Enemies

I dreamed I saw my face from various angles. I was bearded in most of the angles, and better looking than in reality. I looked like Robert Creeley in appearance and in substance: Like Creeley I was self-confident and famous for publicly yet sensitively trimming words from stream-of-consciousness effluvia and making them sparkle. In the dream it was interesting to look at myself because in reality I do not know what I look like. Really, I do not. I have never understood that expression “You’ll know it like the back of your hand” because I do not think I would recognize that part of my body in a random lineup.

In the dream my hairline was the same as today, and I looked older but I knew I was seeing myself 15 years ago. I was older and more comfortable in myself than I am today.

I have had dreams of baldness. Bald dreams themselves, baldly obvious, typical, predictable self-obsession, the stuff that bored the only therapists I ever saw and led them to assure me my problems were nothing new, my existential concerns simply quotidian.

I dreamed of Clint Eastwood, that we were friends having a conversation at the Distinguished Wakamba Lounge on 8th Avenue in Manhattan, and that he provoked some men of slight build into a fist fight. Clint Eastwood engaged these men in head-butting and Kung-Fu-like moves that surprised them, and which looked impossible.

As they fought one of the men handed me a couple of books, out of respect and with a knowing nod as if to say “We’ll talk about this later when the boys are done fighting.”

My relationship with Clint Eastwood is not clear to me now but without it the men would not have known me or appreciated my interest in the books they gave me.

The fight was efficient, artistically organized, like a mosh pit where West Side Story meets The Wild Bunch. The old man Eastwood surprised his opponents with elegant moves unexpected from a man his age. Not knowing what language Clint Eastwood’s enemy spoke — and because I was expected to return the books — I sent my thoughts into the books that had been handed to me. Through metaphysical miasmatic memory output of sublingual skill I translated the old expression “Know thine enemy” into hundreds of languages and thousands of contexts, sending word to Clint Eastwood’s opponents that they were foolish to think an old man would be an easy hit.

I woke up and typed the previous sentences. This is my first full throttle episode on a new keyboard I received last night. I opened the box and the space bar was not connected. “Cheap plastic,” I thought. I lament but accept that my kingdom of nonsense is generated not with artisan tools but disposable junk.

I attached the space bar to its intended location, remembering a day at a summer program during one of the 1980s when I was presented with a diagram of a computer keyboard. The diagram was designed to point out the differences between a standard typewriter and computer keyboard. I do not recall the highlighted differences (function keys, I suppose, and the mysterious Scroll Lock) but I do remember the space bar. I typed prodigiously as a youth but I never learned to type, and I had never seen a pedagogical illustration of a keyboard similar to those at which I had thrashed out so many pages. I did not know QWERTY from SQUIRTY or Hunt and Peck from Toulouse-Lautrec. So when I looked at this diagram of a computer keyboard I was intrigued by the SPACE BAR. Computers were high-tech and advanced technologies and so I imagined the SPACE BAR was a SPACE AGE term, and that computer keyboards, like goggles and freeze-dried food, were invented by NASA. I saw stars and galaxies in the space bar of the computer keyboard, I saw my thumb not hitting the space bar but floating on it, my hands actively sculpting the future of the universe as they hovered over a small window on the galaxy.

I never said anything out loud except to laugh at myself when I made the comparatively dull discovery that the space bar was, as you know, the big thing on the keyboard that one uses to insert spaces between words.

Typing today on this new keyboard, typing full throttle for the first time, I find that I did a poor job of placing the displaced space bar into its nest. I like it, though. The space bar makes a thick racket, far louder than I might expect even from the biggest key on the board that gets smacked by the strongest of my prestidigitational extremities. The space bar roars and snorts while the little keys whimper and cackle. I want a metal computer keyboard but, to quote the Staples Singers, my money ain’t that long. I want a loud metal recalcitrant keyboard that wakes up the neighbors. I want it to loudly announce each letter as I type it, I want it to loudly read each word after I hit the SPACE BAR.

I just opened the windows wide. I raised the blinds as high as they can go, letting the high sky tower over me. It is a nice thing I used to fear, opening the window. I used to imagine hoodlums, hellions, and the guttersnipes would accumulate around the open window, gather to take notes on what to steal and when to plan a robbery. I saw kids doing this on the upper east side one time. They were pointing at wide open windows in apartments and discussing what electronics were in the apartment, trading tips on how to get up the fire escape and how to figure out the comings and goings of the apartment’s occupants so they could engineer an entrance into the place. I open my windows more these days but I still shut the blinds when I am not here, when I am not at this spot, when I am not occupying the helm of this desk and thereby guarding its objects from theft or malevolent contemplation. I shut the blinds in anticipation of entropical attention, an inevitable accumulation as the enemies slowly appear, the enemies that linger behind the thickets of closed curtains in windows across the street, the enemies that rise like full-grown beings from the primordial soup of my absence, sprouting like eyeballs in a children’s book and tapping my windows the way fingers invisibly tap our foreheads into senility. My presence, I imagine, deflects their lurking concentrations, as no one stares while I am working, not even the hoods, the hellions, and the guttersnipes. Not the professionals, at least. I merit only professional attention. Only the most skilled and sophisticated criminal minds mingle with my solipsistic distractions, only they have graduated from raiding unlocked basement apartments and reaching through mostly-open windows to steal you.