Yes," he said, "we will go wild."  I should have known better.  

We caught our ride on a logging truck, standing up in the big bed holding onto the truck's roof for a long, rough ride through the forest.  The heat and the lack of altitude (yes, there is a reverse altitude sickness and after being in the cool mountain air for a month, I was feeling the effects of too much heat and oxygen) were getting to me, so I was glad when the ride finally ended.  Laberinto was a supply town for miners going up river.  Lean-to buildings held supplies and canned goods and cheap Cuzquena beer.  And, of course, there was an unwholesome supply of local prostitutes.  Juan left me to watch our supplies while he went to barter for a ride.  It didn't take long for me to see that I was the oddity in town.  When Juan returned, he said, "C'mon, I we have a boat."  "Juan," I asked, "Why are people staring at me."  "Oh, don't worry," he said, "they don't see many white people here."  And so, feeling like the poster boy for Banana Republic, I picked up my bag and hurried down to the river.  


We loaded our gear into a peque-peque, a long, narrow, dug-out canoe with an outboard motor mounted on the back.  Passengers sat facing one another along the sides of the dug-out.  Juan went to the front and I to the back where I sat across from two fierce looking tribal fellows who were dead drunk and still trying to drink the last of their quart of Cuzquena.  Thus we road through the waters of the Madre de Dios river, a wide tributary of the Amazon.  The heat and humidity seemed terrible after the mountains, there exposed in the open boat mid-day, creeping slowly along, endlessly, up river.  




Juan had taken up a conversation in the front of the boat with a large woman and called back to say that she had a gold mine deep in the jungle and she had agreed to let us stay at her camp.  Meanwhile, the two fellows across from me had taken me into account and were deep in discussion about something or other when suddenly one of them held out to me their bottle of beer.  Without thinking, I smiled and waved my hand indicating no and in that millisecond knew how wrong the motion had been.  Suddenly my new friends did not seem quite as drunk.  I had insulted them, I knew, and regretted it completely.  They spoke to one another in low tones, and then one of them began drawing his hands at me in the motion of firing a bow and arrow.  I have known many bad people in my life, strong men, fighting men, murderers, but I had never seen any like these.  Their entire lives had been lived in the jungle where they killed to survive.  Their hands, feet, shoulders and thighs all spoke to it.  Suddenly Juan called out to me, "What's going on back there?"  "Oh, nothing," I replied.  "What are these two saying?"  He looked at me funny and said, "I don't know, I don't speak that language.  They're just telling you that they are great hunters.  Do you know how to swim?"  "Sure," I said, "why?"  "Oh, nothing.  Just unlace your boots."  "What for?" I asked, nervously.  "Just in case the boat turns over.  Don't worry about anything.  Whatever happens, I'm with you."  


Shit!

But in a very short while, the peque-peque pulled up to a mud island in the middle of the river.  "C'mon," said Juan.  "We are getting out."  "Why?"  "We are going with these people to their camp.  We will wait here with them for their boat to come."  Quickly I threw my bag onto the bank and jumped out of the boat, watching as our new host and her crew unpacked their boxes of supplies.  And then we were alone, standing on a pile of dark sand, hundreds of yards from the closest shore, my new friends happily departed.  


Soon, another, smaller boat came out from shore and we loaded up once again.  My new hostess told me to sit next to her and gave me a great smile.  We spoke as well as we could, me with only a broken Spanish, Juan translating when needed.  She was the leader of the group and it was her camp.  She was a miner, she said.  At one time, they used to mine the river, but their was not so much gold there anymore.  Now they lived in the jungle where they dug down to where the river used to run, down to it's old river bottom, and then they sluiced that for a better yield.  As I would see, it was terrible work, but she had a crew who made a dollar a day six days a week which they got to spend on Sunday's in Laberinto on beer and prostitutes.  As we talked, I noticed tremendous scars running the inside length of her forearms.  She saw me looking.  "El tigre," she said.  I nodded, "Si, un tigre domestica, eh?"  She laughed at this.  Yes, these scars were from fighting.  She had been a prostitute for the oil companies, she said, when she was young.  They would fly her from camp to camp in a helicopter throughout the jungle.  It was a terrible thing, she said, but she was able to save enough money to set up her own mines.  Now, she was tough enough to keep things in line, I thought.  



We turned up a small feeder to the river, a jungle tributary like something out of one of the adventure movies I had watched when I was young, trees forming a canopy from the close banks, animal tracks on the mud embankments where they had come for water.  It was the dry season and the river had fallen, and eventually the boat got hung up on a submerged log.  The men, including Juan, all went over the side to pull the boat free.  Uncertain, I was the last to my feet, but my hostess told me no, sit, and so the two of us stayed dry in the boat while the others pulled us free.  I did not want to get into the water, but somehow I felt this would cost me more, sitting like the great white bwana as the others looked up submerged to their necks.  
We travelled up this tributary for quite some time until we came to a magnificent thatched house built over the water.  I thought this a wonderful place, but it was not where we were to stay.  Late in the afternoon, we began our journey away from the river into the jungle's interior.  As we walked, Juan was a flurry of instructions.  "Don't step there, don't touch that, don't lean against that tree, ants will cover you in seconds."  The sun was going down and birds filled the empty patches of sky between the canopy, thousands of them, millions.  Suddenly, I thought how vulnerable I was.  I had no idea where we were.  If everyone just ran away, I would be dead.  I was certain the men from camp were whispering to one another, "Should we kill him now or wait until later."  No one would ever know.  There was no law here.  "Wild," Juan had said.  Yes.  


Just before dark, we reached a clearing that was their camp.  Men came out to help carry the supplies; the women came out to stare at me and eventually they overcame a small