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It happens rather quickly.
One moment you’re standing outside of some punk themed tiki bar on the Lower East Side where you just performed and then you’re out on the sidewalks of Manhattan. In the Big Apple, they don’t play around. By the time the host says his farewells and quips, they’re pushing you out of the backroom into the bar so the next show can start setting up. So that leaves you in front of the venue, smoking marijuana and bullshitting with the performers; talking shop and musing about the last time you had seen each other. The poetry scene is like those cousins you see around the holidays you know? Real fun to kick it with and raise some hell from time to time but the fact you rarely see each other adds to the magic and quite frankly it’s better off you’re not neighbors after all.
But that’s when that actress who is spending some time in the city and popped out to the show to see you says that she would hate to leave the coast without having partied with you. And she has mushrooms. See some men are known for having money or having a granite chiseled jawline or a foot long cock and all of those things are wonderous but you are known as the guy who really knows how to have a good time. Penn Station is just ten blocks from the bar and you should get back to New Jersey but if there was ever an angel and devil floating over your shoulders that angel mother fucker takes a lot of time off.
So you’re running down the steps to the subway alongside the actress and that publisher provocateur character with the cowboy hat, who has built a career and burned it down five times over, who pedals Ukrainian books from a table in Washington Square even though he hates Ukraine, who drinks cheap vodka and assures you that your career needs him to get to the next level has a spot in Harlem. So you’re hopping subways and you’re taking pulls from the vodka and everyone is a long lost friend. Kicking it with drag queens and beer drunk construction workers, this is New York City baby.
You climb the brownstone spires of Harlem where they haven’t discovered elevators yet and the nights going. She has never tripped before so you’re keeping an eye on her but it’s all laughs. Until the war profiteer turns heel and the mushrooms do what mushrooms do and you’re doing lines in the bathroom (like a gentleman) when chaos erupts. The actress is having what scientists would call a fucking religious experience and she’s ripping off her clothes and seeing the divine, she’s hanging out the window in hysterics screaming to the moon about death. And you’ve been there before and you’re trying to guide her through it and keep things calm but the cowboy hatted now blackout drunk provocateur is pulling up porn. He’s in full blown creep mode. He’s admitting that he’s masterbated to her pictures and when she recoils from the admission he tells her “just your gam gams baby, that’s what we call legs out here”
Then she’s yelling and he’s roaring and you steal the soul from his chest with a pointed threat and you’re back out on the streets of the city. You should have just gone to Penn Station but you get her in an Uber and navigate the subways by inertia and will alone.
Or you could have been out with the punk dude who owned the coffee shop up in New Brunswick where you hosted a show and it’s his birthday so you’re all animal and engine, you’re all less than angels and more than beasts, you’re all tomorrow doesn’t exist so why ya worrying about it? And you’re buying cocaine at some dude’s house and there’s gold records all over the walls. He played in some band that you’ve been told the name of half a dozen times but it still hasn’t clicked; you’re too busy watching him work with the powder. Whatever he was in a past life is history because now he is an artisan. Each move he makes is precise and intentioned, with blade and scale he bags you up a rough morning.
You’re hitting the bar and the boys from the bands are out in force slamming down Pabst Blue Ribbon and lining up for the bathroom like it was some Soviet foodline. Everyone has a pitch under that autumn moon, jaws jumping around their faces like it bumping to the base drum from the speakers. But once your daily bread is amphetamines, blow is nothing more than a Brazilian Bold coffee from 711, if you had taught your heart to gallop then right now you’re just strutting back and forth. You all leave the bar, pick up a case of beer and head back to his house to crush the beer and finish up the powder. Like Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers you’ll be the first to step foot on the battlefield and the last one to step off.
There people are playing guitar and singing pop punk songs and you meet his roommate who is obsessed with Aleister Crowley. You end up talking up magick and not that rabbit in the hat type shit but the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. The woo-woo. The left hand path. The real deep symbolism that makes the hair on your neck stand up and your drug-addled brain buzz with possibility. He breaks out a jar of poppers and you never heard of that before but you take a hit cause why not? None of you had made it this far by being drinkers of water. The birthday boy’s girl springs a leak and her nose erupts into a steady stream of ruby red blood into her lap; the consequence of hard living and tender flesh. So he says his goodnight and the party starts to clear out but you’re talking about Hermeticism and riffing and raffing.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” The dude with the poppers says and you both finish up what’s left of the cocaine. He offers you more of the strange jarred drug and you oblige but then subtly pull out your phone to look up what it does and why you haven’t come across it in your treks around the sun.
He says Crowley’s mantra again. Then he says it again and moves closer to you. And when his mouth utters it the final time alarms are starting to go off in your electrified brain because that’s three times too many for any polite setting when he says “baby, let’s go upstairs and watch some anime”
You give an awkward farewell and bolt from the house, your ass feeling bizarre and you don’t even dare to look back at your phone. You’re almost angry as if the old anime trick was going to work on you. Elementary.
But before you get into the Uber you wonder why your life is always one of adventure and chaos, why you find joy in the comfort of strangers chasing dawn through the backstreets of damnation. Every party always has to come to an end and each delivers its own haunted mornings. There is anguish and then there is the suffering that you earn and that is the pain you have chosen to feel. Each stubborn morning eventually gives in to the sinister moon and twilight is when the dogs come out of the men. There you’ll be another strange ghost again dancing beneath the streetlights and under the neon glow of the bars none of the other pain exists.
You are a matchstick burnt out heading to ash but you are the night. And in these shadowed hours you forget that your family doesn’t call much anymore, you forget about the woman who used to love you, you forget about the money you don’t have or the jobs you can’t find. You languish like a specter desperate for a kiss from the sun and hold onto each moment like it was your last.
Let me know what you think in the comments! Next post is going up Monday morning and we’re going to be doing an actual schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. As always my Kofi is here
Like I love it. Damn the writing style. Also, though, I want you to be here in 30 years still so take care of you, please!
I absolutely loved this.. you are such a phenomenal artist.
I was there... In New York,dancing in the lights of the moon, and neon.
The hum of the city so vivid...all from my bed in Washington!
Bravo 👏 can't wait till Monday