path: root/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt

	It was well past noon by the time we made to back to mark’s house and Betty was sitting on the porch waiting for us.  Most of the houses in the are were your standard eighties tract housing fare, but the street Mark lived on was older probably from the fifties when things were looking rosy and we still got along with each other.  Or at least that’s the impression the architecture of the period gives off, there were no fences on the street and all but a few of the houses had porches.  I could almost picture the old Buick wagons or huge tail-finned Oldsmobile’s lumbering into the one-lane driveways —the kind that were really no more than two narrow stripes of concrete separated by grass— as the husbands came home for a lunch break.  The way Betty was roosting in the shadows gave one the impression that she was the neighborhood gossip sitting on the porch all day observing the comings and goings of the neighborhood.  Perhaps scandalous ministers stopping by a widows house to deliver the good news or a nice boy turned urchin riding home on his bike kicking over trash cans to the disgust of the hardworking fathers that have to clean them up.  Those porch-sitting women would have been remarkable writers if anyone had given them a pen and paper or even a typewriter.  Dean and I used to debate endlessly the fact that it was very likely that many of the best books ever written were read only by their authors, which is what happens when the world of art is forced to subsist within the world of commerce.
	Apparently in our absence the world of Betty had collided with the world of Natalie and according to Mark who came outside at the sound of Dean’s car, the results were spectacular.  Betty is a big girl and I would not personally want to go needlessly provoking her wrath, but Natalie couldn’t do anything else, it was the nature of her personality and Betty dealt with her swiftly and effectively —She threw her out a screen door.  Betty picked her up and gave her the bum’s rush sending Natalie right through the screen door and down the steps into the driveway.  I deeply wished I could have seen such a spectacular episode of justice, but we had done what Dean and I do best —avoided confrontation.
The subtle art of non-interference, as the I Ching calls it, is a process by which you train yourself not to partake in the foolish social bickering of tribal monkeys.  That is to say that yes, there is a part of me that would have loved to throw Natalie out a plate-glass window and then jump up and down on her lacerated body until it resembled the gooey mess of pulp that congeals at the bottom of juicer, but to do so (or to do the less violent equivalent with words) would have had every bit as much reciprocal effect on me.  The stress which the human body must endure to work itself up into such a fit of rage is too much effort (in my humble opinion) for a result that is inevitably doomed to failure.  No one ever really learned anything by being bum rushed through a screen door, fun though it might be to serve up a little probity every now and then.
	This account was my first impression of Mark and it only served to illustrate Dean’s descriptions and highlight the fact that he was effeminately gay which I already knew, but it was nonetheless always a treat to witness when one is usually surrounded by all forms of blatant heterosexual dominance.  Its nice to hear a lisp after spending time in Utah where the only people with lisps usually have a host of other physical handicaps to go along with them.  Gay communities are just that —communities— and they primarily exist within the liberal confines of big cites where they can enjoy, if not a political tour de force, than at least better treatment without the open hostility of hicks.  Of course that isn’t to say that there is no open hostility, just that it is less and more infrequent.
	I flopped myself into an old rocking chair with soft pillows and a gentle, natural rhythm to it and Dean went inside to take a shower.  Betty was in an exuberant mood from having done something about the Natalie situation and she wanted to go out.  Mark also was talking about a club he wanted to go to; I was all for it, its good to be hit on by gay men every now and then, nice to be the hunted rather than the hunter for a night.  It would massage my ego to be hit on by gay man for the simple reason that any living brute can get a girl, but you have to be above average attractive before a gay man with waste his time on something as potentially volatile as a straight man in a gay bar surrounded by fag hags.  At least that’s what my friend Zach used to tell me and he was the closest I ever came to wanting to be gay myself, I never had sex, never even kissed him, but there was an unspoken tension in the relationship that we both had a healthy respect for.  Amy was horribly threatened by him which amuse the fuck out of me because she was herself bisexual and there is nothing funnier than the irony of hypocrisy.
	I was lost in my own reflections glaring on the windshield like car headlights streaking through the night when I heard my name.
	“Hello, anybody home…Sil I was asking you a question?”
	“Right.  What was the question?”
	“Right.”  Betty laughed at me; “I was wanting to know if you and Dean wanted to go to Tangz with us?”
	“Us?”
	“Ya well at least Mark and I, maybe Sabrina…”
	I curled my lip at the mention of Sabrina,  “is it absolutely necessary that she be included?”
	Now Mark was laughing at me, “she’s really nice when she’s not around Natalie, in fact that’s the only reason I tolerate Natalie is so I can hang out with Sabrina.”
	“Alright whatever… what’s Tangz?  Isn’t that that stuff astronauts drink?”
	“No that would be tang.”
	“Right.”
	Mark obviously didn’t find this routine funny so I dropped it and he launched into a description of the Tangz, which I ignored for the most part, but when he mentioned dollar beers before eight I suggested we leave immediately so I could get good and liquored for five bucks and then spend the rest of the time trying to maintain myself.
We weren’t hardly inside the door when the first lavascious gay boy was all over Dean and I; we smiled played his games and let him buy us drinks; when we had what we wanted we turned our backs and ignored him.  I learned all this from having female friends and no I don’t think it’s heartless and mercenary.  The man wanted to buy us drinks insisted on it with all the fervor of one who believes that something is going to be exchanged; far be it for me to rain on his little parade. (Contrary to what some men assume this is not a business venture, you do not get anything in return for buying someone a drink.  If that’s your strategy stick to catholic bars where the guilt quotient runs high, because in any other establishment your making a gamble and if you happen to encounter me or may friends it’s a gamble that you will loose).	
	Not that the buck fifty he spent would have broken us; no things were still riding along well with all three of us flushed out with money, but like everything else we all knew that was bound to change so we tried as best we could to live it up while we could.  Its tricky business the whole money thing, sometimes its there and sometimes its not, unfortunately I have yet to master what it takes to track when its around, where it comes from, how long it’ll be here and when its going to leave… to do that you’d have to care.  And I don’t care.
	What I was caring about at that particular moment was a blond at the far end of the bar, as a girl in a gay man’s club she stood out like a sore thumb, but she had yet to turn around and look in our direction.  I watched her laughing with her friends who seemed consist of three guys one of whom was in uniform; I was tying to decide if all three were gay or if one was her boyfriend.  It was an act of desperation or maybe of boredom.  Betty and Mark were dancing on the big ballroom floor that occupied the majority of the joint while Dean and I sulked away free drinks in the corner booth of the mezzanine area that constituted the only seating outside of the bar,  There isn’t a whole lot for a straight man to do in a gay bar, but change I reasoned is always good.  Now and then a lisping stranger would approach sometimes trying to be casual, sometimes outright soliciting sex, and try to entice us somewhere or other that we had never heard of.  Needless to say it was not long before the blond turned around and reveled the inconsistency of the gods which bestow some with bodies and others with faces reflecting all their glory, but seldom both in the same lustrous package.  She had the body part down and I was in love with her until she turned around.  Be careful what you wish for they say….  
	Dean and I were ready for a change of scene, but Betty would hear nothing of the sort.  In fact she merely mocked us for not being able to have good time.  She detailed our own enthusiasms back to us which we had so eloquently arranged several night before and then with that cutting edge that women always have at the ready she sliced and diced us until I started to have believe her that I was indeed the biggest hypocrite on the planet.  At least, I reasoned, I’m good at something.  Undaunted Dean gave Mark the keys to his car and suggested that her and I set out on foot together; Mark told us about another bar up the street which was a singles hang out and apparently the most notorious place in Denver to pick up a good case of the happies —er—herpes, but we wrote that off as a gay mythmaking in the same way the some hetros are won’t pee in a gay bar of fear of contracting “the AIDS” as my friend Jeff used to refer to the Human Imunodeficency Virus, which contrary to popular belief does not always lead to the AIDS.  Dean and I were out the door in a flesh with a rough sketch of where we were headed, but it wasn’t more than a block before we got sidetracked completely off course and found ourselves in a diner booth waiting on hamburgers and swilling cheap beer.	




Drifting lightly over fields of heather through Picasso conversations and dipping over the ridge in full regalia we sailed on to New Orleans.  It was only a blanket sky that stole us through and across Kansas where the soft velvet covers of night is the only way the see.  Kansas was built and designed for darkness, one look at it in the daytime and you know that.  I had my looks a ten when I was dragged at gunpoint by my mother to family reunion in Kansas, it’s flat, it’s hot and it two tone brown and green.  It’s a Cliff note of cyberspace where God just threw down a pile of two by fours called it a house and moved on.  The people are etch-a-sketch nightmares crafted by drunken cartoonist in the back lot of Hollywood cartoon porn set.  
We did it at night on our backs staring out Dean’s moon roof, the road was straight flat and didn’t require much driver input beyond the sympathetic nervous system.  At night Kansas is a prose poem embryonic sleeping like the grass and birds and whatever else inhabits the blank Formica-like ground.  
I loved it drifted through endless hazes of abstraction drawn out across continents of thought where I where I wandered through Parisian streets looking for a bit of bread and coffee.  Whorehouses and cafes drifted across the night sky and the passing glare of headlights bounced from the road to the roof of the car and for moment we saw our reflection and then the great looping butterfly conversations began.
“Did you ever read that piece I sent to you on the vitropy thing you read?”
“The one with Einstein as con artist ‘buying time for the universe’?”
“Ya do you remember the other theory that was in it?  The one where I was arguing that in light of Steven Hawking theory nothing can ever be true for more than the time in which you can observe it be true…”
“How do you know then if you are observing it at the instant it happens unless you are being observed as well?
“Huh.  Well I don’t know if that would really be answerable, it like saying if a tree falls in the woods…”
Ya so the answer is no.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean it’s in the language.  ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there does it make noise?’, well yes and no I guess because it depends on how you define noise…is noise only what is audible to humans or is noise the movement of air regardless of whether it hits a human ear drum?  In the first case the answer is no the second case the answer is yes and in neither case does it have any bearing whatsoever on anything that we might ever hope to find interesting enough to write down and try to communicate to other people.”
“You guys talk about the oddest things.”  Betty didn’t say much in Kansas, she was having a kind of culture shock experience coming out of a stable happy marriage into a seething pit of relentlessly narcissistic and self obsessed vipers.  Dean and I could talk about anything we could find arguments and discussions in the simplest and most mundane of points.  We would pick them up like mice and role them around in the dirt until they were ten times our size and the whole thing collapsed under its own weight and we ended up laughing ourselves quiet until we found another one.  We would have been happy to lie on our back and watch the clouds all day so long as we had all the comfort issues of food and the like taken care of and a healthy supply of heroin was running on drip IV and never ran out for all eternity.  But the circumstances of the planet at this stage did not allow for such and idyllic life so we stop up ideas, words, schemes, plans, the unteathered nothingness of thought, and occasionally heroin.
Dean was my skeptic.  He tended to not believe anything while I believed everything.  We could both shift our polarities around in a dizzying fashion that left observers disoriented and unsure of who exactly we were.  We tended to lapse into that person universe whenever we were bored and Kansas at night provided as much bored as you need to drop down into the fertile crescent of you brain the unconsciousness and drag up Paris where you walked about looking for a girl named Nina and tragic river to watch it all from afar.  Dean tended to anchor things some what for Betty because she was his sister and he felt some need to keep her in touch with reality, his stories had an urgency to them and subtle homer Simpson take on life more bemusement than amusement.  Where as I talked the way Terence Malik made films, in riddles and allegories only we understand.  Some people found it interesting and other arrogant.  The one who thought it arrogant usual slept with me, wanted to be around me constantly and ended up ruining my life; the rest became my friends.  Dean and I never held our arrogance against each other but secretly we both knew we were right and wrong all the time, which was a horribly efficient way of seeing everything from as many angles as possible at all times.  Verbal and emotional esotericness tends to lead to physical chaos.
But it tends to accelerate things as well.