Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Though Miriam sent me once to the dental clinic uptown, and I recall contemplating borrowing a car off the street to save time and now I see that as an early experiment in a public transportation system with open cars anyone may use within a given borough. The car theft I mentioned awhile ago was an old VW that petered out slowly block to block while the cops gave chase until at last vehicle came to a halt, and perpetrator left piece of wood used as pistol on seat, and the cops never identified it as the weapon.

Things go on somewhere here and are heard of. Guys for example might get burned upstairs. I don’t mean they been doing it, but it looks like they are going to activate the refrigerator and other major appliances (smile), stove, blender. But we would never see it. Not even the dimming of the light because they got a separate generator. What do you expect in a maximum multiple dwelling? Let’s say the head pop off and the exhaust smoke just squeeze out from armpit one, armpit two, and the curled hands darken with the body’s irritation at this half-ass cremation, this summary drying out of the teeming colloids. On those midnights when you are waiting for a dream in which there’ll be an unexpected dimming of the seventeen-hundred-toilet candle-power, you think then of an H-bomb settling whole and bright upon this place and reaching down instantly along so many fuse radii the incandescent inmates here are at the center of the flower if not attention; bodies with auras for a moment and auras inside too, where the skeleton flares orange under the analysis of the moment and the brightness that is in truth the ultimate shadow gives you gall remembering what you’re in for to say as you die (instead of "I think we’re in for a shower," because as our Chilean contact said, When people talk about the weather they often mean it). At least Outside the others are getting the same, and you see one of them jacking up a fast car to change a tire which ain’t reboring a cylinder because what’s he know? but doing something anyway, and on the parkway rolling nowhere; another person jumping at the kitchen timer and plunging to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer; another window-shopping, finding a trace of a faraway idea in an article of clothing; another in a backyard digging not realizing a person that knows him well is watching him from the back-porch steps, you could go on, Jim, but when you’ve had this final thought at the moment of the capital H — that your own human kinsmen outside are also being totaled by the bomb — your brain’s too full to let this be the last thought so while you think, ‘ There it was, they’re getting this, too," and ‘That was my last word and thought, that was it," your brain as it shimmies adds a whisper to the shuffle of your coil (smile): Anh-anh; nope; quite the reverse, everything on the Outside, unchanged, unbombed, is O.K. and as it was — like this new generation of clean devices come off the drawing board not just to eliminate undesirable elements but to model a holocaust at minimum expense and with maximum media exposure to show each man in the family of man.

Or so I used to let my mind go — a sloppy body (you said you’d check out colloids, no need to get too technical, Jim) — until my life changed when I woke up to the Colloidal Unconscious. It had always been with us. You touched on it when you first arrived on tape. You are different, Jim, from our old born-again prospectors with the fine-tooled boots pointing out under their cuffs, who pull their big-buckled belt off at the metal-detector checkpoint, yessuh, small change, pen knife, and some credit cards show up too, glad to be asked, suh, well you know they have got it all down to Jesus; or that good bearded father who cornered history by just splitting the Earth between those thirty-two hundred mines full to the brim with miners and on the other hand and always elsewhere the twelve inspectors who by some arithmetic fronting as geometry could ensure each mine one visit every ten years.

Or that bad father — for there’s always a good father and a bad father, Jim, and the bad father didn’t want to get into a shouting match and found the world in a necklace of garbage cans that magnetized his mind, and were his work and perpetuation and care like overflow from father function until his beautiful daughter the one I always love grew older and then those cans got mysteriously linked by a medium-voltage line especially dangerous in a drizzle to jolt and stagger Dobermans, frowning shepherds, bassets minding own business, cold-cock your Afghan, explode your spaniel, straighten out a white chow’s tail, recharge your Saint Bernard, when these had until then lifted, oftentimes propped, a leg to leave a sign of themselves upon galvanized common surface that could now be turned on or off; or another who’s got it all down to one thing, Willie Calhoun Jackson, fellow inmate, soon to get out on work release, soon to be wed, soon to join the army of the employed, who does not say what he does not know and does what he says he will do and is one member of the population here who does not walk the tier or walk the yard but — like him or not — got it down to one thing, and he sees it all as black and white, until you better just not talk to him any more, he is so clear:

as you, Jim, can see when he comes into a workshop when he comes, and in that ledger of his he has place for that famous President’s black Jupiter behind him on horseback or muleback (secret overseer-without-whip) — comes up in that famous American’s account books who knows when? when the master was meditating the source of petrified shells in the great layers of schist in North Mountain — not the ray-root mountain of the West-coming-East alluded to in the new weather of my old science-man when he writes, that will change our chromosomes and coastal precipitation not necessarily for the worse — and Jefferson recalled if not the Universal Flood those shells fifteen thousand feet high in the Andes that were said to testify to it — and this Jupiter was in unconscious connection with his famous master in ways not imagined by Willie Calhoun Jackson’s universe of black chance

: whereas you Jim boiling down my letters in your head now and the visits in between, keep us all in our places: you’ve got Juan, I bet, out in the yard pumping iron to build up strength to study chapter and verse long after lockup, after the last steel door clangs to, made by a Cleveland ironworks but not by unskilled cons but Juan isn’t hearing the clanging any more if I may speak for him, he’s memorizing contradictions between the freedom to sell that one basic valuable your labor, and the freedom not to buy it of those who made the steaks and winter coats you need, for these are nothing but materialized labor: but I say (wishing Ruth M. Heard was here), Listen, man, the cheap-labor market for Puerto Ricans in the early fifties, that’s past, it’s education that’s the difference (but I don’t like what my words tell me like a head I have contacted into existence outside of me)— So what happened to you, Foley (Juan demands), blond, white Irish-Polack (asks the red-eyed leader): Juan bides his time, regrets he was not at Attica getting strafed by a Rockefeller for what a difference a transfer makes: while hearing his own voices only sometimes because he’s studying every paragraph three times of a sacred book that found its proofs from across the ocean in England, but: Attica (I tell my friend Juan) was inevitable, then so was his not being there to get winged and anyway the day is over when Puerto Ricans were neither Americans to Americans nor Latin-Americans to Latin-Americans:

No, they’re not over, he looks up now from his book and I feel old twilights I used to enjoy outside — but (I add) Puerto Rican is internal immigrant. Migrant, you mean, he answers and don’t look up from his book: So what are you, man? Con, I answer — and he goes up in a laugh or not a laugh, and snaps the Bible shut: