Grim Thoughts

I’m depressed: this is what I say to myself: Oh, you guys again…and like doting on trick or treaters and commenting on their get up, I wish them well and just make sure they keep moving. Maybe after Sinead, Pee-Wee and now Robbie we will get a break, even a week off would be appreciated. The current two, Paul and Sinead play rough against the cultural and legal backsliding on the subject of abortion and sexual identity, both of them ahead of the time and now this surprising retreat. Makes me think of a real hero of mine, Daniel Ellsberg saying he felt like a failure at the end because countries had taken up sword rattling with nukes again. [August 9, 2023]

Kind of in shock because today got the news about Robbie Robertson while in the middle of stumbling on news of someone's death, someone I was with for several years who was very influential. It was a throwaway line in her mother’s obituary… “predeceased by her daughter Marita.”

Pushing aside the thought that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution probably got the facts straight, I went ‘looking for confirmation.’ really a form of ‘maybe it isn’t true.’and could not find any; she was not an online person. Oh great, magical thinking response, shock spooling up along with key images and film clips: leaving when we parted for the last time and the bit of fluff from the vicuna bedspread that I was spiriting off as a souvenir, flew out of the box on my shoulder three times and that I turned back to fetch three times as in a ritual, a secret goodbye handshake.

Cutting dress and shirt patterns for your business late at night in the shack in the backyard, so small we’d measure to be sure we both had the same amount of room between the table and the wall. You saying you had seen your guide in vision in that yard and he was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Going to your debutante ball while bombs were going off in Lima. Your mother’s family fleeing, leaving behind a finca, with trunks of money during unrest decades earlier and you calling your welfare check a government grant and playing up your Latina side as opposed to your French, in order to get it. We hardly saw anybody, I’d take Etienne to school in the morning, you’d get a little work done starting at eleven and soon after have to get her, only five, from school. I got back from work at five and one thing and another, we’d get down to work at seven and work until late. That set a pattern, living and working together that I’ve repeated, am still in now for that matter.

That makes three that have a special sting because of the physical connection. The idle fun you can have with your powerful people finder site. The same thing happened with a guy friend, someone I looked up to. I intuited that a different key friend was sick and looking him up to get in touch, had 'just checked' on another friend while on the snooper site and found that he had died in 2017. It goes on, but you get the idea. I can't believe fucking eighty is four years away.

I must be old; the angel attending the news that a friend has died no longer carries a sword, now a stalk of lily, yards long to strike my cheek, brush my eyes closed for a moment as I take this, no longer rebelling only affronted for the first breath…another one, I start to count how many and stop knowing I’ll only stall not half way through; Laura, the news locking time, me motionless on the couch all night waiting to call her Mother in the morning in Connecticut…who else? an entire choir looks back from the semi darkness, then it’s quiet. Carla running off for days then flying through the kitchen with a bread knife nearly stabbing me in the back all the sharp pieces melt, nothing more to correct, death canceling her debts. Steven gone ten years now smiling from the roof of St John the Divine in his hobo canvas shoes and ragged coat, Peter the latest does bring me up short and in sensing the news out of the blue and looking for him I find nothing but numbers that don’t work which makes me all the more sure something is up and instead find John has gone seven years ago and Harvey three. Two weeks later I check again and find Peter is gone. Strange new achromatic territory, hoping this non reactive response is good.

Caitlin below deck in the ship carrying Dylan’s body home looks through the bars where they’ve stashed her to sober up and smiles at the sailors playing pinochle on his coffin.

Tears of Rage The Band

Carla was convinced this song was about her because the boys had put her on a bus home carrying her laid out on top of her steamer trunk to the station in Woodstock. Being a chippie with the boys had led to other things. The last time I saw her thirty five years later it was me leaving a note and sneaking out of town while she went to the store. Enough had not changed; she was still telling the story of getting put away because she ran over her father when actually she just knocked him over with the car door. Terribly unfair. She took me in when I was just out of the hospital so I feel bad telling stories out of school.

Carla rescued me when I sprung myself from Payne Whitney Clinic. I was on the last study for lithium before it became the snake oil of the seventies, the miracle cure for manic depression. She hung out with these guys and was a chippie that that ended up with a habit and, as in the song, was carried to the bus station, in her version, laid out on her steamer trunk and the boys around her like pallbearers. She had knocked her father over driving off in the car and got put in the hospital for that. When I checked in with her in 2003 she was still telling the story in the exact same words...."so unfair, I didn't run him over,I just clipped him with the door" This accounted for the "What dear daughter ...would treat her father so" line.

We lived on sixth across from Phoenix House and Joe Dallesandro who the girls liked to harass with 'accidental' naked shows. I'm remembering a night after we had broken up, bumping into her at the laundromat. There were fire trucks, the apartment above the Laundromat was on fire, smoke pouring out, ladders, hoses, the whole scene and Carla suddenly appearing her eyes amazingly vivid, green. [I didn't know she had gotten tinted contacts] She was friendly which surprised me and made me leery. The last time I saw her she threw a bowling ball down the stairs after me. We talked for a bit, a crowd gathering to watch the fire. Then she got agitated checked right and left and made a beeline for the laundromat door, stepping over the hoses, to check her clothes in the dryer. For some reason it was a signal to me that it was going to be OK that we broke up, that I wasn't going to miss her the way I did when we were together and she ran off for days. That was the last time I saw her for years, bent over, her head in the dryer plucking at her clothes, the building burning merrily above her.