what do folded girls do?

Next June, the 27th will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the flying saucer. It was in this neighborhood, in the vicinity of Mt. Rainier that Kenneth Arnold saw nine disklike objects while flying in his own plane. They were described over the news wire as saucers. Another area native, Dennis the Menace, is being celebrated in a new anniversary edition of early comics. The boy whose father drew the strip, Dennis Ketchum, grew up on Queen Anne Hill, where I lived for many years. He was as mischeivous as a Little Rascal, but beat a strangely solitary path. Other kid characters in the strip never seemed to share the spoils, nor participate in the plotting. Another thing that was unique about Dennis was the absence of a supplied cause for his delinquency and malevolence, his adult-proportioned menace. Dennis' popularity had to be connected to the spontaneous generation of his crimes, his criminal turn of mind, his jail-bird patois. This might alternate with a naive, hickish huck finn like candor.
Neither the behavoir of his father nor mother could explain Dennis'. He was a product of the time and exculpated the both of them. I think it has been a late popular development to not visit the sins of the son upon his father or family but to blame them upon the zeitgeist. As though the young transmit the evils of the times.
++++ ++++++B++++++ +++
I went on a coffee date with Claire and the baby. We sat at a sidewalk table, at the 45th Starbucks. We had parked the stroller at Tully's initially. They have sidewalk speakers that amplify the music they play indoors, a New Age concoction- sax, timbale, and unconsonant vocals. We moved. Two unoccupied tables in the sun only the rush of traffic at our ankles to disturb us. And the baby.
We are deep in the crossword when a bearded gay with a border collie negotiates for the table next to us. In a few minutes a black man in his late fifties comes up and begins addressing the gay, the collie, the baby, Claire, me. He tells me loudly, insistently that I am holding the baby wrong. "Stir, don't shake." He takes a cowbell and drumstick out of a bag and begins to play. He stops every young girl on the sidewalk, with either a "Hey, girl! Look at that nice skirt. I like your skirt, that's a nice skirt....mmmm-hmmm." or a variation. He talks to the gay about the hard load his race carries. The gay baits him. The cowbell guy addresses his righteous indignation to the baby. I tell him we are not a part of his conversation, though the five of us are nearly touching knees.
Claire walks the baby around and leaves me with the two of them.
"I come here on a slave ship. Yes I come on a slave ship here," the man says.
He does not mean the 45th Starbucks.
Claire and I decide to walk to a garage sale even though the posterboard sign we read on a telephone pole suggests that there will be live music. There is. A man is playing a guitar next to a folding table of kitchen items. Claire points out a table ten rows deep with mass market paperbacks. I find a Thorsten Veblen 'Theory of the Leisure Class', and a Norman Mailer 'Naked and the Dead'. I already own the Veblen, but it is a quarter a book, and the covers of both are terrific. 'Theory' has a coat of arms featuring a groomed poodle and a luxury car. Mailer has a bedraggled soldier and jagged typography, to suggest the horror and chaos of war.
I've read the Veblen before but the Mailer is new to me. The first chapter is not encouraging- shipboard poker game. The Boston cynic, the hard sergeant, and worse than one could hope for, the Southerner, who might say, "By gumption! Ah'll niver git the little ol' card Ah want!"
It is impossible to believe that this is a male speaking. It seems drawn almost entirely from the Southern-variety starlets of movie musicals and comedies. The kind in which, to differentiate, the Southern girl drawls her one unremarkable line, unfolds her legs and undulates across a room. By the way....Why why why do they perch like that? Where did it come from? Perched so far forward that their ankles are nearly beneath their anuses. Why must they simper bent? Is it sexual? What does a folded girl do? He ponduhed and ponduhed, and figgered and figgered but he got no closer to cipherin' it out than a ol' coon dog gits to tinned victuals.
Mailer's omniscient narration just sounds insane when it reproduces characters' voices in their dialects, or with their particular lack of understanding, and when it assumes an easy familiarity with our habits of perspective..."At a second glance you could see he was 28," it has gone too too far.
I think only a gay man could write of men together with any knowledge. A gay man might know, like he knows thread count, what activity makes shoulders like those.

Resuscitate

Will's ex-partner B. lives under Roy's house. He has cleaned it up gradually. The upstairs bedroom that was entirely given over to becoming a litter box has been cleaned. The floors are cleaned even if the damage from Mick's spilling bladder is too deep to eradicate or disguise. B. lives in fear of warrants and treachery. He talks about moving away. He is sure that Will has called the police. Will visited after Roy's death and saw B. taking cover. The police are interested in a bathtub that B sold to a dealer. It was an antique claw-foot tub that B earned as a payment on work done for someone who stays high, delusional, paranoid and hyperactive. The owner of the tub, after giving to B., called the police. THe police searched the second-hand shops. They recovered the tub and returned it. The shop owner, who had dealt with B., gave the police his info.
This sort of thing used to happen with frequency when we all had shops on Capital Hill. It seems shocking now. He might have made 50 dollars from the tub. It seems the burden of the addict to carry cast-iron down the sidewalk across the street and a mile more for a few dollars and to run from the transaction for the next seven years.
Mick had been an alcoholic. It had been the destruction of him. He had once modelled for Jantzen. When I met him he was hunched, sagging, balding, blind and only semi-ambulatory. Their floor and all their furniture was marked by spilled drinks and burns from dropped cigarettes. You could see where they passed out the most times, Will said.
When it came time to make the final decision, when Mick's family and Roy were around the bed, with the hospital staff, and they discussed the "Do Not Resuscitate" order, Roy was given the power to remove the ventilator or keep it. "Mick?" Roy asked, "If you want me to keep the respirator on, sit up and tell me."
*
*
I wrote what I called a valedictory for L.'s daughter. It was her 18th birthday. I worried that it might be inappropriate. L. seemed to like it. It went as follows:
Nothing would have suited me better at eighteen than to have left home at seventeen. It would have been a symbolic action if I had left home, by the most charitable reading. You see, by the time I had become seventeen years old, my parents had already packed a few sticks of their Early American furniture in a Mayflower van and left me with a woman of dubious morals, while they relocated to the flats of Oklahoma. Under those circumstances, it was harder to run away. I hid under the covers of the bed I had been given, but this woman in whose charge I was left had raised two head-strong children herself, and knew the difference between an empty bed and an occupied one. Indeed that might have been her forte.
I was destined to miss getting everything I needed to nurture my self-esteem by the shortest distance. I was given the editorship of the yearbook, not the newspaper. I was in second band, not first. I was the first runner-up for an exchange program. Everything seemed to have been given away to someone else before I got to it. My path to the future was littered with the shells of the nuts others had eaten. And yet I crunched forward.
Some are determined to make their mark early. Salvador Dali emptied the water supply in his sculpture classroom into the plaster supply, flooding the rooms, halls, and walkways with what became a cast that had to be chipped away. I think he was expelled. There are better examples. Of course you can't forget Mozart.
Others are poised to accompany the exact tenor and drift of their moment, and at any other time, or in any other place they would be passed by. Harry Truman is a good example of this sort of life.
Have you forgotten Mozart yet? Try.
Being young is a currency itself, and those who are richest have the least idea how to spend it wisely. Since you are an attractive young girl, you will find that everyone seems to want to lend you a hand- at least there are lots of hands apparent. At times it will seem like you are the last lifeboat off the Titanic.
A generous nature and a kind disposition must be earned, I believe. In my own experience, you have to be a total bastard for a while, before becoming a saintly figure. Look out for yourself, maybe just for a month. Give it a try. Be snotty to everyone who will not advance you. Snub those who have shown you compassion, and mock those whom you envy. Ignore the needy and shun the powerless.
You will find that you have a spine nearly straining to the breaking point against this manner. You will find that there is something inside of you- surely not the soul- nothing that mystical... something which expires, but which cannot be extinguished during your life... something your Mother and Father gave you. I won't name it. I can't. Goodness. Oh, I could.
Alright maybe do it for just a week. The needy and powerless can hold grudges a long time.

In Passing

The Gallery called about the T.S. Eliot Square Dance paintings. 2 for 275? No. Am I becoming arrogant, because I had a good month? 137.50 seems too cheap, as I will never make anything in visual art that I like more. I can make others. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' could lend itself to one or two more square dance calls. Eliot is the only poet I can stomach. His Catholicism notwithstanding. It is Eliot's glasses that the shifty, deceitful elderly lady dealer wears. That's why I initially liked her. There could be no other reason. I have loaded twenty or thirty slabs of marble into her Jeep Cherokee with nary a thanks, and still been civil, even solicitous. Damn frames tricked me.
Mick of "Just Dandy" has died. He was the fourth person of "3 of a Kind", I think. He had been with his partner, the Fagin-like Roy, for 35 years. He had kidney failure, went on medication, then dialysis, had a leg amputated. He never seemed entirely well, even ten years ago. Words were slow to leave his lip, like tipped molasses. He seemed slow on the uptake and his eyes focussed with effort, like he was just crawling out from a nap under the bed. He gave the impression that his tongue was fat, that he chewed it like a pacifier. He was, though, the most... untroubled of the group of dealers. He had a sweet disposition, and reserved his scorn for the scorned.
He would sit on the sidewalk, while Roy sanded down an end table, and his head would slowly turn to watch the boys walk across the street. He was Floyd the barber, capable of homilies on the weather, business.
I remember being scandalised that Roy sanded down furniture. It seemed dishonest to me at the time. He wsa deliberately disguising the condition. Other dealers, knowing the lay public carries this incomprehensible prejudice, would just criticize Roy for doing it on the busy corner. In their shops you would hear the muffled sound of sanding in the backroom or upstairs.
I would often walk down the street and sit next to Mick. Never exchange many words. Just sit. He was easy company. Unpretentious. Genuinely nice. He would hand money out to just about anyone that asked. And many did. Without reservations- even when business was slow, he would just give money to any impoverished street kid or addict.
Julie, who worked for them, stopped me on the sidewalk downtown to tell me. "Mick passed."
and... "I think he passed on Labor Day." and "Right before he passed he was beginning to walk again." This passage is the tip of a belief system whose mass, I trust, will remain submerged.

Unlikely apprenticeships

"What does 'Handsome is, as handsome does' mean?" Doug asks... often. I tell him:"It means that you are only as handsome as your actions." "I thought it meant that if you are handsome you can get away with anything," he replies, just as often.
The most handsome man I know, now a successful businessman, built the capital he needed to go into business by becoming a prostitute. This was probably ten or more years ago. He will talk about it frankly, he will laugh delightedly. It seems a ridiculous phase. He was well-liked, though he did not pro-rate. Premature ejaculators would sometimes ask for pro-rated refunds on the unused time. He also did not allow repeat customers. Repeat customers also felt entitled to ask for discounts, or familiar enough to elaborate on their requirements. My friend, the male hooker, might sometimes just get his shirt off before the whole thing was over.
He said that he did what many other prostitutes did not do: make out with the guys. Most of them were older, fat. Some were younger, but fat. He would charge $100 an hour, to be paid in advance. He looks like a high-school football player, thick, muscular shoulders and arms, massive legs, a prominent chest. He has the look and the manner of a high-school jock, and a stunning, pretty profile. No tattoos. Blond body hair.
He probably gave up the business when he met Arthur at the gym. Well, possibly twelve years have passed. Art was tawny, if that's the color I mean, part American Indian, no body hair, "so muscular that he had trouble wiping his ass", I was told. He had worked in a logging camp, felling trees and in teh down-time, lifting weights with the other guys. He was on work release. He had just come from prison, a drug conviction. They were together two years. Art began using. Meth, I think. My friend never went back to prostitution, but he still thinks about it. He's 40 now. But still dreamy.
He tells of one guy, a 23 year-old, pudgy, nerdy guy, living at his folk's house in Bellevue. The guy called 4 times to make sure that the fantasy that he wanted would be acted out correctly, authentically. My f. was supposed to humiliate him, degrade him, while the guy masturbated. He told him how pathetic his dick was. He followed him around the house. "You're worthless." They were in the kitchen. He pushed the guy out the glass patio doors and locked them. The guy pleaded to be let in. He was naked. the neighbors could see him. He pressed himself up against the glass, and to my f.'s surprise shot upon the glass. The kid said it was the best experience he'd ever had.
Doug loves stories like that. So does Claire. They both live sedately, respectably, but they've had their days. Doug overdosed in the alley behind Neighbors. Claire, in just her bathrobe, crawled out a window to escape the police after she accidentally violated some hospital in/out patient rule. Of course they're the most trustworthy people I've known. They're quite similar; though they've only had occasion to see each other maybe a half-dozen times, they seem to have an affinity.
They both want the grisly parts of my rare outings. Doug wants to know "How big was it?" I never remember.