Port town, Honduras 10-10-74

Listening to classical music on the little transistor radio I bought yesterday. Sitting in candlelight darkness, my lonely pants hanging from a nail by the window (the same pants I wore when they took me to jail in British Honduras- but that’s another story.) Outside it’s pouring rain and I’m thinking the whole world is under water empty and hopeless. I dunno. Maybe I like it that way sometimes. This feeling, comfortable-sad; entirely different from the truly depressing feeling of total despair I got when the ship pulled into this port at first light two days ago and I got a look at the dead industrial wasteland of the docks and the foggy horrible green hills and meadows across the bay. Feeling totally alone and even now when I’ve grown accustomed to this place and even comfortable here, somehow these hills make me feel empty and bad when I look out past the ships and see them over there and know they’ll still be there when I’m dead, grave-rot green and peaceful and horrible. I remember how I almost cried looking across the bay that first damp morning. Aw well, fuck them fuckin hills anyway. Now it’s late at night and I’m sitting at my little desk in my little room by the railroad tracks across from the docks full of ships, big booming monsters from far away, China and Londontown. It’s raining hard and I’m content for now with this happy/sad feeling. Like this classical music I’m hearing now. I don’t need to listen to lively Latino ritmo or go out and get drunk and dance with the girls in the street. I’m just happy right now with my candlelight and my little radio playing sad-static sounds in the endless rain.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

St Patrick’s Day
2010
Times Square

Fact: Saint Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland. Why then do they all come slither about on his day of honor?
Fact: Holy days are meant to venerate Saints. Last time I checked, vomiting at their likenesses fell under the ‘desecration’ category.

Now that we have the facts straight, this is how my day went. It all started because I found myself enjoying the uncharacteristically warm weather so much yesterday that, instead of descending into the 14th street station and taking the train to class, I followed the glistening sidewalk all the way to Midtown. Of course in my sun-drenched daisy-filled summer-lovin’ mind, I completely forgot the occasion. You know, that day where every asshole is the Irish kind.

Well, as soon as I hit 23rd street, my rose-colored glasses turned into green beer goggles. They were everywhere. I mean everywhere. Crawling out of the sewers, clogging the crosswalks, flopping around haphazardly in front of bars wearing Jerzees with names like McGillicutty across the back in big orange letters. Screeching poisonous renditions of Danny Boy and Kerrick Fergus from these greasy drooling hatches while laying belly up on the gummy dogshit pavement. It was horrifying.

This was some serious shit. Why was I the only person who appeared visibly shaken by the thousands of possessed green gnomes that had taken to the streets in vomit-inducing revelry? What exactly were they celebrating? Did they even know?

I slunk along like a wounded animal, trying to disappear into the bricks of the grime-covered midtown buildings all the way to my class on 35th street. Luckily by the time I got out of class, the revelers had slithered on back into whatever holes they called “bed.” I walked down through the shallow-breathing Chelsea streets back to my apartment, careful to avoid the river of corned-beef vomit that mixed with green confetti as it made its slimy retreat into the underworld– where it belonged, with other green things.

Saint Patrick, wherever you are, please take this as a formal apology on behalf of humanity.

Sincerely,

Alessandra De Benedetti

The blogs that you are about to enjoy in this series have been transcribed from various corresponding napkins and small scraps of waste paper, Mexican product labels and cigarette wrappers that I came across while uncovering new (old) material for Scabvendor. The first entry was written by a frustrated and bored young junkie named Jonathan Shaw shortly before leaving his Los Angeles home forever in the twilight months of 1974.

- AD

July 26, 1974

City of the fallen angel, with your glowing 3 AM streetlights that nobody sees, you lie too still, too still; it’s not a healthy sign.

Where are your street corner musicians, your sidewalk cafes? A truck rumbles by and gone down along the tiny block I’m on, intent on some great and important midnight mission. A cake to deliver. Where is your past, burned out young friend? When do you dream? Or am I but a dream, a figment of your unsure imagination, who is this ragged figure who walks catlike the line of your deception? Mourning the death of the unborn, I am a friend to your crazy ways, so don’t sic your mad dogs on me before I see you all lit up like a Christmas tree in apocalyptic fires of your earthquake Armageddon.

I stop to light a pale cigarette before moving on seeking the eternal fix, the answer to no particular question. Whispered conversations, lines to greater things zigzag your worn-out welcome mat like the directions of a suspended whistle. Where am I to go now? Please show me some sign that you’re alive. You are the great god of madness, gone disturbingly laconic tonight. It’s not right. Give me some great rumble of disaster in the distance, and I’ll leave well enough alone.

© Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

Still life: razor blade, book of matches atop a pile of white sheets of paper… does every eye see it the same?

Tired old rush– tied off, tucked in and sucked away. drop by drop. spots on the wall, unique decoration, jazz writing, surreal hypoglyphics, gimmicks, mexicans say it best– in a song “me quiero nada…” On the street of the Saint, Monica, Mr Cadillac pulls his barrels, 38 blast— BAM! ten bicycle writhers spewed asunder. Flash, thunder. The occult bookstore stands monument to the spot and a pizza joint blasphemies the cradle of nostalgia.

HAD A PIECE LATELY? None of yer fuckin bizness. OH, yeh, bicycles, bicycles, thousands, MILLIONS of bicycles, and rats. Bicycles and rats combo sandwich. No Renfield, he lay on a hospital a week delirious, raving of rats and bicycles… then he died. I say, I was there, I saw it, not Renfield, not bicycles and rats not just then, but i was there, i saw him die. Horrible. Well, not so bad, really, I went out afterwards and had a rat and bicycle sandwich. I never could stand the taste of pizza, the aftertaste of a hand me down childhood romance, even New York style.

Silverfish, California, oh that sure is a nice place, no neighbor sam to terrify your ant gardens. It’s like memory lane, oh such a nice place. But now let me finish… He’d never rode a bicycle in his life, never flown a kite. But he had his own designs, little bottles of bacteria, stacked up in mason jars in a weedy old tool shed, above rows and rows of tenement slum buildings, he lived in them all.

Harlem, teeming with grease, bubbling and mysterious, he controlled the whole sector, he heard the sunday gospel music in his head, his brain circuits were locked in and crossed countries, gazing by industrial moonlight into the murky bottles he collected. A little god, the abnormal child he grew into the depths of his microcosmic universe and it grew into him, pulled his strings like a puppet. Till one day he met his match. He beheld a row of gleaming perfect little white teeth, clicking in the murk. Clicking gleaming perfect little white incisors.

That’s how it started and the clicking grew and persisted in his mind, louder and louder, distracting his thoughts at the dinner table and conventional prayer and incantations that had always kept the fragile balance, his control began to snap and his manners grew dark and brooding. Finally he was cast by his family and friends out into the night. Mania blossomed. He bound up the stairs to the rooftop, blindly, clutching his special jar, the accursed white teeth, and fled off into the sea of teeming millions, emitting strange radio waves. Shady characters in dark suits followed furtively.