i remembered today why i avoid wearing shirts or articles of clothing which contain any kind of logo or identifiable information. i could deign to wear a Yankees cap or shirt, as that seems safe enough, but anything else that might invite controversy or unwanted attention is to be factored in to sartorial decision-making processes.
while crossing 21st street some powerful assholes in their piece-of-shit vehicle needed to make a turn while i had the WALK light. i was walking at a perfectly normal clip when one of the guys in the car saw my shirt and said “c‘mon snoopy, step on it, we ain‘t got all day, MOVE IT!“ and then, as i got out of their way and th driver peeled off, the same dude yelled “GODDAM FAGOT!“
now, i don‘t care, because why would i, but i suspect this little bit of stupidity might never have blossomed had i been wearing a blank t-shirt, or at least a t-shirt without a JOE DISCO snoopy artwork on it.
i remember a similar incident, from the callow annals of my youth. i never hollered insults at strangers from the passenger side of a moving vehicle, but a friend of mine did. we were at a store, shopping for something, and being callow youths we made fun of the salesman any time he turned around. i thought we were being safely discrete about it, with no possible way the gentleman could have noticed our antics. as we left, though, my friend was driving and without noticing that the salesman had come out of the store to tell us something he shouted “You know, that guy has a real fagot-face. See ya later, fagot-face!“ my friend had no idea that the salesman was stading Right Fucking There when he called him that name.
Similar incidents of hurling insults from the always-powerful vantage point of the passenger-side seat of a moving vehicle come to mind. When inㅣㅐㄱ갸걍 Florida without a car i would walk as much as a few miles, either to reach a specific destination or to just walk. either way, it often happened that someone driving by in a pickup would see me, hold their clenched fist toward me and yell “GET A CAR!“ in Daytona Beach, during my bright-red-socks phase i often fielded “FAGOT!“ declamatoins from passing rednecks and drunks. while the Triborough Bridge was under construction and the pedestrian walkway was about as wide as my ass and no more than a foot away from vehicular traffic moving at 60+ mph, i would cross over the bridge with the faces of passenger-side people so close to mine i could see the saliva on their teeth and i could hear the chit-chat conversations taking place between them and the driver. under these intimate circumstances i was targeted by a clenched-fist passenger who yelled at me to “KEEP WALKING!“ which was a variant on the “GET A CAR!“ directive heard down south, where pretty much everyone has a car. i laughed with the guy on the Triborough. not at,but with, because walking on that pedestrian path during that period of road work was, in fact, a joke.
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ok, then, enough about my t-shirts.
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i keep returning to how much the room in Brooklyn this week felt like the room at 9 Cabrini 18 years ago.
i need a new bed, and i want to go all-in, California King. massive terrain of rest, wrest, wrestful rest, plenty of room for those all-night hard-ons and the extremity-yawps.
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i said that already.
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reading Ed Dorn. again. how did he do it? i suppose it started with typing words onto paper. i want to find his tomb stone. i have seen pictures. i think it is in Colorado.
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