THE GLACIAL CARNIVAL
Another piece of this book appeared in the on-line journal CAVEAT LECTOR (Caveat-lector.org). The only time something of mine has so appeared. THE GLACIAL CARNIVAL is composed of sentences rooted in rescued relics from that time of the late Seventies in NYC when living in Room 801 in the Earle Hotel over-looking Washington Square....
-Hugo was saying: too much concern for everybody if you ask me.
---And you didn’t even come from out of town so you can take it in stride when you’re in the WHITE MARK DELI on Sixth Avenue… and have asked the guy for change after you got a quart of ale and this next customer comes up to the counter with a can of dog food saying, hey, can you open this for me? The guy behind the counter asks, do you need a spoon? Nah, I can get it out with my fingers.
-Hugo has been here before. He is stunned to still be alive, I think. All his best friends are dead or married and he only thought of the former. What can you say to a guy who’s married?
I go over to Hugo's apartment near the river. Across the street from from his window is a truck park. Guys fuck each other between the trucks or suck each other off. I could charge admission… a guy gives a guy a hand job and hands him a handful of cum… what does he tell the guy?
-Hugo gave up on girls and boys a long time ago. It’s nice and boring here. I want or I don’t want. That’s about all there is. People are always asking, how’s it going, how are you, how, how, how…
-I go back to the hotel. The only thing I miss…
-Was there ever a time when I didn’t miss something or other?
-Pride is a bird’s meal.
-Hugo says he knew a woman who liked to get a guy from the Bowery when guys were sleeping on the street… don’t ask me how she did it.
-Get a guy on the Bowery and brought him Uptown and does things to him and then tells him to get lost with a twenty dollar bill.
-Hugo says, he is much too busy. He didn’t have the time to kill himself. To kill yourself you got to be able to find yourself.
-But Hugo was at one time not alone: he is remembering her tongue discovering his armpits, the place behind the knees, the spot behind his balls and she would comment on how his little toe is curled up into a miniature fist.
-But she left. They always eventually do.
-Like him, I often sleep with my clothes on… saves time in the morning--- for what you ask? It’s only habit.
-At least no refrigerator in the room…the waking and falling asleep to the sounds of a refrigerator… to be found dying and the last sounds you will be hearing: the refrigerator…
-The smallness of my room is appealing as there is no empty spaces to dream of…
-But room enough for a Pat and Mike joke… they had been great drinking buddies and then one of them goes and dies and it could be either one or the other and you throw in the cows, the wife, the house and the children and one of them is looking at the other boxed up and ready to go: looks good since he stopped drinking.
REMEMBER, here is a young man living in a hotel room, once upon a time, as the hotel where he lived once upon a time no longer has such tenants, they have guests who come because of its location, because they want a small hotel, they want a hotel that reminds them of small hotels they have stayed in Europe, once upon a time, and even Europeans come to the hotel as they want something that is familiar, though these people are surprised that the light bulbs actually allow you to read while resting in bed.
-He is listening,: I gotta find a lady to eat my grapes, being said in The 55--- a hole two steps down from Christopher Street--- with a bursting liver, once you’ve decided nothing matters that would be paradise, a version of it, I guess someone else is saying: broken glass, tears.
-My corpse should be viewed face to the pillow.
-Obsession versus observation.
-Is it tonight to The Ramrod or The Toilet?
-Jason Holliday was saying, fucking a girl in the ass is like milking a cow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ehssx01b0
-I’ve been fucking you for ten years and now you want to go down to get a license so we don’t have to keep on with the fucking: what do you call it?
-He had died of a heart attack on the operating table--- they thought it was a heart attack but it was his spleen that got him in the end.
-Shut your mouth a little while I… what I’m saying…
