The answer is always nothing. It is always mute. It creeps up on us in dreams that we only find to be electric when we plug into what we want the answer to be. It is then amplified out to a mega watt that only Pete Townshend can hear in his worse nightmares of tinnitus.
Once the ear drum ringing of gracious and gratuitous sensory perception is pleased, amended, can we find the thoughts of hum drum that pacify one’s soul like no other. I have a friend that had the first feud. I just had it (hence the death post of anger last week). She is in a long term, long distance, newbie. I would hate to walk a foot, never mind a mile, in those shoes; even if they were comfortable and we were both svelte.
Sometimes smiley face IM icons mean more across the board than a foot or shoulder rub. Some people do not like feet. That is how it goes.
I am a toe sucker, I’ll admit it, in all of it’s Technicolor glory. I am not the guy looking to rip off your shoes on the Greyhound and suck a toe or two, but I don’t have an aversion to it. I will NOT be appearing on Mory, Geraldo, Jerry, Richard Bey, or any of them, to talk about toe-sicles, or footsie-pops. I am fine just where I am. I just know something about intimacy. Some things that cross most peoples boundaries. Some things that leave people ill. Too ill. Much like a Beastie, I have a license to ill.
I also know that I am a pleasure chest, a Pandora’s box of satisfaction and fantasy revealed. I am a bull stud, a he-cat. Some would say that Tommy the Cat is my name.
“Say, Baby do you wanna lay down by me. Say, Baby do you wanna lay down by my side?”
Sometimes ghosts walk into your life and the blood still pumps through their souls. I do not intend to mean that mystic vapors find me (although they have) but I proclaim that some people know better about you and your path than you do. This, most certainly, does not mean parents. I imply the dead of foot worn pilgrimage that find us and hold us tight, in worn blankets of warmth and comfort, are here among us as oversee-ers of our reality. I have one.
Something is to be said about being bathed by another individual in a hotel with bad paneling and flimsy micro-mesh sheets that would radiate the cum stains for a mile around given the right lighting. The ghosts walk in and out and hold our hands through the toughest times and offer up the spirit of Mary when they can. They are the interlopers of sin intervention (sometimes perpetuation). They prepare us for a sainthood that we think ourselves not capable of; a world we are not intended for. We find our paths without ampersands and dot coms. We tread heavy and light and hope that the mud does not stick to our feet but the apparition guides let us know that Guardian Angel directed mud is better than not walking the path at all. Dirty feet are what were nailed to the bottom of that cross, not clean, manicured, Vietnamese painted ones. Would you message those feet?
I met a spiritual guide about three and a half years ago. She guided me to a placid and serene source of spring fountain sprig. It was an odd and mind bending experience that revolved around a trip to Staten Island for seven days with a mere and meek 200 dollars in my pocket.
I wore my slick tan felt chapeau and my earth toned tweed over coat of slickster status. I drank many 7&7's as I was nervous, very nervous. She met me at JFK airport. We volleyed the shuttlecock of ‘hellos’ as we walked up and down the fairway of luggage return looking for each other.
We found each other. It was erupted with a hug like that of Vesuvius taking the Earth core belch to the black soil dirt. We were an elemental collide. Fire ~ Earth: and so the melting began.
If I could not have stayed at her house it would have been a very tight trip. I was sick the first few days and her son, a stunning little boy with big brown eyes that would make a fawn jealous, would peak in the room to say hello and gaze at the sickly bearded man in his mother’s bed. He was quite concerned. I liked to pat his head and let him know that I would still rock on - that is what men with cool hats and facial hair do - they rock on.
He is a cautious little man who needs hugs more than anything but sometimes he needs a good swift kick in the ass in order to remind him that those big brown eyes of chocolate drowning can not rule the world in all situations. His sexually ambiguous youthful smile made me feel welcomed to be in New York, something I had not felt since I had been there ten years before.
He is a young man now, not a boy. He needs that ass kick swifter than ever now due to the arrogance found within the bindings of that age.
His mother, an angel of intensity, made sure I was getting better and cuddled me into health. She soaked my fevered brow sweat and I found the moist cloth of heat reduction to be that of cowboy quality. She was my frontier woman. I was a bandit.
We hit the streets with the fiercity of the ‘70’s punk movement. All revved up and ready to go. We were a force to be reckoned with. We had walked the streets of Manhattan one day and looked at everything from chicken death window dancing in China Town to Washington Square Park and the bereft bereavement of musicians that wanted to be junkies and vice versa.
As we misguidedly danced with the city island streets of historical hand crevice engraving and acid etched hide and seek, I screamed out of the car window. I hung my head out. The radio pumped the music of my phlebotomist careening. Lou Reed’s ’Viscous’ was on the airwaves of antennae connect. I had never heard him on the radio before, at least not like this, and on his home turf. I howled. Werewolves in Romanian lands were proud of me that night.
We ate at Yaffi’s in Tribecca and loved every sip of the drink and every chew of the meal. The conversation and company was devoured as well. To be in Manhattan and to take it all in was like swallowing a sodium orange street lamp and letting it guide me through the night as I vomited reflective street paint to guide the cars by.
We ended up at T.J. O’Keane’s which is in Hell’s Kitchen, just outside of Times Square. It is right around 47th and 8th. It is a true Irish pub and we cat scratched our way into it’s history. I had been there a few months before and knew the scene well. I closed the place at 4:30 a.m. four of the five nights I was there on my previous endeavor.
We ate, we laughed.
We drank from green bottles.
She smelled good.
We talked about Bob Marley’s hair.
We slip slide finger screwed days away on the living room floor while listening to Zappa and the Pizzicato Five.
Before the Hotel of Baths and after the slide show of metropolitan misdirection was the night of Staten Island Candles.
She had a surprise for me. I was eager with anticipation. I thought we were going to eat or drink or screw in nature’s bedroom of street lamps like the ethos/pathos of seventeen year old horn dogs steaming up windows to guide the police to the auto of fornication.
We ended up at a church. We ended up looking at a statue of Jesus and of Mary.
The little candle temple of prayer next to the Church was surrounded by paths that were littered with little bird house candle holder shrines of all of the Saints. It was a graveyard of wax. The little prayer shack/shed was something that made me scared. It frightened me. I know better now.
I would never take that night of fear and confusion away from me if it meant saving my life.
Inside was a very distraught woman who lit more candles than there are lights at a pro football game. She was about three feet tall and had a silk scarf babushka thing going for her. Straight off the Scicilian boat. She cried and huffed and stammered through her Italian praises of the Holy Mother. Upon seeing my heathen ass she fled. My friend did her candle thing and gave me my space sensing that it was not what I had expected.
That week in NYC changed me. It made me recognize my existence for both good and bad.
It made me feel week, vulnerable, open, superior, powerful, and meek all in one inhale/exhale of a cigarette puff in the shadows of a New York second.
I love New York.
I miss Manhattan.
I miss my very, VERY close friend.
She is always praying for me. She is always making sure I am ok.
We look out for each other.
She is in charge of the ‘Writings of R.E. Knowlton III Trust’ once I pass.
We will be neighbors someday. We will drink Long Island Ice Teas or crazy-ass high balls and smoke and laugh sitting in the shade of the Sun, while our yarns of yesteryear flow and fall from our lips with the ease of the waters of Niagra.
We will always know each other.
Thick, thin, thoughts, thoughtless.
We are the horses of a different colour.
Please, If you read this, know that we will negate the ‘miss you’s’ soon enough. Our kids will play. Our mates will laugh at our bond. We will laugh at them and scarf down another drink and smoke.
Be good in our trailer park.
Make my chair a comfy one …
