Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (10 page)

 

the other night

under a new moon

with the cuckoo clocks wound

tight

they stopped 6 Chinese fishermen

on skidrow

San Pedro

with 28 million dollars worth of

shit

in their boots.

 

 

they say it was an old dwarf

on a houseboat

who painted butterflies

on the sleeping body of his wife

in their pitiful

dream.

 

 

Artists, they say, sell out cheapest and most

quickly.

 

 

meanwhile, a fat man in Hong Kong

hearing,

decided to do away with Art,

and

while irritated

just to make Mr. Justice

soil his new clean sheets

he dialed a number

and arranged

the assassination of the

next-to-last

American

hero.

 

 

and the pleasures of the past,

remembering the Goose Girl at Hollywood Park

1950,

red coats and trumpets

and faces cut with knives and mistakes;

I am ready for the final

retreat;

I have an old-time kerosene burner,

candles, 22 cans of Campbell’s soup

and an 80 year old uncle in Andernach,

Germany

who was once the burgermeister of that

town I was born in

so long ago.

I ache all over with the melody of pain

and people knock at my door

come in and drink with me

and talk,

but they don’t realize I’ve quit,

have cleaned up the kitchen

chased the mice out from under the bed

and am making ready

for the tallest flame of them all.

 

 

I look at buildings and clouds and ladies,

I read newspapers as my shoelaces break,

I dream of matadors brave and bulls brave

and people brave and cats brave and

can openers brave.

 

 

my uncle writes me in trembling hand:

“How is your little girl,

and is your health good? You didn’t answer

my last letter…”

 

 

“Dear Uncle Heinrich,” I answer,

“my little girl is very clever and pretty and

also good. I hope that you are

happy and well. I enclose a photo

of Marina. Answer when you are

able. Things here are the same as they

have always

been.

Love,

Henry”

 

 

the sorrow of Scibelli,

friend,

as he turned at a sound in the brush

and was bayonetted

by a man 5 feet tall who didn’t even know

his name,

who then sliced his jugular vein,

took the gold from his teeth,

both ears,

then opened his wallet

and tore up the photo of a soft-faced

girl named

simply, “Laura,”

who was waiting in Kansas City

for an earless, tooth-ravished

bloody

Scibelli

who just happened to die a little earlier

than most of the rest of us,

also for

Cause

Unknown.

 

 

once in lockup, being fingerprinted and photographed, all

that,

I dropped ashes from my cigarette on the floor

and the cop got mad, he said,

“by god, where the hell do you think you are?”

“County jail,” I said, and he said, “All right, wise guy, now you

walk down

that corridor and then

take a left.”

I walked on down

took my left and

here it came—

they had this beast of a thing

in a huge cellblock, alone, alone,

and there were wires across the bars

it was the L.A. County drunktank

and it was their pet

the thing saw me

came running

and threw itself snarling against the bars and wire

wanting to kill me, and I stood there and watched it,

then spoke:

“Cigarette? how about a smoke?”

the thing rattled the wire and snarled a few more times

and I pulled out a smoke.

the thing grinned at me and I poked a cigarette through the wire

put it in his lips and lit him

up.

“I dislike them too,” I said.

the thing grinned and bobbed its head

yes.

 

 

the cop came and took me away

and put me in a cell with

5 less living.

 

 

it’s amazing

the number of people who can’t feel

pain.

 

 

put 40 in a room

squeezed against each other

hours of lethargic talk

and they don’t

faint

scream

go mad or even

wince.

 

 

it appears as if they are waiting for

something that will never

arrive.

 

 

they are as comfortable as chickens or

pigs in their pens.

 

 

one might even consider it wisdom

if you can overlook the faces

and the conversation.

 

 

when the 4th is over

and they go back to their separate holes

then the sun will kiss me hello

then the sidewalks will look good again.

 

 

back in their cages

they’ll dream of the next great

holiday.

probably Labor Day

smashing together on the freeways

talking together

40 in a room,

cousins, aunts, sisters, mothers, brothers, uncles,

sons, grandfathers, grandmothers, wives, husbands,

lovers, friends, all the rest,

40 in a room

talking about nothing,

talking about themselves.

 

 

he got drunk and went to sleep

in his bed

and the fire started

and he layed in there

burning

until a friend in the next room

smelled it

and ran in

and tried to pull him out of the fire

by his arms

and the skin rolled right off the arms

and he had to grab again

deeper

near the bone,

and he got him out and up

and the guy started screaming

and running blind,

he hit some walls

finally made 2 doorways

and with half a dozen men trying

to hold him

he broke free

and ran into the yeard

screaming

still running

he ran right into some barbed wire

and tangled in the barbed wire

screaming

and they had to go up

and get him loose

from the wire

 

 

he lived for 3 nights and 3

days

 

 

drinking and smoking

are bad for the

health.

 

 

September after Labor Day,

99 degrees in Burbank, Calif.

I am looking at a fly

a small brown fly on a yellow curtain;

the Mexicans would be wise enough to sleep under trees

on a day like this

but Americans are stricken with ambition

they will survive as powerful and unhappy

neurotics,

right now my tax money is dropping bombs

on starving people in Asia

as I fight the small fly that has arrived from the

curtain by my elbow;

I swing and miss the fly,

neurotic American me,

the boys who pilot those planes are nice boys, gentle,

they kill apathetically

with honor and grace,

without hate.

I know one, he is now a prof who teaches American

Literature at a university in Oregon,

I’ve been drunk with him and his wife, several times,

so he teaches me,

that’s nice.

99 degrees in Burbank

and as I sit here

any number of things are happening,

mostly unhappy things

like swearing mechanics with hangovers climbing under cars

and drunken dentists pulling teeth and cursing

and bald-headed surgeons making too much of a mess,

and the editor of
Time
magazine backing his car out of the

driveway

after an argument with his wife;

it’s 99 degrees in Burbank

and there’s a jet overhead,

I don’t think it will bomb me,

those Asians don’t have enough tax money,

the only clever Asians are the ones who claim they are

Supremely Blessed, speak good English,

grow grey thick beards plus a heavenly smile topped by

shining eyes and

charge $4 admit at the Shrine to

teach placidity and non-ambition

and screw half the intellectual girls in the city.

it’s 99 degrees in Burbank

and those who will survive will survive

and those who will die will die,

and most will dry up and look like toads eating hamburger

sandwiches at noon,

I don’t know what to do—

send money and the way,

be kind to me,

I like it

effortless, sweet and easy, remember,

I never bombed

anybody, I

can’t even kill this

fly.

 

 

I have them timed—

first the nurse will arrive in her nice

yellow automobile—4:10 p.m.—

she always shows me a lot of

leg—and I always look—

then think—

keep your leg, baby.

then, after that,

there’s the man who arrives

and takes his bulldog

out to crap

about the time I’m out to mail

my letters. We test each other,

never speak—I live without working,

he works without

living;

I can see us some day

battling on his front lawn—

he screaming, “you bum!”

and myself screaming back:

“lackey! slave!”

as his bulldog chews my leg

and the neighbors pelt me

with stones.

 

 

I guess I better get interested in

Mexican jumping beans

and the Rose Bowl

Parade.

 

 

a woman, a

tire that’s flat, a

disease, a

desire; fears in front of you,

fears that hold so still

you can study them

like pieces on a

chessboard…

it’s not the large things that

send a man to the

madhouse. death he’s ready for, or

murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…

no, it’s the continuing series of
small
tragedies

that send a man to the

madhouse…

not the death of his love

but a shoelace that snaps

with no time left…

the dread of life

is that swarm of trivialities

that can kill quicker than cancer

and which are always there—

license plates or taxes

or expired driver’s license,

or hiring or firing,

doing it or having it done to you, or

constipation

speeding tickets

rickets or crickets or mice or termites or

roaches or flies or a

broken hook on a

screen, or out of gas

or too much gas,

the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,

the president doesn’t care and the governor’s

crazy.

lightswitch broken, mattress like a

porcupine;

$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at

Sears Roebuck;

and the phone bill’s up and the market’s

down

and the toilet chain is

broken,

and the light has burned out—

the hall light, the front light, the back light,

the inner light; it’s

darker than hell

and twice as

expensive.

then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails

and people who insist they’re

your friends;

there’s always that and worse;

leaky faucet, Christ and Christmas;

blue salami, 9 day rains,

50 cent avocados

and purple

liverwurst.

 

 

or making it

as a waitress at Norm’s on the split shift,

or as an emptier of

bedpans,

or as a carwash or a busboy

or a stealer of old lady’s purses

leaving them screaming on the sidewalks

with broken arms at the age of

80.

 

 

suddenly

2 red lights in your rear view mirror

and blood in your

underwear;

toothache, and $979 for a bridge

$300 for a gold

tooth,

and China and Russia and America, and

long hair and short hair and no

hair, and beards and no

faces, and plenty of
zigzag
but no

pot, except maybe one to piss in and

the other one around your

gut.

 

 

with each broken shoelace

out of one hundred broken shoelaces,

one man, one woman, one

thing

enters a

madhouse.

 

 

so be careful

when you

bend over.