BEER MYSTIC
BEER MYSTIC
A Novel of Inebriation & Light
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC
A Novel of Inebriation & Light
bart plantenga
“Top-fermented, with a good nose, an acrid middle, a dry finish — bubbly and acidulous in reserved measure –and with ambient yeast peculiar to the Lower East Side, the kind that turns concrete to dust. Plantenga is a poet and a prankster as well as a distinguished bathtub brewer. He deserves immediate investigation.”
• Luc Sante, Low Life
Cover by David Sandlin
Furman Pivo believes he [plus beer] may be the cause of a rash of streetlight outages. This sense of empowerment transforms him into the Beer Mystic. He has a mission and a mandate. Or does he? In any case, 1987 NYC will never be the same and the rest is history or myth or delusion.
BEER MYSTIC: a unique literary adventure that will take you on the longest, rowdiest literary pub crawl ever. Follow the Beer Mystic's story around the world via a global network of host magazines, from URL to URL, zine to zine, city to city. See complete list of BEER MYSTIC hosts.
<< Beer Mystic Excerpts 17-18: Nictoglobe
Beer Mystic Excerpts #19-20
By 1 AM my neighbor in #4 is ranting on again about “puta,”sluts, vivisection, sabers and scimitars [their distinctions, mainly the Arab and Persian] in our hallway. He bangs on walls, presses the brim of his NRA cap into my forehead when he corners me trying to corner him, and somehow he always manages to renegotiate me through his “illustrious” past.
“Look, fella, I KNOW for a fact that personal eccentricity is an inadequate response to cultural insanity. But what is a decorated general-astronaut supposed to do when his just desserts are eaten up by the vermin in City Hall.”
Pasha Georg consistently tests the limits of the classic quandary: Do you have to actually have lived a life to be able to talk about it, or is it enough to have just dreamed one up? Can the dreams or delusions be considered part of your life? I need to know this.
Djuna doesn’t buy Pasha Georg’s crap; she is fed up with his playing the radiators like a xylophone with a carved walking stick that once “belonged to the gifted poet Robert Service”and ranting on in various languages. She wants to call somebody. But who? An exterminator? Social services? I actually find him entertaining and grease for the mill. This is what he’s revealed about “him”self so far:
1. He was an orphan, a member of “Our Gang,”having starred in some 20 “Little Rascals”shorts as Wheezer. [Every time he mentions this, Djuna raises her eyebrows and says, “No wonder.”She has said “no wonder”at least a half-dozen times.] He was kept in a shoebox those first few days of life. Incubated in a bakery oven. And then later him and his poor mom ended up camping under the “W”of the “Hollywood”sign during the Depression.
2. He’s sure our neighbor in #3 is a spy with a “primitive surveillance device.”
3. He was a champ half-miler. Began training in 1933 for the ’36 Olympics, which he missed because of bursitis. For which he later invented a cure. Jonas Salk may have stolen his ideas for his polio vaccines from him. They went to college together.
4. He’s a surgeon with 22 degrees. He can show me if I’m ever interested. He operated on his friend Johnny Weismuller, whom he also taught the backstroke.
5. He fought in North Africa during WWII. He was master of the desert. A unique cravat style, “the Georg,”was copied from him during his battles with Rommel and became all the rage in Southern Europe immediately after the war. He sent Rommel scurrying more than once in humiliating retreat. He refused to shoot Rommel in the back although he could have. He wrote the definitive biography of Rommel but his portrayal was considered “too positive and loving”by the publishing houses.
6. He led a hodgepodge army of Arab pirates, Zulus, and Celts to over twenty decisive victories in battle against the Nazis.
7. He wore a gleaming silver helmet decorated with three cockatoo feathers. The silver blinded opponents in hand-to-hand combat. He also wore a kilt, cowboy boots, and his signature cravat. He rode a glorious white steed and was often confused for Lawrence of Arabia –whom he claimed to know and considered a “pompous oaf.”
8. He has a vice-like grip that kills even the strongest. Could crush my neck “like a grape.”He is by law not allowed to even demonstrate this hold. “So, consider yourself lucky that I abide by all just laws.”
9. He saw twelve belly dancers, including Mata Hari’s daughter, dance at one time in the Sheik’s palace in his honor.
10. One redhead later performed all night for him for two dollars. He later married her and she became a famous movie actress. Each time he mentions her name it’s different. It is not Rita Hayworth, however, who he also met. But Orson Welles was too jealous and forbade their friendship.
11. He once broke up a Russian spy ring. Was recruited by the KGB. He considered becoming a double agent for the remunerative aspect. Kim Philby worked under him.
12. Was hired by the White House to entrap homosexuals involved in white slavery and kiddy porn. He has one thousand letters from grateful parents thanking him and nominating him for a Cabinet post. He says not all homosexuals are bad and that he had to “engage in some despicable sexual acts for the sake of the nation.”
13. His unique torture-confession methods, as learned in WWII, have been approved for use by the CIA in El Salvador and Zimbabwe. He has mentored only six official trainers of his methods.
14. He was a potentially great opera singer. His voice has natural vibrato and perfect pitch and a range of four octaves.
15. He saw Caruso the Great die on stage. He also helped Yma Sumac with her singing.
16. The last words Caruso heard were actually his –on tape –and Caruso claimed they sounded just like his own. Then Caruso died. And no one will believe him to this very day.
17. One day he heard his own voice on the radio. He realized later that someone had made a recording of him singing and had produced a record of it and then claimed it was someone else. He claims to have settled out of court for $138,000.
18. He claims he can do the Sunday Times crossword puzzle in 5 minutes or less. I can watch if I so desire.
19. He saw a preview of his next life. He insists he will be a pasha and will personally reunite Turkey and Iran as Persia.
20. During WWII, armed only with a bayonet and his wits, he captured three German soldiers who surfaced in a U-Boat off Long Island. He personally took them into custody and brought them to Hart Island where their cell had a view of Potter’s Field.
And then he mumbles something about him organizing the hounds of hell into baneful roving packs. Leader of the Pack, vrooomvroom! NAH! HMM! I could be wrong. I sometimes have a hard time listening because I am so fascinated by his face as it talks and moves in a thousand directions all at once. Once played Bartok’s “Drunkard’s Song”with a bow on four strands of his beard right there on my doormat. Whether it was actually Bartok I wouldn’t know. He then quickly goes on to claim [I could be wrong] that he trained these canines, the ones I’ve been talking about, to rob and mug. I could see his stash of gold chains that they’ve snatched for him... But then again, maybe I just hear what I need to hear. Or perhaps, circumstance had made me hear things in a certain peculiar way. In this way, all of life can be seen as an accumulation of misconceptions, a calculus of misbegotten phenomena, where disunity becomes a kind of unity of knowledge. This has managed to serve the present regime quite well.
And with this “new”chapter of his life, Georg punctuates his departure with some flamboyant swordsmanship right there in our hallway. The same hallway where the Ukrainian women grumble about something-something “schniz-…voshna-…gulag…”
Another night Georg came to our door to claim that agents [and radio DJs too –I say nothing!] were harassing him. Claimed his walls held voices. And when we refused to answer the door he smashed the hall light with his “saber,”really just a broomstick into which he had carved intricate cryptograms.
Or the sour-faced Ukranian ladies had said “goulash.”“Gulag”or “goulash”–the two words rattle in my brain like marbles in a tin can, like mispronounced competing mantras in a howling cranium. Their voices like two sea gulls being choked in a potato sack.
“It’s like a movie,”I thought.
“We have to do something. Call somebody.”Djuna was spooked.
“Call your ex. Maybe he’ll do a video. Put him in a commercial.”
“What do you know about anything to do with Rex?!”
~•~
20 At the San Remo on MacDougal after work and after Holcom Bayne had bid his aristocratic hobo adieus, I was perched on the edge of my seat, shell-shocked into drinking extrapolatory numbers of elixirial ales, waiting for the ale to push me further back into my seat. Now if you don ’ t stop drinkin ’ / I believe you gonna lose your mind …
I was doing some battle with a waddling horde of voracious pilgrims of fame and celebrity. Their inflamed corpulent posteriors, an evolutionary development, cushions them from awareness –they do not even know we have done battle, that we are veterans here. This allows them to grow ever further away from the responsibility of themselves. You is a whiskey-headed woman …Robert Johnson? Willy Dixon? Sonny Boy Williamson? They had so hoped that I would confirm what they had misheard and misread about the area. In other words, have celebrities inscribe significance onto insignificant mindscapes and make this bus trip worth it. Maybe I should froth up some bohemian claptrap. You know, like bohemians portrayed in Disney films. The maps they shove in my face are confusing and the guidebook, Walks of the Stars, is unclear. In any case, the manager quickly changes the music –click, gone are the blues –to the Kingston Trio or maybe Peter, Paul & Mary. Puff the magic dragon …
“Where’d they film that Partridge Family segment where they end up in a park surrounded by hippies?”
“I think it was filmed in LA to look like NY.”
“We’re also looking for where the Fonz hung out before he got on Happy Days. The Purple Eggplant. You heard of it?”
“The Purple Eggplant don’t exist. It’s a fictitious club!”Finger holding open Celia Green’s Causation and the Mind-Body Problem to pages 8-9. Radical skepticism based on her “total uncertainty”notion. Heroic response to the conclusion that the human condition is unbearable and that the existential loner must in his or her single-mindedness respond to the problems…out-of-body experiences…
“But it’s on this map.”
“Yea, and this map also shows Fifth Avenue is blue and Sixth Avenue is red.”
Also on their agenda: Cher’s old apartment at 14 East Fourth Street, I Love Lucy’s 1950s middle-class apartment on the Upper East Side, Marlo Thomas’s That Girl stomping grounds in Manhattan, The Odd Couple’s NY, The Cafe Au Go Go, where Bruce Springsteen made his first NY appearance in 1966, a Billy Joel shrine, Michael J. Fox, Christie Brinkley, Kermit the Frog, and tomorrow, out to Queens by bus through Archie Bunker’s neighborhood and to The Honeymooners neighborhood in working-class Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, ending the day in Brooklyn Heights, site of the mid-1960s The Patty Duke Show, and a foot-long hot dog and a large Orange Julius on the Promenade with a skyline view of Manhattan. How do I know all this? I’ve been in here enough to piece together the entire tour.
I knew entire sections of the guide’s monologue: “The plots of many mid-1970’s urban situation-comedies often incorporated urban dilemmas into their stories: rats, drug addicts, muggings, traffic jams, overcrowded subways, and the major power outages like the famous one of 1965 and the 25-hour one July 13, 1977, blackouts that made New York City the very emblem of a modern civilization run amok.”
I was this far from informing them that I was working on one for 1987. But thought discretion the better part of survival.
The tourists, half-listening, half-blabbering, fit uneasily into the rattan caféchairs as their faces searched despondently for the blue light of television that would bring their facial features back to life. But when the sites of whomever they didn’t even know how to want seemed hopelessly lost to them they quit talking to me. They left behind some crumpled napkins and candy bar wrappers, an empty film box, a measly tip.
It was safe to say that this was no longer the same San Remo where Dylan Thomas attempted gallant meldings of inebriation, gratification, and obliteration. I sat where I imagined he may have, trying to understand the dynamic of how his process of obliteration of self made him ever more eminently present. The more he killed himself the more alive he seemed to be for others. His friend Holcom Bayne put Thomas’s strategies this way: “The tactical advantages of clandestinity, the language of the heart... gives aesthetics its revolutionary centrality.”
Is this the secret alchemical domain of alcool? Does giving bad directions to tourists protect this domain? Frequent failure to attain proper gratification, however, forced him to pursue what it was that clung so melancholy to the heart of his writing –which further encouraged his ferocious imbibery. I write and note how difficult, after a day of lifting cartons, it is to write in a handwriting I can read: “Black-eye #18: Corner of Great Jones and Lafayette, 10:30 p.m., I walked under it and light went dark. I think of a black walnut cracked open.”
I attempt over a “nip of Bass [Ale #5!] and a sam handwich please”some Thomasian versification: “firm in foam / I stand for falling / my soul in loam / and what I find galling / is how thoughts mark the whims I do roam...”
I leave before I confess to the tour group that I actually know someone in Bensonhurst. Instead, I wend “home,”O sad hovel with your crying walls and moldy cornered crows feet, and railed at how objects, architectural details, griffins and cornices, strange pudgy child saints all seem suddenly capable of lateral movement. They are moving. A man with a pointy red cap, like Tipsy, the 8th of Snow White’s dwarves, is versifying for me, although it could have been anyone, although I’m the only anyone with the right lack of mind to pay him any mind: “The CHESS players won’t end / my man, they sit still, unable to comprehend / millions of hats collapsing in the dusk(t?)”He removes his hat, places it on my head and says: “It fits!”I am unsure of what he means. “Movement to be made / I’m tough like Randy Quaid / we are lost, so Fuck You!”
He has carried this punchline around with him for five years. And now to finish it, he reaches out –JAB! –his fist mere millimeters short of my gut. “Gotcha! Hehehehehe!”I may be wise but I am also stupid enough to think it counts for something. That I should look for signs inside these incidents.
I continue on, dodge impediments, sharp jutting things, rolling strolling hips that can lead you deliriously astray like follow the bouncing ball off the end of the song and screen. Quick jaunty dodges, a little head jive, just to throw me further afield. Sills quivered, spitting down crumbs of cement, neon buzzing, flickering, a pulsation meant to distress me ever further. Signs in dark windows said: “YES WE OPEN.”Bad grammar and definitely not open. Baby carriages mangled and discarded in collapsing garbage cans. Take me to the next whiskey bar.
I once marveled at the techno-utopic predictions issued by Popular Mechanics. I was young and good at believing that some things would happen because they needed to. Back then when I read a word I believed that word; back when Popular Mechanics predicted monorails would ring cities sitting under huge Plexiglas salad bowls, protecting them from fickle weather patterns and missiles. By 1975, housewives were supposed to be made happy by convenience with hair flying wild, free to pursue their whims and artistic muses. But by 1980-whatever vehicular transport STILL didn’t have brains or swimming pools. Maybe PM’s editors were more sardonic than I ever cared to notice.
Convenience offers speed, and this speed carves out wraiths of space so that women of extraordinary beauty can sadly dart into chosen doorway, past velvet ropes to hastily arrive at their destination so that they can be pissed, full of distress for having been left with nothing to do with themselves. At Cooper Union I burp up a Bass to sustain me for the rest of my journey “home.”There under a streetlight I watch as my body goes from lit to unlit. I have black-eyed it. I have. I swear. I point up, say “I DID THAT.”And others pass by saying sorry or fuck off. Things move at the speed of bullets and lightning but we still advance at our own glacial pace.
I found a box for a pistol in Marco’s garbage can. What am I doing in his can? Snooping neighbors gaze out at me like I’m ET. I count four spent shells on my stoop. Who’s dead? It’s midnight and they could be anybody’s. I jiggle them in the palm of my hand. When I question the neighbors about the spent shells –did they hear anything? –they look at me as if I’ve caught them coming out of a peep show or I’m suggesting gang rape of Their Blessed Virgin! None of the lingering stoop marsupials even think it strange. They hoist up their pasty-faced veneers of indifference. I’ve broken the vows of silence and this makes me the criminal.
One whispers aloud, elbows in ribs: “Grillos para la caveza.”[I look it up weeks later in the library: means something like crickets in the head or, in other words, crazy.]
Why are these people still outside? Are their living conditions inside so unbearable? Are they, with their mourning dove souls, being devoured by misgiving and worry?
But as life is supposed to get easier it gets proportionately that much more difficult. Recent studies show a direct relationship between the improved comfort of furniture and the incidence of acute despair; the exponential growth of choice in consumable diversions and pharmaceutically treatable dread.
The parade highlights on TV sounded like a gun battle. Might very well have been.
“Hey, Dee Jay, what’s the holiday?”
“You call me that again and I will knife you in your sleep. It’s no holiday.”
“What’s with the parade?”
“I was talkin’to somebody and I we started in about the Mermaid Parade. How it’s really rigged. The Coney art mafia. I’m watchin’last year’s Mermaid Parade. I’m trying to see how I lost being Queen to Monika Beerle.”
Djuna has an ass the three Graces would kill for, and she knows it. Never a pimple has sat on that ass. When she used to pass out on the bed I often thought that she had strategically placed her naked loins in a way to absorb the light emanating from the electric candlelight. Like a buoy marking a treacherous pass into her harbor. And I could part her perfectly formed loaves by making my hand into the shape of prayer and then wedging the prayer in there. And I would lay my cheek on her thigh and just lay there, head moving along with her heaving and breathing.
She claims an ex of hers once won a poetry contest with an allusionary ode to her “marbleous loin”[his phrase!]. Puerto Rican kids –it’s true –on wild airborne bikes zoom by, grabbing her ass like the faithful might kiss the greasy plaster feet of a saint. Black men pushing racks of dresses on Seventh Ave. have been known to praise the lord when she sashays by. Drunks, wending by arm-in-arm one night, changed the words to Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”to include a verse praising her haunches. I swear. I was there.
She was really beautiful and unstirred once. Face this side of Edie Sedgewick –with a slight hint of baby pudge. Laid out tickless in gin and milk. Back then when her hips still amused us as they nudged aisles, tipped over grocery displays, brushed sculptures on pedestals in galleries askew, and had so-called blind beggars singing, “Baby, lemme pull up to your bumper.”
On cold nights she’d risk the chills to run across the cold stone floor, nude as an iris, to pour oil she’d warmed in the oven over my chest and then slip and sleep skin inside skin. Or sing her lawdy arias to celestial bodies [she was one] in her psychedelic lava lava. The only thing she “knew”about astrology was how she thought the heavens should affect her. Or she them. In a sense, Djuna was right; I only mattered in how she –and beer and dread? –managed to give me shape and movement in lieu of substance. I can’t remember her exact words.
[Djuna Scolanaski (Schmeling): “He’s a horse of many manures. He comes from somewhere, anywhere. You know, it’s never been made clear exactly where. Maybe 1/2 Lithiumanian and 1/2 Lowlandian? I don’t know. I mean, I’m trying to forget and this isn’t helping. The vaguely oversized dome-shaped skull reminds me of a Gaelic cairn and it has been the object of much name-calling, usually with reference to beings from another galaxy, as seen on Star Trek. I always thought he looked like the younger Chet Baker with a doorstop nose and too much forehead, too much target for someone, like me, to not cowpunch him a nice third eye. And the guy who called us ‘The Sid and Nancy of Foho’(ed: corner of Forsythe and Houston) well, he can tell you the precise flavor of his testicles now.]
I never wanted to wreck our scene of enhanced trivial pursuits. I mean she even used to put toothpaste on my toothbrush. Run her oiled pinky between my toes. Fever and heroic purpose seemed to be the kinds of things that kept us warm back then. But no more. Like I said long gone no more. Eventually her freckles transformed into scurrying fleas and bugs and...
And late at night I’d have to come into her screaming room and slap her with my open hand or sometimes something more substantial. She’d point: shoulder, thigh, belly. Bugs! And I’d be there, examining the body of a scream, her disembodied wail. See which of her beauty marks were aching... the mad bugs scurried in her ear... And then –A-HA! –it began to make sense. Boy banging her arm! Black and blue crusts in the weld combined with sun-worship carcinomas.
[Djuna Scolanaski: “...also, ‘he has something every dog has and every man desires.’I did not say that but I found it in an old journal. It may be his ex, Pam Grier, who told me that. I never quite understood what she meant by it. I don’t think she did either. This somehow seems strangely appropriate, however.”]
This New Yorker gopher-boy, with all the TVs was some disheveled piece of effete grunginess too. A Trustafarian follower of Hailme Asiselli [pronounced: Hail-me As-I-sell-I] with his scented dreads, who was always fretting that his cover as junkie [in the image of that painting of the Marat Sade in bathtub] would be blown and we would discover he had a Volvo in a parking garage –he did –which he drove to Westchester –he did –to vote for Reagan/Bush –twice! Bendro Corpuscle is how he came to be known, his nom de needle, in Goth-grunge-dreadlock noise circles. He lived for noise, attention, bendroflumethiazide, and metams. And he manifested these vital signs when he was allowed –he bought his way in –to hang and mingle with drug entrepreneurs on street corners. Or rather, the thrill of talking about it later. Or rather, the satisfaction of being able to give Djuna a choice of [nicked] TVs.
But sometimes Djuna would ask him to perform [I think before she met me, although who knows anymore] and there he’d be in the sad light of the flickering electric candle wiggling his twiggy wag to no effect at all. She enjoyed telling me and I didn’t mind hearing it. And this periodic necessity to perform his male function for Djuna embittered him to her and he set about to get her by cutting the ration he banged into her arm and messing with the false architecture of her soul. And in his midst –he had no arms to catch her –she collapsed at the toes of his shaved shrew leather boots, out and forever away from him.
“At least with drugs I stayed thin,”she said in a tone too casual to be really her. Although now that she was ultra-clean she’d deny she ever said that, ever romanticized the abuse of soul with narcotics. And it was only much later that I realized it was her full rich tan that ultimately obliterated her “bugs”–i.e., freckles. That and drying out.
But after she dried out she became intolerable in an entirely new way. Or maybe it was me. Djuna was now driven by the misplaced clairvoyance of clarity –call it aerodynamic delusional certitude.
Now it’s more on the order of: “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink and then the drink takes the man.”Her mouth like a pair of dull scissors gnawing through coarse fabric. The Mermaid Parade video was over and a TV special blared in the background: “Bring Back Topo Gigio!”
I was no longer her surprise, the smiling bed, the stone that floats, a pocket full of rose petals. I was just a bag full of bad habits, put on this earth to bug her. A lot like her father, she’d say. The more you live with someone, the more you need to lose track of them. It’s courageous just knowing this.
“I watched that video again. Objectively I still don’t see how I lost to the Beedle. Corruption sucks.”
I sometimes find myself still getting in bed next to Djuna –the spite of fate! Djuna says “Booze is TOO effective as birth control.”Sometimes I tell her my penis is on fire.
“That’s not desire,”Djuna says, “it’s disease. Plus, alcohol’s a poison. That’s why it’s called intoxication.”How many times am I going to hear that one?
“Beer is not poison.”
It was something in the beer, or in the air or the bitter defeat at the Mermaid Parade that catalyzed her resentment toward me that night. Maybe just the fact that she couldn’t yet afford to live on her own and wasn’t ready to fall for Mr. Times Square or Mr. New Yorker [aka Ninja Dreads] just yet. In her eyes, I had simply devolved into some generic guy as she did this tassel dance, a vestigial gesture from her old go-go days, up on the kitchen table. The mockery here just mocked some other second-hand mockery from someplace else. There she was twirling a banana peel over her head like a lasso. Taunting, turning me on, and rejecting me all in the same gesture. A dance stuck somewhere between self-hatred and the hatred of my weakness to get aroused. Trouser arousal –scorned simultaneously for its appearance and its disappearance. She taunting me with “Flacido Domingo,”displaying contempt for any signs of flaccidness or tumescence. And you could see that her ability to have an orgasm was based on the dynamic level of despising she could muster. All emotion remained perpetually murky and negotiable. I could not win.
I remember she once said, “Love is slitting your throat and then feeling your last spasmodic pulse beat through your blood.”
I can’t sleep –paranoia is a way of dressing up dysfunction up as vision. It can, however, be a very reliable focus. I get up and roam around with her asleep and discovered a book folded open, in a pile on her side of the bed: Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation. A highlighted passage read: “With a stab wound to the heart death may not occur immediately... when there is only a little blood in it, it may be a while before the individual dies.”I looked at her so peaceful in her sleep and back at the book and…
I also found an article photocopied from Transactions of Functional Control, “Computerized Employee Monitor Device Deployment,”that Djuna had apparently been studying for her new job. She had highlighted significant passages: “To put work within the reach of Computerized Performance Monitoring and Control Systems [CPMSs], the ability for unbiased tracking of employee performance via CPMSs has made them attractive control devices for management in that they make workers more visible to measurement systems. Control Theory entails the process whereby systems restrict, constrain, or direct the freedom and discretion that individual employees can exercise in performing a task. Reports of increased stress, deteriorating health, poorer working relationships among peers, privacy issues, and a lower ‘quality’of work life should be overlooked when one takes into account the cost-effectiveness benefits that far outweigh these as yet, inconclusive claims.”Another article “Dress for Success…in a Tan”that opened with a quote from Wagner’s Siegfried: “Sieg heil dir, Sonne / Die uns bescheint! (Sun, I hail thee! That lights our way!)
I shivered. I walked around the bed back and forth. I sat on the edge of the bed. It felt like an alien spacecraft. How quick and slippery her slither from discord, her fashionable glorification of chaos, to an almost totalitarian belief in the ecstasies of control. Maybe it was just the gratitude of having a new “high power”job as a potential way out.
In the morning, Djuna is bright-eyed staring, staring with purpose, strategy, prejudice. I need to defend myself. “I am NOT an alkie”I declared as I poured a beer left over fro last night over my corn flakes –hehe, smirk.
“I didn’t say a word.”She dressed in three minutes, looked sharp and meticulous and was out the door with no more than a gloomy “ciao”. I was late for work too, still drunk and reeling from sleeplessness. However, along the way, I collapse in Union Square, just give it up in among the hedges where the feral dogs apparently bed down at night. Most 12-step programs consider the “blackout”one of the advanced signs of alcoholism. My program does as well, although I have replaced the word alcoholism with alchemy. The “blackout”for the alchemist is the first phase of his Great Work, not an advanced phase as it is for the alcoholic. The conjunction of fire and water, “firewater”becomes a helpmate, a sort of living metaphor or wet nurse in the alchemist’s search for the Great Elixir of life. The blackout is a time when all mundane elements are refined out of memory, leaving only pure consciousness. When I return out of the voluptuous black I am two blocks from work. My nostrils are flared by the primordial symphonic scent of soil, grass, and canine urine as I watch people scurrying to work, from the squirrel’s point of view, fascinated by the efficiency and thrust of their walks like gray birds who’ve forgotten how to fly. I’m in a new time zone.
BEER MYSTIC excerpt 21: Jiggered
bart plantenga is also the author of Wiggling Wishbone and Spermatagonia [1995, 2004 Autonomedia]. His book YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: THE SECRET HISTORY OF YODELING AROUND THE WORLD received worldwide attention. He is currently [not] working on his novel, PARIS SEX TETE. His new book YODEL IN HIFI will be published in 2012. His life has been defined by women, undignified employment, migration, writing and a lack of money. His writing focuses on inequity, unempowerment, insatiable desire, the under-regarded, ignored and ineffable, which has led to a life of luxurious suffering and indelible indifference to profit. His radio show WRECK THIS MESS has been broadcasting since 1986, first on WFMU [NY, NJ], then Radio Libertaire [Paris] and finally Radio 100 and currently Radio Patapoe in Amsterdam. He lives with his family in Amsterdam.