Augyst 25, 2016
According to the Old Testament Moses descended from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets inscribed with seventeen Commandments and although the adopted son of the pharoah was the only man in the crowd who could read, Yahweh deigned not to write in Egyptian, so there could have been a thousand commandments for all Moses or Charlton Heston knew in the DeMille's version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
The re-interpretation in the ensuing millenia have whittled the 17 to 10, although the late comedian George Carlin shrank the list to One Commandment 'THOU SHALT KEEP THY RELIGION TO THYSELF!!!'
I have religiously obeyed his non-divine edict, as have an increasing number of non-believers, however American education has ignored Judeo-Christian thought for the last half-century along with geography, history, math, art, PE, and any science with an -ology at the end of the word.
People know less and less. Few can complete all the Ten Commandment, however anyone can resurrect the list by going to ask.jeeves.com and the interactive website had come up with its own list called the Ten Unanswerables, which are the following.
1. What is the meaning of life?
2. Is there a God?
3. Do blondes have more fun?
4. What is the best diet?
5. Is there anybody out there?
6. Who is the most famous person in the world?
7. What is love?
8. What is the secret to happiness?
9. Did Tony Soprano die?
10. How long will I live?
Having recovered from my Friday night occupation of a bar stool at Solas on East 10th Street, I will try to provide Ten Answers for the Ten Unaswerables.
1. The meaning of life is simple. Live today for tomorrow you die.
2. There certainly isn't a bearded God wearing a muumuu in the clouds.
3. Blondes have more fun, if you like blondes.
4. The best diet is excess in moderation.
5. There are plenty of anybodies out there. They just don't know where we are.
6. The famous person in the world is Andre the Giant. To me at least.
7. Love is like pornography, I know it when I feel it.
8. The secret to happiness is loving yourself and the world around you. Even in North Philadelphia, which can be a very bad place.
9. Death on TV is cancellation. Even Tony Soprano can't escape swimming with the fish on TV.
10. Everyone lives until they die. See answer one.
Not trying to be smart, for anyone who thinks that he has heard all the answers has not heard all the questions.
While Charlie Bebdo portrayed Hassidim and Arabs as hook-nosed monsters, Hollywood cast a white man, Christian Bale, as Moses, which is almost as good as Paul Newman starring in the original EXODUS about the Zionists occupying Palestine for the White Race.
But nobody did Moses better than the Yahweh of Charleton Heston in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
"Am I white enough for you, Yahweh?"
No one ever pulled the Ten Commandments out of Charleton Heston's dead hands.
Personally I prefer Isaac Hayes, then again I'm a race traitor and proud of it too.
Good old Bridget has gotten himself into a dicey situation on the Cote d'Azur. Guy, her ex- legionnaire husband has impregnated a secretary working for his clothing company. Bridget and Guy at first married in 1982 to get her French papers in order, since her South African passport was banned for most countries, which is uncool for a top fashion model. Somehow this union of accomdation has continued for five years and her husband has finance her fashion line Yorke and Cole with Julie Cole. I can't count the times that the two of them were on the rocks and I've witnessed it close up, since I live with Bridget on Ile St. Louis.
Bridget convinced her husband that I wasn't a threat by saying I was gay.
She and I have never even flirted, because if I was to have sex with her, she would throw me out within a month and I need some place to stay and she needs someone to take care of her dear dog the Scottie, Angus.
Bridget's being angry with Guy is the height of hypocrisy, since she's been having an affair with Fabrice Langlade, a young painter with a Steaming Muslims, a popular artist collective. They fuck all the time. Bridget is cruel to him, to her husband, to our partner julie call, but never to Angus. Her nickname is Cruella, but I like her.
Guy and I get along. as a teenager he had served in Algeria with a Legion and once told me how his troop had forced all the inhabitants of the village into a mosque and then threw grenades inside. He was telling the truth. Drinking with him here in Paris and down on Cap d'Antibes.
Bridget is in love with Fabrice. Guy wanted her to be the perfect wife. No one is perfect, but he is satisfied with her, because he submits to her anally.
About the girlfriend down south, Bridget said, "I couldn't stand seeing her face in the office everyday smiling like she had won.
Her Wildcat temper got the better of her and she caused the grand scandal at the Biot office by beating up her rival and having her hair pulled out. He's fine the secretary would have been the next move, but the Lord opted against that maybe he likes having sex with a secretary better. Both Julie and Bridget want me to act like a dangerous terrorist, when I go down to the South later this month, not that I could scare a legionnaire.
I have my ticket booked for London as a courier and told my friends David tidball barry and Albert expect me August 20th. London in my old comrades even after 7 months in the United States. I don't know how I can deal with these Americans in their present mood under Ronald Reagan. Europe seems so idyllic now, easily forgotten that there are hard times there when there are no jobs not at all, being broke at the harsh mercy of Candida, no memory is too short
Alan Vaughn showed up from Florida on route to London. At lunch today ," he said, " i love to travel." then proceeded to tell me all about the demise of his fair with his winter living, natalia, aKA seven rooms of Gloom
"You know I'd come back from trips planes Trains. And feeling beat. I'd open the door, and that should be. Sitting watching some terrible French television show she look up and Mumble something like hello and go back to her dreariness. In the end I had to tell her to go and she took it really easy. Came the next day got her things, " what do you think was I wasting my time
Alan looked at me for truth
"I don't think there's anything wrong with her in the winter or rather being with her in the winter but let's face it enough was enough. That girl suffers from some form of pseudo-catatonia. It was time for her to go___ anyway you had to recover after the Thomas Cole disaster. That she lost that sale didn't help."
Alan's face scrunched up at the mere mention of Chee's name. After all the rumors that they were an item had been heard even this far from the schemes that she. He had seen her brothers this morning midtown. Never Can Say Goodbye.
After all it was spring and April is in the coolest month of all in Miami but London. Winter takes its time dying there.
"How is it with Chee anyway," i know I asked damn well the answer would be forthcoming and wouldn't you know it before he could say a word the waitress place at bacon and eggs right on cue. Yes the old man Magic still comes through.
Hudson spring almost
The last lash of winter when black waffle river
Shark fins cutting through the Hudson
The Sun
Swollen with doubt
Shine or not shine
The street lights dim
For the dawn and the cold wet wind swirls off the river
As empty taxis swish away
On the West Side Highway
Where the lights
Inot New York's dying night.
A fleet of side wheel steamers plied the waters of Boston harbor in the early part of the 20th Century. The flotilla was reduced to one by a fire in 1919. The Mayflower remained in service until 1948. After its decommission its new owner had the white-hulled ship hauled close to shore several yards from Paragon Park and opened the Showboat for business as a nightclub. Sighting the old paddle-wheeler announced our family's arrival at Nantasket Beach for a day of surf, sun, and fun. My father gave a quarter to the first person to spot the grounded ship.
My father was a Mayflower descendant and we joked that the Pilgrims also came over on the Showboat.
We never tayed the night. Nantaskets had wicked bars and live music. Nightclubs were for adults, but as a teenager the Surf Nantasket superseded the attractions of Paragon Park and we drove down in out VW every Saturday night to dance at the Surf Nantasket to assorted cover bands like the Techniques, Mods, Chosen Few, and the house band the Rockin' Ramrods, who had a regional hits with BRIGHT LIGHTS BLUE SKIES and SHE LIED. Sometimes bigger groups like Steppenwolf and the Doors played special concerts for teenagers on the South Shore.
In the fall of 1969 I drove to the ballroom in a VW Beetle that I shared with my brother. He was in college and got first shot at the car. He chose Friday nights, which worked out for both of us.
One evening I loaded the car with my sister, her friend, Chuckie Manzi, and a friend of us just back from Marine boot camp. We drank beers on the way down, since the Surf only served soft drinks. We danced to the top hits spun by the DJ from WBZ and then watched the band. After the Surf closed, the five of us got back in the car for the ride home.
It was 11:30 and traffic was light on Route 228. I sped up to 50 around the curve by Paragon Park. The Mayflower was on the right. The parking lot was empty. Passing the darkened ship I spotted oncoming headlights. Without any turn signal the big Olds crossed the four-lane state highway. I stamped on the brakes and then time was accelerated by the force of the head-on collision whipping our car into a spin.
Glass shattered in my face. The impact buckled my door and flung me onto the pavement. Car wheels rolled by my head and then the speed of the present returned to normal.
I sat up.
The steering wheel was in my hand.
The front of the VW had been crumpled by the accident. I ran to the door and peered inside. My sister, her friend, Chuckie, and the marine were cut by glass, but no one was injured badly. I turned to the Olds. A woman sat behind the wheel. She was trying to start the engine. I walked over to the car and rapped on her window. She shouted at me to go away. Her voice sounded drunk in a manly way.
Several cars stopped and their drivers helped us.
A young man pulled open the door of the Olds and took away the woman's keys. Rubberneckers stared out the window. Sirens neared the scene of the crash.
"You're going nowhere."
"But I'm late."
"There's no one in the Showboat. It's closed."
"Oh."
"So you almost killed us to meet someone who wasn't there." I had a temper even as a young teen.
"You're all alive." The young man pushed me away from the Olds. "That's the important thing."
"You're right." I looked back at my sister. She gave me a smile. We were alive. The ambulance took my sister and her friend to the hospital. The police drove us to the station. They wanted our statement.
"The woman drove into us head-on. No lights or nothing."
"She said that you drove into her." The officer was a veteran to teenage crashes on 228. Not a year passed without a fatality on the road.
"She's lying."
"That's what another man said."
The police escorted the woman to a cruiser. She was taller than either officer and had stubble.
"Can we go to hospital now?" I wasn't saying anything more without a lawyer.
Everyone was okay, but later I told my father that there had been something strange about the woman.
“Strange how?”
“Like she was strange.”
“How?”
“Like she could have been a man.”
“A woman that could have been a man.” My older brother laughed. “She must have been some kind of ugly.”
“I guess she was.”
Without a car the Surf was too far away from my hometown. That spring I graduated from high school and in the fall attended Boston College. The following May my long-haired college friends and I visited Paragon Park for the seasonal opening. We rode the rides and saw the Techniques at the Surf. Both were fun on reefer. None of us went inside the SS Showboat and it burned down in 1979.
This year I searched for any information about the club on Google. There was just a few photos like the rest of my past, but I later learned that the Showboat had been a tranny bar, which explained the Olds driver’s strangeness, but she might have just been a mannish woman. Boston was a Navy town back in those days and those Marine nurses were very masculine.
I have searched for more information about the Mayflower on Google.
The Mayflower had provided passenger service between Boston and Nantasket Beach from the 1890s through the 1930s. In the 1940s she was taken out of service, grounded at Nantasket Beach, and converted into a nightclub called the the Showboat. The Showboat operated for many years, but by the 1970s, it had become a derelict and abandoned structure. In the autumn of 1979, it caught fire under unknown circumstances and burned to the ground.
There was just a few photos like the rest of my past.
“Strange, but the truth is always strange, when we revived the old memories of things gone by."
In the 1970s city politicians launched countless projects to stem the tide of ‘white flight’. None of the doomed programs achieved their goals and the population of the Lower East Side shriveled from 120,000 to 60,000, never hitting zero, because cheap rents, proximity to the subways, and minimal police presence proved irresistible to malcontents disenchanted with the morality of the Silent Majority War and a diverse smattering of gays, drifters, artists, musicians, and addicts reversed the flow from the smoldering desolation.
Soon stutterers read poetry without ridicule to NYU coeds. Bums squatted derelict buildings without fear of landlords. Teenager girls denied cheerleader destinies were offered opiated ballerina gigs at sordid go-go bars. Graffiti artists painted heaven on toppled walls with spray cans. Hell portrayed itself without any artistic endeavors.
Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared out of nowhere. Andy Warhol recognized the young Haitian’s genius. His paintings sampled the history of black as if the icons were sampled by a hip-hop DJ, however his mania was cursed by fame and he said he wish he was nobody like me. Heroin was his pay day. Junkies normally only care about heroin, but Jean-Michel was blessed by an eternal desire to paint through his ever-tragic fame.
I knew Jean-Michel.
He once painted my refrigerator.
FAMOUS FOR NEVER recounts the opposite poles of fame and failure.
I saw him a week before his death.
The summer of 1988 at my apartment.
He left me a gift.
I wished he was still alive, but he emulated Nick Tosches’ first line of THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON.
