Then there is boredom...hard to detect on the great white beach when the blue canvas above and golden light shines and one is circumambulating, harder still to know anything but love loss when you’ve just said yr first goodbye to something as precious as Ramona...what you want to rise forth is your own buddhamind, godhead Emptiness, Atman that is Brahman, Keter, Christ, consciousness, radiant Shekhinah...you want that because you want anything to replace the nearly impossible sinking feeling that is starting to gurgle in on shore break, that foreboding that always accompanies the more complex crush of lust, or Joy Division “Love will tear us apart” for it is not Plutrarch on sexual love “this love becomes a guide to lead the soul from the world below to truth and the fields of truth...where pure deceitless beauty dwells.” No, it’s a dumb lust that takes your mind from you...
Instead, you get “what’s up Brodder?” from a black hustler on the beach walking past of all places the pink and white time share three-story owned by an ex leader of the Ku Klux Klan—Me, “Nothing much”—with eyes down but not too down because I believe it primordially rude to not look every single person in the eye but these guys mostly have a con and it’s usually weed, in fact it’s been sweet leaf every time but in this case, like the street hustlers and junkies in San Francisco, I can see the monkey on this guy’s back, and I know he wants scoring money and will use every excuse in the book for using; needing the money—“Hey man, I jest got beck to the island, you know...Uh huh—and I’m looking for any kind of work. Can you help me out?—because you know I had a job and my boss had to let me go no tourists I was fixing his dive boats and he couldn’t even pay me my last two days’ wages man you got a house I could clean up the yard or fix things?” (I notice his bloodshotglassyellow eyes and feel pain of SF street, and I remember the shifty-no-luck gaze of Jimmy Portsmouth, my trust-cash junky almost genius shifter poet con-friend who used to look at me the same way when he wanted a part of my soul in those bad kick times when off junk (but I secretly believe he was never totally off the plan) he would try to kick with tequila and whiskey and CRACK cocaine, like the time when I only first knew him, had purposely stayed away from the beginning because I could smell him, his con, but by this time he had swayed my buddy and roommate the poet Dudley Brown, so that he had begun a habit of stopping by unannounced usually in the neighborhood because he liked to drink at Flaps #2 bar across the street and it was on the way home from the college we all attended...so this day Dudley was out and I was keeping myself monumentally busy with apartment sized affairs—being a graduate student har...and Jimmy rings the buzzer and talks his way up the stairs and into the place which I don’t mind and we take up places at the kitchen table jabbing about literary theory class yawn and blink and just as my conscience, my consciousness, my colorado head is snow, is something just a shade ignorant of pure, his is a small yellow rock which he unwraps from its tinfoil says—“man I ran into this guy in Valencia who owed me some money and hands me this rock and says it’s all he got so what am I gonna do walk away with nothing? So I took it and well I thought I would smoke it you wanna hit it with me?”—“No”—I say—don’t want any part of that...it’s the most vile shit I’ve seen...jaundice yellow and like hungryghost burnt in a kiln of sickness and fever, yellow fever and neither is there anything fluid or crystal about it and the whole naïve time I’m thinking rock is white like coke and this is why the more I should love—this acrid poison nothing but griefs and simpers and sloths and disappointments—Jimmy—thru and thru—a constant explosion of wrong moves, one upon another I mean who ever heard of kicking heroin with rock and juice? You know you got to pay for every one of the motherfuckers, you know in the heart of hearts you keep hidden and in spite of you it glows golden but you will have to pay dearly my dear...whose what when he lights it up—like the vilest industrial dow chemicals mixed up and lit, like bad plastic burning, fills the whole house with death and mistake... Aw Jimmy I’m not mean enough to kick you out on your ass and I should I should I should refrain...
But this young black hustler has brought me right back to what I had escaped, and on top of that, appeared in the middle of my restorative, emergency ruminations of Ramona...the human mentality has five thieves: joy, anger, happiness, sadness, and lust...I was not about to let there be a sixth stealer of my delicate balance so I told this guy—“Sorry man, I can’t help you today”—leaving the possibility for later help on a different day when I wasn’t lost to this grey, this light grey, medium grey, dark grey and triton slate...he reluctantly let me go, perhaps out of some small recognition of my plight which overrode his strong need for something from me and I was duly grateful and on my way...
Once in the house through the porch wood screen door and into my room directly on the right with its ocean view off the back porch, I unhooked my bag from my shoulder, took off my shirt and fell onto the recently departed unmade bed of last night’s Ramona and there I found myself as I often did, lethargic, dismal, seedy, and shallow. Howling how those first few alone hours in the scene of the crimes hurt, now alone, now without, a temporary illness dressed up in forever feeling, studying the prison of four eight-and-a-half foot walls with no ceiling on a rickety frame bed and horribly soft mattress, a small wood Mennonite desk, realizing that this room, dressed up the way it is—is like gold dust, no different from gold ornaments except in the mind, which is where I was wandering sick and dark and flacid in the abyss...the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it...tho’ I was a long way from that as that ceiling fan above wobbled and swished through the heavy air and I watched from the lower hells and wondered even through film class logic why filmmakers always put lots of fans in scenes invoking hell but maybe that was my answer right there laying uplooking into that ugly early american designed fan, these kind that belong in some lost-time saloon or bawdyhouse with the three bad light fixtures coming out like frosted flower petals, who chose to keep these fans in style? There is afterall like in Vera’s new apartment a sleek white fan with a streamlined housing and quicksilver plane blade that doesn’t wobble and look like it’s going to fall all the time and it works better at moving air and I’m willing to bet all my inheritances that it’s cheaper to buy too...but that’s Belize and that’s the knot between the conscious and the inert...with America thrown in, often a giant homogenized plate of SUCK...
-Michael Price
