JUST IN TIME FOR DINNER

I try to run my food consumption
like a good German runs his railroad:
ON TIME! Not just diabetes
nailed me to the cross,
but Ma & Pa whose world
didn't revolve around the sun,
but around a Lazy Susan.
But tonight, o boy,
tonight I was gonna feast...
Dine... Eat!...Grit-up! GO
FUCKING CRAZY!
I was sick at sticking
to strict diets & marginal fare--
not because of medical dictates,
but because my pockets were bare.
Tonight, they'll be no Heinz
baked beans/salami & eggs,
or Campbells Tomato slop
& Keebler Krackers crunched
on top like fake grated cheese;
and no peanut butter
& bullshit. No, not tonight.

Now, I ain't no fuckin chef,
but I can burn a little;
I can fry shit up
& make it happen
in the cast-iron skillet--
finish it off in the oven;
get that top char happening
& the bloody ooze
from the inside running
into that baked potato
slathered in butter
complemented by fresh
iceberg lettuce hearts,
Jersey tomato wedges
lapping up imported hazelnut
olive oil & Tuscany vinegar
& a hint of Dijon mustard.
O, man, gimme a glass
of Pelligrino with a lemon wedge
& call the undertaker--
I'm ready to go!

My man, Ramon,
cut me a one and half inch aged Ribeye
& I carefully culled the rest.
Exiting, I began to taste the dinner.
I started to salivate; drool
threatened to leak out a side of my mouth;
I made sure to swallow.

I prepared the salad & dressing,
heated the oven to 350 & inserted
one Idaho marvel which,
after 20 minutes took, cut open,
& spooned in an ungodly amount of butter
into its soul
& proceded to heat the skillet.
After dressing the Ribeye,
I flung a few drops of water
on the skillet--they popped,
& hissed; and when I lowered the red slab
of cow into the pan,
it sizzled.
The aroma of exceptional steak hitting
all the right senses.

Three minutes laer
I was sitting at my table,
watching the NBC evening world news with Lester Holt,
about to take a mouthful
of heaven...
when they came
relentlessly:
Hemorroids & rectal suppositories,
vaginal itches, penis carbuncles,
COPD & emphysema & breathing tubes,
toothless people talking out of their necks,
rasping gasping for a reason to live,
chair lifts, stair lifts, soul lifts,
menstration pads, piss pads, shit pads,
brain pads...Alzheimers leaking memories
and a thousand yard stare, Parkinsons
shakes, bi-polar, tri-polar, quasi-polar...
diabetes drugs--a new one an hour,
Pepto Bismal, diarrhea, and all manner
of discharges...
or just plain hanging on
by a fucking thread...all tied up
& made pretty by those beautiful & happy victims
by a beautiful red bow
around a Toyota for Christmas
with a Golden Retriever loving you up.
My balls went into a vacuum;
my butter curdled;
my steak stunk;
salad wilted;
Pelligrino flat & foul tasting.

I got off my ass & out.

The old Italian, Stromboli,
had the Yankee game on;
Judge coming to the plate.
Hey, Nick, gimme two slices...
and wait--put some anchovies on em;
make it to stay.
It was only the top
of the fourth
with the Yankees down a run.
All in all
not bad, not bad
at all.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

SATURDAY NIGHTS ON A CONEY ISLAND BEACH

we'd lean our backs
against the concrete bunker
built during the second world war
to look for ships & subs
who might try to fuck with us,
and our shoulders and arms
would touch and I'd pass her
the joint
and then the bottle
of wine and we'd look
into the blackness
and tell each other
secrets no one else knew:
her mom used a hair brush
on her while my father choose
a belt buckle; he ripped farts
in the middle of the night
waking us up while her mother shacked
with a family friend next door.
I ran my hand along her thigh
and marveled at this easy intimacy;
how I hid and ran and dodged
and she told me I didn't have to do that anymore...
and neither did she.

We sauntered along the boardwalk
to Nathan's and had a gloppy Chow Mein Sandwich
and a Beef Bar-B-Q bun for a buck
and shared a large fries for 50 cents more.
The night had sharp jaws and edges,
but we had our own space, enough
to feel safe within as she slid her hand
through my back pocket as natural
as the stars coming out while the salted air
alerted my nipples and I reached over
and put my hand inside her shirt
and found one of hers and she jerked
and laughed and I laughed and I knew
I had some more pot in my pocket and
would not be going home
for a long long time and might
catch a beating for that but that
didn't enter my mind.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

WE WAZ ROBBED

Your parents robbed ya;
your teachers robbed ya;
God robbed ya;
you bounced
against walls,
slid down pipes;
tied to hissing radiators;
you ate
empty plates;
your stomach filled
with air; your heart swelled
with dread;
they diddled your privates;
told you about good boys
& good girls & chugged
a fifth
or fucked
a neighbor
or gave you a wafer
& wine breathed hope
of a heaven
so far from your daily hell
it might as well have been
a Saturday cartoon.

And then a warning
not to tell
even yourself
because all you do
is lie anyway.
Now
go out
& play.

I will vote
tomorrow
for any party
I'm not
invited
to
be
in.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

HOW TO SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FUCKIN HEAD

First:
Get a set of parents
who are out of their fucking minds.
Next:
Digest them
whole, absorb
their judgements:
you're shit,
the world is shit,
everything's shit.
Next:
Believe that.
Then:
Go out into the world.

Lock & Load.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SOMEBODY HAD TO LIVE THIS LIFE

Were you gonna do it?
Were you?
Or you?
Or you?
No
you weren't.
It was up to me
to draw
to an inside straight
& get my parents
& get their crazy lineage
& language & cultivate their
sperm & eggs & zygote & shit
& get waylaid, side swiped
with a naive but monstrous
sentimental emotional stupidity
nurturing a sugar fear,
a people fear a crowd fear, a fear
of self & sustainability
in a home of sickness & sustenance.

Raise your hand
if you want diabetes & dope,
institutions & dangling
from the puppet strings
of failure.

I didn't think so.

But how about
if I threw in Bird
& Billie
& Bach
& Beethoven
& Bukowski?
And I'm not even
out of the"B's" yet.
How about Beckett
& bowling
& black beauties,
& Brahms?

How about Coeds
from Harvard
& Bennington
who play
the piano
& know your
secrets better
than you do?
How about Coney Island
when it was Coney Island?

Nobody becomes
who they are
until they live
who they are.
And if they
don't do it
who the fuck
will?

Like you
reading this
now. What
will you do?
Stand pat
or make
a move?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE ANNUAL PILGRIMAGE: MOVE-IN DAY AT NYU--FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE--CHAPTER 18

The city doesn’t empty out in August as much as it just falls flat and crawls at thirty three and third. Everything sweats: arms and arms of chairs, sides of beds, remote controls, shot glasses…a sparrow’s dick. It winnows the earth’s savagery down to its basics: first breaths.

Except for move-in day at NYU…

I’d been a student of this particular migration for nearly fifty years: going from nest to nest, leaving the parental roost, and swinging, usually without missing a beat, into the arms of a different breeding ground; a bit intimidating, but not rough—this was New York City in the twenty-first century, not the fucking savannah. Like most everything now, there was just too much money at stake for everybody who stood to make a buck and those spending a buck for the exchange to be fraught with too many external risks. Life is an illusion, of course, and this was a petri dish of urban illusion; control was king in this fiefdom. Shit, they even put up a fucking awning over nearly the entire block where the NYU dorm was in case it threatened to rain. I’d not seen a kid in thirty years walk with a suitcase in hand, alone, trying on his new clothes without benefit of his mother’s hand or his father’s eyes.

The city in their munificence allowed NYU to block off the streets surrounding the two dorms near me for days; little NYU elves stood at the crossroads directing the Esplanades, Navigators, SUV’s, Mercedes, Lexus and Caddy’s, and less dignified modern chariots into spaces near the confines of those Spartan dorm rooms and twenty-four hour a day security.

I’d been living around the corner from these warehouses for our future leaders since Grant was a cadet, and liked to fuck with them as they were breaking through the parental yolk. I was doing them a service: ushering them into their last phase of exemption before they, too, hustled their way toward the boneyard.

This annual pilgrimage had me going from my pad to a brownstone with a stoop that offered some shade from the merciless sun, heat and humidity that refused to abate. I took with me an old and worn copy of a nineteen-sixties tits and ass magazine. On the cover was a sexy coed using her books as her only bodily armor with the caption proclaiming: CAMPUS CUTIES: WHERE TO FIND THE BEST COLLEGE SNATCH. I opened the rag randomly, spread the pages wide, and took up watch.

Out they tumbled. Trucks opened and hatchbacks raised. Mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, all looked around at this strange new world, this concrete enclave which really only offered them its greatest and most fearful gift: anonymity.

They looked like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Their heads swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees before they moved to unload their loved ones loot to create a home away from home. Boxes and plastic buckets filled to the brim with every imaginable substitute for the “blue or pink blankie” now morphed into “favorite” undershirt, underwear, jockey, boxer, pantie or thong: fushia, aqua, pink, white, blue, black, yellow or crimson. All stainless and smelling as sweet as a baby’s scalp. Nothing had turned to shit yet. All the notebooks were white and clean. Waiting for their hand to write a sentence, even a word. Classes had not been cut or failed. Romances had yet to bloom or fade. Everything, (my god!), was still possible.

The boys were a bit more sullen and the girls more jiggly. Girls knew early on that their cunts were part of nature, while the boys were still trying to figure out how their dicks were attached and what made them work. Each were pregnant with expectation…and so were their parents.

Particularly suspicious were parents of Middle East descent, followed closely by the Asians. They knew that they might have owned a few square feet of The American Dream, but little else. They’d busted their balls for their darlings, breathing in cleaning fluid or shelling peas while watching their crazed and hair-trigger customers run in and out. They watched with disgust as their culture was being digested into a McDonald’s maw.

The mothers usually brought up the rear, while the fathers pretended to lead the way into the unknown. The white families, a bit more on terra firma, still were in unknown parts of their own particular fears. Sweat was running off them as they piled the computers, T.V’s, hot plates, microwaves, tiny iceboxes, and other electric gadgetry onto carts that other NYU elves so eagerly provided. The kids, however, controlled their cells, iPhones, iPods, Blackberrys, secreted diaphragms, hidden condoms, a stashed pack of smokes, a little reefer maybe, and a few pills for later.

Some parents glanced my way. They saw an old, rumpled, man, smoking a cigarette, laid back, holding a girlie magazine, only his eyes peering over the top lip at the flesh of their flesh. Most looked away quickly; some looked too long.

I saw the bare arms and legs and faces of the twateenis, so smooth, creaseless, unlined. Charlie Chaplin and Julio Romero de Torres would go nuts. Some of them, the high school adventurers, were skilled already in knowing the knowing look of looks. And some boys, curious already about the ways of some men, glanced at me, too. They were the deeper ones, going further than their peers into their own studies and the outreaches of their limited and limiting birthdate. And as each sexy and sex-starved eye caught mine, their parent’s radar unconsciously swiveled their once upon a time sex-starved eyes to the stoop where I sat. The white eyes of fathers unknowingly dismissed me, the Asian ones deferred to the wives, and the Indians didn’t know what the fuck to express. The moms, though, didn’t hide their disdain…and claws. Some of them moved their bodies between my sight and their kids bodies and pushed them onward to the tasks at hand, keeping their feeble bodies and best of intentions between desire and action. It was a battle most them would, if they hadn’t already, lose.

The only remaining trump card that the parents really had was plastic, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best. It would only cost them more money, but would cost me more time and I had precious little of that left to lose. I’d stand behind them for the next four years while they paid for the smallest most inconsequential purchase—a container of milk, a cup of coffee, a pack of Orbit—while I’d shift from foot to foot, getting older, more frustrated and angry, waiting for the transaction to go through. Their bar and marijuana tabs would be handled with cash.

pgs 102-104 of 539--The Departure Lounge
© 2015 Norman Savage

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

WE ARE DAMAGED

The Betty Poems

by two traumas:
birth and who
gave birth
to us.
Can't do much
about either.
If we're lucky
our caregivers
were hip
to that and allowed
our wounds
to scar
and fade
quickly. Most
of us
were not
lucky
and found ourselves
slugging it out
with ourselves
and life's consequences.
We played dirty
because life
played dirty.
Some
took a beating
quietly,
while others
bit back.
Some
sought mercy
others sought symbols;
some suicided
and some killed
others instead;
some killed a different kind of pain
in error
or desperation.

Pass the salt
please.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

RETINITIS PIGMENTOSA

As soon as I saw
my parents
my world
got smaller.
I was pushed
into pockets
of fear
and flight.
When I saw them
for what they were
and saw people
for what they were
everything
got smaller.
Then
I saw myself
for what I was:
small
and insignificant.
Suddenly,
I was smaller
no longer.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village 2009-2013