Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Gustave laughed. J.B. said he liked being called Brother, as Grace Kimball did as did sometimes Mother, though J.B. had no brother or sister. But Gustave said that maybe retard messengers were all angels and Spence/Santee said "they" knew things "we" didn’t. Bike lanes beginning to prove curved sometimes and may be taken away. Where’d you learn to ride a bike, cab driver yelled at me, at J.B., and there wasn’t time to say learned in secret in trashed lot in Brooklyn that they took away one day.

s. Lane is in mind of operator, and in mind is always more than one lane, is lanes to one side or both. And since operator and sometimes bike operator, with hopefully body-signal, shift lane and think ahead, lane is how you think and so lane can zigzag, can curve, and you look ahead like psychic consultation and see lanes not parallel, or parallel but not straight, maybe not even on bulging and potholed north-south avenue white-painted sometimes, and even if parallel-painted the lanes you really track they parallel the m/nd right up onto the sidewalk like when a tall white woman in a black coat with bright fur collar like a fox glitters her eyes at me when I’m passing at speed, when she don’t know me but the man with her does but didn’t seem to look at me, he has sport coat and hat on and scarf and like man in cab that passed last week with Spence/Santee in it but is not that man but the one who wore black pinstripe strolling in Central Park with Lady Luisa the singer loving him but now as I passed the tall lady with the fur, this man laughed and said (to her), Parallel! or words to that effect which when spoken do not need to be opened like potentially hazardous envelope carried from Lady Luisa’s pad uptown (where probably this same man’s foreign voice was heard probably back in bathroom or someplace singing) down then to singer Ford North’s pad (with sofa out by elevator like moving) (though envelope handed examined and added to and handed back by same red-to-gray-bearded man already last week seen beside piano in warehouse); to foundation then, where received by girl Amy who went away, and Xeroxing whoom-whoom was heard, and came back with envelope to be carried direct to warehouse, but Gustave he phoned at that moment right there to foundation hoping to catch me but then could not speak except to say Wing, Senora Wing, and I could not speak because envelope was moving slightly in hands and kind Amy was on the watch and I had problems in terms of saying the correct words, especially with Gustave laughing weirdly at his end so hands shook and Amy came and held one and said it was chilly. The foreign man who was in the cab with Spence/Santee came out of office and was bald and said to me, She is a girl with the most true grit, and we all laughed at that. Amy said to him, You were saying about the void. .?

t. People coming down off the sidewalks like the light was green, leaving the sidewalk to take up position in way of outer-lane vehicle such as bike so either brake and miss civilian and be hit by truck or in some cases passenger/ pedestrian-to-be stepping off stopped bus. Sidewalk leavers take up position by ignoring oncoming bike, not looking at it and at rider-operator, and turning slightly away from it like you didn’t exist and like they are looking at something else worth looking at too. If you knew any one of these people, you might find they was divorced with children, or was junky, or was former movie or opera star just out walking to buy a present for someone or themselves, or had concealed video gear, or had unseen cancer. People that took up position regardless of themselves and of oncoming bike and messenger and his business and would be unknown quantities except would make you think you better go back to school get some more education, they’re smoking their cigarettes and talking and thinking and not thinking about position they take up in ignorance of oncoming messenger bike, they just take it up.

Stopped in cold sunlight southbound to check contents of envelope and envelope gave feeling of many days, many weeks, years, and bike leaning against phone booth led to phoning Mother: How you doing? I asked her and she said, How you doing? but did not ask, Why you calling in the middle of the day? and I said, I think I want to go to school and get some more education. She said, You got your own business now even if you didn’t tell me, and you are a man, not a boy, you a real man, Jimmy, and I am proud of you, but don’t you get hurt. If you got your own business you don’t need to go back to school.

u. Coasted on that one, spiraling back and forth down Seventh like my own daytime streetlamp in the middle of the avenue until cabs on either side hollering straightened me out but I’m still in the middle until I reach a red light and cut over and onto sidewalk. Envelope contains — but social worker’s dream comes to mind, Mother passed it on to son J.B. only yesterday (and where did it go? and who knows why or how? goes song Mother sang in bathtub and at kitchen stove) that in social worker’s dream J.B. didn’t stick to his job at T&W and went to electrician school and met a whole team of new people preparing to go out searching for positions, and J.B. stuck his finger in the Boulder Dam socket and blew out all the colored string of lights one end of the Mississippi River to the next and he was O.K. but the country was in a mess — like a dream could be anything but relates to them not me but never to future because how could it? and the future would be the one thing that dreams do not tell but when the envelope opened while I’m straddling my bike tells what will happen to messenger "then and there" as "preparation" for "what is to come": all this and more in margins of music pages all in pencil and name of music work is Hamletin, and J.B. had seen Lady Luisa penciling one more note when J.B. arrived and was let in and she pulled stuff out of envelope, scribbled, and replaced, but handwriting not all the same and Lady Luisa would never say messenger be liquidated then and there, so this note was someone else’s, so hers must be, for example, "music like venerable Verdi yet original": yet she started to erase in a hurry and then gave up and some of erasing was on backside and in capitals, and read, together with words I recognized from the regular music lines ("And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe But even his mother shall call it accident") various initials across and down such as RS (which could be Ray Spence) and with a U over the S and then an SR (reversing Ray Spence/Santee) and with another U over that S, so you had US and USSR, if you tried, but meanwhile a sharp arrow digging down the margin from the Rs to first PM (which could be afternoon or evening) and actually between the P and the M, and then written in, so you had PRM, but with "Miles" written in, and below it an AM (morning) with above the M a J and below the A a B — which would have strongly indicated a JB for Jim Banks (throw in M for messenger), except vertically down the margin went, then, old familiars

PM PRM PRP SR

plus, this time, P (luton.) R (eact.) 1964 / USSR / ABM, plus, then, the words Since there’s no help followed by PM PRM MRM PRP SR, with, then, a big H drawn so it looked like an R and a big R drawn so it looked like an H, and then a big question mark curling around

if R = H, then MRM = MHM

leaving little room at bottom of margin for "Delivery Vehicles" and

UNO

N S G 1975

as the margin was needed when the backside of this page was all the time blank unless with invisible ink, and scrawled at bottom, Now at something’s latest breath with a question mark over the "something" which began with L and was certainly not Otto which is Gustave’s last name, but could have been Luisa written small.