WORDS ARE SHIT, TOO

Basically,
you gotta let it
come out
all at once.
Later,
you clean it up
as best you can
to make sure
you don't stink
too much.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE...

I've lived in Greenwich Village
in the same pad--as big
as a postage stamp--
for thirty-eight years now.
I had "fools luck"
falling into this one:
rent stabilized.
A beautiful, tree-lined street,
scaled for humans,
off 5th Avenue where NYU's tentacles
keeps it clean and safe
for those little tykes
living on daddy's dime.
You hardly ever hear
of a kid thrown against a wall
or a stray bullet going where it shouldn't.
The minorities that pass through
are most often going to class
or selling reefer in the parks.

In the early sixties
after I'd sucked all I could
out of the poolrooms
and bowling alleys
I cut high school and came here.
And even though it's best days
were over, there still was a faint whiff
in the air, in the bookshops
that held broadsides and mimeo rags,
and record stores that played
the classical long hairs, death operas,
be-boppers and avant-garde hipsters;
the old and young eccentrics who sold the stuff
or just hung-out seemed to know
much more than I did,
but kept it quiet
unless asked.
Most of them
have either died
or been run off
by capitalism's geometry,
perfect in its greed
and knowledge of space
and real estate.
This part of the city lives
now as all others do
on myth and nostalgia's commerce.
The apartments change bodies
as quickly as semesters
as the monthly swag rises.
I know no one
in my brownstone--five floors
of coffin shaped studios--
and no one knows me
except as a kind of calendar
telling them
what time it was.

A few years ago
a five floor brownstone was bought
by the owner of a hedge fund who,
rumor had it, paid five million
and change. Rumor also had it
he was sinking seventeen million more
into "refurbishing" the structure.
Can you believe, he's building an indoor pool,
a rock garden, spa, steam rooms...My God...
went the whispers
loud enough to make a contented god
jealous. It was too rich
for this block to contemplate. Hell,
Dylan Thomas drank there
and died a few blocks away;
Delmore Schwartz dreamt there;
Melville and Twain wore down their boots there;
Pollock and deKooning had fist-fights around the corner
while Rothko contemplated colors and suicide
and Klein thought of the black and white firmament there.
Even Eleanor Roosevelt
put on her brassiere across the street
and thought about saving the world,
her husband's infidelity
and pussy.
My neighbors though were not there
to discuss old masterpieces;
and Eleanor's tits had long ago sagged; our new neighbor
was creating a new masterpiece for the ages:
an indoor pool.
Two years later
he and his family
were ready
to dive.

Spring has been weird
this year
on the east coast: mild,
even warm. I went out
to breathe in the freshness
and smelled dog shit instead.
What the hell, lemme go across the street,
sit on a stoop, have a smoke and then run my errands.
I saw groups of young folks
walking past with green nylon wigs, big stove-pipe hats,
green t-shirts, shorts, knee socks, shamrocks, sipping
beer from cardboard containers or bottles.
St. Patrick's Day makes idiots
out of idiots who love any excuse
to take their idiocy for walk
and make it public. Soon, I knew,
you'd have to sidestep their puke
to make it back home.
The hedge fund owner was sitting
on the next stoop, one kid dangling
from his ankle and another tot
a few steps above holding on
for dear life the hem
of his mother's running shorts.
The hedge fund owner looked
out of it, somewhat dejected, staring straight out
to where Eleanor used to get dressed.
I knew that look.
It was the look you get
between battles. It's the long stare.
It's shell shock. You don't believe
you can go on,
but you know you will,
you have to.
I need some down time, she said.
And me?, he replied, barely above a whisper, what about me?
Raising children is no picnic,
she said in perfect english.
He tried to swivel his head up
to meet her eyes,
but he knew in his heart
he was fucked. But that's why, he began, you have help,
goddamnit--a nanny, a cook, cleaning girl.
You're out all week. They're yours today.
The kids grip tightened with each syllable.
Jesus, Cath, I need a run, he began...
Not today--you need a run today? run the kids to the park;
I've got to get dressed. Take her.
She gripped her daughter's hand and brought her down
to where he sat, staring out
once again,
lost.

The whole scene
played out in two minutes,
but would be replayed constantly
for years to come
until it played itself out
one way or another.
The hedge fund owner
will be happy
to get to work Monday
and take it out
on nameless, faceless people
and make even more money.
The poor have it
no differently
in the love game,
but being poor
kill less souls.
Scramble two.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT

you'd adjusted
to the cruelty
of your birth--
the brutality
of your father;
a derangement
of the senses
felt in the lash
or his absence;
just when you thought
you'd habituated yourself
to your mother's preference
for stray cats and dogs
or three-legged orphans
that you heard pawing
and clawing through endless nights,
tattooing the "no place like home" tapestry hung
inside your eyelids
and above the dinner table
where we're least blind;
just when you thought
you stopped believing
in conductors and teachers
and railroad escapes and streetcar conductors,
lawyers and doctors and magicians
and started having a limited faith
that your words made sense,
when you began to make them
yours, birthing them, nursing them,
raising them, teaching them
to sometimes behave;
and they, in turn,
trusting you
to come out
of hiding, jumping at you
from impossible angles,
through hoops and loops of memory,
across caterpillar armies,
until your defeats
became butterflies, their wings
intact, and beating like a tiny heart,
just then
you dreamt six numbers
and Ralph, the corner newsboy,
told you to check your ticket,
as he handed you a fresh deck
of smokes and you
became not you
and the words fled
not recognizing
who thought them.

It was a nightmare,
of course. Yet, I've dreamt
this often, in many forms.
And, occasionally,
I've even had "fuck you" money;
a parade of pussy;
an absence of bosses
or overseers. All I could do
was get high and drunk,
laid and lazy.
And the words split
to greener pastures.
I was a fraud, a criminal,
a squanderer of opportunity.

The hard part
is needing
the nightmare
to achieve
the other.
Some would not want
to do it. And most can't.
The old ones, like me,
who do this
without fame or money attached,
who are used to this,
this being ignored,
are dying off.
There are some good ones out there;
they are young
but so is the mortality rate.
My advice: dream rich
stay poor
while you learn the craft;
take the pricks and cunts
where you find them,
and can get them,
but don't go out looking;
let the game
come to you;
the gods are generous,
don't force their hand;
and know that most,
if not all advice,
is bullshit
to do with
what you
want.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

HANDCUFFS

Nobody who ever felt,
then heard,
the steel snap
around the wrists
can doubt our brotherhood
with the wolf
and the deer
and any other living thing
caught in the human jungle
of motive.
No matter the reason,
it's a ferocious defeat.

If I could,
I'd rather be the wolf,
gnawing my wrist or elbow
to the white sinewy bone,
my own blood dripping
from my own teeth,
pulling and snapping
until I was able to run
to where I either bled out
or healed.
That choice was not given me.
A policeman stood or sat
too near and watched my form diminish
as he pushed and prodded me
from the street to his cruiser to the station
to the cell
where bars replaced cuffs.
Still, those cuffs
were not the worst.
The worst were liquid.
The worst were sanctioned
by the state and the Feds
and were made to be drunk,
looking as inviting
as orange Kool-Aid.
Each morning,
I broke the night's skin
a bit dope sick,
a thin coat of clammy sweat on my skin,
I went in the ice and the furnace,
to a proscribed place to drink
a proscribed amount for
a proscribed time only
to get up and do it again tomorrow.
It is another form of poor white trash life,
of nigger life,
a dreamer's life
of hopelessness,
an indentured life,
a black faced vaudeville life,
where if you don't make them laugh
you will wait on line forever.
Nature can never be that cruel.
Having taken everything from you
they try to extract a little more.

Some people won't know
what the hell I'm talking about.
They won't think about rent,
or husbands or wives or children
or jobs or electricity or flat tires
or broken teeth with just enough money for soup.
They'll have come out and grown up pretty much intact.
They'll have read, they'll have watched and many have even understood.
But they'll never have lost a pinkie or a hand
in the dope cooker;
they'll not have missed a meal
except on purpose.
They'll have been caught
only in the abstract.
Which might make
for good conversation,
but not so much
for anything else
except our continuation
which is not very much
to brag about.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

IF IT'S BREATHING, I'LL TALK TO IT NOW

for Z

Making your way
through this madness
there were people
you had to talk to,
others you must to talk,
and the few
you did talk to.
But even the ones you did talk to
were selected by circumstances,
not frequently by desire.

It's true:
most of us are boring
and somewhat limited
in how we see ourselves
and the world:
the common gain importance;
the old debates are debated again;
the sides might as well had been chosen
as randomly as kids choose-up pick-up ball games.

Never trust
the crowd
I knew
early on.
My degeneracy
was elitist.
I cultivated
quirks
and quacks,
children
who had an early taste
of death
showing those invisible scars
that parents and gods beat into them.
We managed to find each other
in places were the deranged gathered:
schools, odd jobs, pool rooms,
gin mills and shooting galleries.
It took me more years
to discover
that most of them
weren't smart either.

None of us is simply
that smart.

But in these six decades
I've been around the world,
sometimes in a day.
Age has tempered me,
wised me up,
the rocks have smoothed
and no longer leave me
bloody from memory.
Each person is a person
I could like, if not love,
I could smile with, if not laugh with,
they have warmth and compassion
wrapped around their failures
and the failures of others they love
and do not judge themselves
and me too harshly.
And since my jar
had remained purposely empty
all these many years
I am thirsty for this kind of humanness.
And surprisingly,
they see something in me
that would have turned me away
in years past, but they don't turn away
they just make the lamp brighter
and push their way
into the dark.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

G.I. GIN

I'd just hit
double digits
and was home
from school
because of a blizzard.
I'd stayed up
most of the night
huddled in my bed
under the covers
listening to my little Panasonic
waiting/praying
for it to announce
school closings,
while every few minutes
(which felt like hours),
I'd poke my eyes
through the wooden slats to see
how much of God was on my side.
Early that morning
He finally decided to do the right thing,
and schools shuttered.
My father, too,
stayed home,
but not from a childish reverie,
but because of a hacking nasty chest cold
he'd been fighting for days.
He hated staying home.
I loved it.
He'd always had an easier time
being away from his family
than around them,
and had an even worse time
dealing with sickness
of any kind.
Me?
I was still too stupid
to get the Hell out of Dodge.
Hey,
he called out to me,
come in here.
I went into his bedroom
and there he was,
Moby Dick,
thrashing around
in his blue blanket sea,
Kleenex like whitecaps
strewn across the ocean.
I want ya to go the drugstore
and tell him to give ya a bottle
of G.I. Gin.
Tell him to give me what?
I asked.
Just tell him you need some G.I. Gin,
he'll know what that is, even that idiot will know that.
Take five from my bill fold, but it ain't gonna cost you that,
and get it for me, will ya?
This fuckin cough is gonna kill me. Hurry up,
before I die.

I got dressed,
bundled up for the elements,
feeling like a soldier given a mission,
for his General,
a General who was sick,
and made my way to Mr. Markowitz's store
on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island
a few blocks from my home.
Snow has a way
of quieting things,
slowing things down,
even those inchoate surges
that were already so much a part of me.
The inverted fin of his '57 Caddy
had an inch or more on it,
almost two feet on the ground itself.
Nothing moved
except the white free fall.
I trudged through it,
enjoying the effort,
getting to the goal.

Mr. Markowitz was there
in his whites
and seemed surprised
to see a customer
when his bell rung
and I came in.
Mr. Markowitz,
I said,
after I clapped my hands
to shake the snow from my gloves
and took off my beanie
covered with ice.
I need a bottle of G.I. Gin.
Who needs a bottle of G.I. Gin?
(Mr Markowitz was an idiot.)
My father needs it Mr. Markowitz.
I don't even know what it is, what is it?
Cough medicine. It's cough medicine:
mostly Turpin Hydrate and codeine. Soldiers drank it
in the war. Tastes disgusting--but it works.
He went into the back, where he mixed up his pills and medicines
and came back and handed me a cough syrup bottle with a clear
but viscous brew inside it.
Three dollars, he said. Tell your father I hope he feels better.
Yeah, sure, I said and left.

My hand was icy and wet when I handed him the bottle.
He chugged
almost a quarter of it,
let out a roar of disgust,
and lit a cigarette.
Tastes like shit,
he exclaimed,
but it works.
And pressed it against his chest
like a third tit
as he fumbled for an ashtray.
What a fuckin life
this is,
he opined,
I'm home one fuckin day
and there ain't nothin on TV to watch:
no movie, no nothin.
You feel like playin gin or casino?
Anything is O.K. with me. Either one.
Get a deckacards and somethin to keep score with--
I'm gonna whip your ass.

I don't know about him,
but it was a good day for me
so far;
the best I'd had
in quite a while.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

SMOKING

I used to watch my old man smoke
those Chesterfield shorts.
How he'd shake one
out of the pack,
flip it nimbly in his fingers,
and light it from a match
he cupped in his fist
whether he was against the wind
or not.
He'd hold the smoke deftly,
like a good pool shooter would hold his cue,
inhale deeply,
and while letting go
that first drag,
smoke coming out of his mouth and nose,
take another
down into his lungs
which seemed to satisfy him
for a few seconds.
Sometimes I'd be with him
and a few of his Mafia cronies
and they, too, would smoke unfiltered's:
Camels, Pall Malls, Chesterfields,
and Lucky's. I'd see them dry lip
the ends and then flick their tongues
to get at the specks of tobacco
that snuck aboard or sometimes
pinch their lips to remove them.
It was as cool and natural to them
as it was to Bogey
or Frank
who they idolized.
It went with the doing;
it went with the getting done.

I musta been eleven or twelve
when I stole a few Chesterfields from him
and a bottle of gin
from the liquor cabinet downstairs
and took them and a pack of matches
to the beach.
Stealing was a delicious act,
but crossing into their world was tastier.
I got to the beach in Coney Island,
sat on the wet sand
my form lit from one of those old street lamps
on the boardwalk.
I put the Chesterfield between my lips,
tasted a kind of sweet bitterness that stung
the tip of my tongue
and tried to cup the match,
burned my fingers,
tried again,
tried again,
and again,
finally lighting it from the side.
I took a drag
and coughed;
took a sip of warm gin
and gagged.
Not a bad start,
I said to myself.
I smoked three or four cigarettes in a row, quick,
and sipped what tasted like hair tonic
just as quickly.
Light headed and a bit looped,
I made it home,
snuck around the back
eased the door open
and up to my room
undetected
and found my old man
sitting on my bed
waiting for me.
Come here you little bastard,
and close the door.

In a short amount of time,
Chesterfields tasted too stale,
Camels too thick,
Pall Malls were too long,
but Lucky's fit fine.
Later,
circumstance would dictate
what was smoked and what was drunk,
or ingested,
but who knew that then?

Today,
there is a filter on my cigarette,
and coffee in my glass.
Sometimes that thought
gets me sick
if I think about it
too much.
And soon,
I fear,
the cigarettes,
and my lungs,
will have to go,
too.
"Love" does not
and never will,
conquer all.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012