Some Thoughts on “Howl” *note: I usually avoid posting class assignments on japhyjunket as part of my 100% FRESH (TM) commitment to blogging material. However, this weekend was just crazy busy, and the piece I intended to post just didn't happen. Please accept this sacrifice, oh most powerful blog readers! Howl, btw,is a fantastic poem by Alan Ginsberg. Read it here. It was December of last year that I decided it was time to leave Albuquerque and come back to New York. I had woken up two weeks before with this distinct image of my friend Ray and I walking up the spiraling incline of the Guggenheim, talking about Frank Ghery’s plans for a new museum downtown, a massive skyscraper-thing rising up out of billowing clouds of aluminum. I woke up with this image and it made my flesh crawl and my stomach clench. I knew I had to go home. Looking back on it now, everything was collapsing. I really loved the New Mexican desert, which, by fluke was far colder than the Manhatto I had left just three months ago. I loved the way the impossible Sandia’s demanded attention no matter where you stood. I loved the way scientists from nearby government labs would come into Applebee’s and over beers, get their waiter (yours truly) to figure out bizarre physics questions. I loved the bitchy Latino lesbian that kept outing my boyfriend and I to the rest of the wait staff. I loved it all, but it was the needy possessive love that comes when you’re poisoned and sweating and parched you need an antidote fast. It didn’t work out, is what I’m trying to say, so I bought a ticket for the daily train to Chicago and got on. The Southwest Chief, as Amtrak calls it, is the last holdout of what America was; a traveling diesel homestead being chased back and forth over the West. Onboard, a peroxide blonde whose hair had been heat damaged, whose heart had been broken by her cheatin’ newlywed husband of two weeks, whose leg had been fractured when a car had run over it, ordered around a sweet girl from Kansas, making her carry her pocketbook and get her food. They had only met at the last stop, but as the blonde had said, “If I have to be sober for even one minute, nobody’s gonna be happy!” Over tiny cans of cold margaritas, the blonde, her servant, a Rastafarian and I played games of euchre as the Denver Highlands swept over us. Later, I went to the smoker’s car and shared the communal bottle of Jack as two kids from L.A. told us all how they planned on smoking up in every bathroom on the train. The guy had on a sweatshirt that read ‘Property of Paramount’. Housewives and hooligans bonding over nicotine and booze eventually made my eyes weary enough to go back to my seat. In the dark, the trains’ rocking did not lull. No, it was a nervous twitter, the panting and squeeching of metal and rail, taking me home to what? A city that invited me in and then hated me for doing so. A city that would send me to the hospital in the middle of the night with certain conviction I would O.D. A city that I had finally pegged and won; till the sky fell. I need to get off this train. If I go back I will die. I know it, I know I will. Call Matthew. I’m scared and there was a bomb threat on the train (there was, before I got on) and I want to come back. Is it okay if I come back? Cell phone cuts out. Somewhere in Kansas, it’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m walking through the tilting funhouse corridors of the train looking for a conductor. I need to get off this train or I’ll die. Finding the conductor, I explain, “I was just on the phone with my girlfriend and she was in a car accident back in Albuquerque and I need to get back there right away. She’s going to be fine, but I need to go back there.” He loans me his cell and I babble to Matthew like he’s been hurt and he’s a she and the conductor, listening in, says he’ll let me off in Kansas City, where I’ll wait ten hours for the next westbound train. At the station I try to sleep in the hard plastic chairs and Missouri is cold and corporate grey and cold again. Giving up, I stray a little from the station and find a large phallus built to honor the dead of The Great War and a Crayola store and the Hallmark Greeting Card Center. I want to get ribs, because this is where you get ribs, but I don’t have the money. I go back to the station and freeze my ass some more in my jean jacket and I think about Dean Cassady and Jack and Alan and all those other great heroes who just couldn’t keep put and who saw the great godly oversoul of America in everything and and and. I think I get it, but it terrifies me, out here in the middle of things, waiting, like a shuffleboard puck to be slid across the continent again. I don’t have a fucking clue. I laugh and choke down a cigarette. I don’t have a fucking clue! My breath is smoke. I don’t have a fucking clue! I grin! I’m terrified and I’m grinning! That night, as the train barreled back to New Mexico, I slept.

posted by Japhy at 9/30/2002 10:17:00 AM || #