Chapter Five
Narco Marx
Doc had died from too much life. Needles and cooked spoons and booze had tolled it's bell in the tower of the hunchback but Doc had left Mike a legacy, an Alexandrian library of knowledge with rolls of parchment scrolls of hobo stoves, skid row survival, and flop house philosophy. He was now piloting himself solo on a river of no return through the junkie infested homeless Tenderloin districts of the West Coastie trainhoppers, pill poppers, junkies, hookers and hookahs, trannies and whores. A journey into a Dostoyevskian vortex where the Narco Marx Brothers Karamozov kept mum, stunned by the impending impaling of marxism and marijuanaism and socialism on a single skewer.
An experimental ka-bob that would prove beyond the meager measure of a kilo of doubt that they cannot, will not have the self discipline to live as syncopated planets aligned like brakes on a car, but rather as a great collective sludge of stoned to the bone Bukowski expats, humping and hemping up and down, in and out, strung out, keeping time to a ferocious beat of survival on the streets to a melody played by an equally strung-out quartet controlled by puppeteers selling cheap Sterno drinks by the bucket on the Pink Lady's Skid Row.
Haiku hobos, ruanway kids at 15, dharmabums and all of their zen friends were confined now, at night, in Marceaubian cubicles sharing filthy buck fifty flea infested pee stained mission cots crowded with private demons, sisters of mercy and schizophrenes on amphetamines. In between sermons and hot meals served by volunteers, they were drunken composers with tremors creating symphonies, (old deaf Beethovens) that play majestically, filling the orchestral halls of the gang grafitti alleyways, sound bouncing accoustically as whispy, flickering motel neon off the broken bricks. Together, in a circle jerk, the audience, sitting on dumpsters suck on Oedipal hookahs for a taste of naughty nirvana while moored in secret coves of Polynesian islands waiting to go ashore in skiffs where missionary tempting thighs await them along with pipebombs and pipebongs hidden in tropical forests of cleavage, sweat, and sweet tasting coconut brown breasts.
The bums, the tramp, wander, walk with hiking sticks made of the grass of bamboo with little bobblehead toppers, jap miniatures made in little jap factories, as art, later the workers indulge in origami self abuse for the sake of sake and orgasm. The haiku hobos, the homeless holy men and women walk on clouds underneath in caves suffering from arrested development while firing the kilns full of black tar, processing opium and distributing it as holy communion for the literati and the iliiterati alike.
The Ugly American, fat and greedy with the gristle of corporations clogging the arteries of the late, great United States suffer now from guilt, green dreams and primal screams, carnal knowledge and coyote ugly…marveling at big haystack mounds bigger’n Nebraska piled high with hashish smoked deep into the lungs by the big male transgendered Negress with masculine thighs on Beaubien Street. Groucho’s and gaucho’s, printing press poets on sal mimeo’s distributed by Gestentner pampheleteers to every juke joint, deep south, pork ribs, drawling bayou junky searching for one good vein in vain…not collapsed and dark green bruised almost black, but a rich motherlode to the head…jamming the needle into the soles of the feet and under the tongue don’t have effect anymore…the body of christ cooked in a spoon soon siezes control of spectral hallucinations of Lang the Fritz along with his cat of the same name..visions of metropolis german expressionism with Charlie Chaplin lighting the city with his own light and power…Diego Rivera amused at his own heavy metal mural of industry, Steinbeck joining him now in a kayak with Upton Sinclair, crashing down the rapids towards the shores of Left Coast boxcars together on a river of immigrants, dust bowlers, poor and the indignant indigent, all the while not noticing the pirouetting beauty of a ballet being performed in tiny silk slippers nearby on shore by the sirens of serenity promising to replace poverty with a'plenty. Even the Statue of Liberty shops now at the Salvation Army, itself tired, hungry and poor, one big huddled mass of French metal weakened by the elements and the Lady is now at liberty turning tricks in the boardroom brothels.
The psychedelics kick in the doors of perception like Storm Troopers on Krystal Nacht, stomped on and attacked in retaliation by 50 foot amazons from the inner space of fantasy and illusion…subjugating male society with whip and wit and taking him as her prize and pet and property..can she run society and bring societal cohesion to bear…are large breasts alone, enough to govern and rule? The answer..a resounding yes!
The poor of skid row become a universal non-reversible, non-returnable, discardable field of energy..not the speed kills kind, but a driving pulsating creative savant mass, a glacial thrust of the ice age pushing rocks and mammoths ahead of it’s bulldozer advance, then receding in 10,000 years time leaving fertile soil to till gardens and seeds for planting as testament to the new Tenderloin..not a solid force, but the rings of Saturn, loose, individual particulates orbiting alone at collosal collision velocity as a whole, together in unfathomable and incomprehensible harmony.
The skid row, the new skid row takes it’s cue from it's own past that has since passed, the northwest past where he man loggers and not Kerouac's sensitive east coast lumberjacks or French Canadien Paul Bunyans rule the gates where the sun sets in the west..In skid row, at night, with moon bright, the stars electrifying the skies, mirror the broken glass of cheap wine bottles in North Beach alleys with old piss soaked bums lying around on saturated cardboard cots..in Seattle this used to be where logs were skidded down the hill, into the tom swift rivers and carried downstream like lubricated hardons..The loggers you see lived in shacks below the “skids” in rows of houses..eventually the loggers logged the area out, the town grew away from the row but the name remained…the old skid row whore waited for the new residents, the new poor to nourish or perish in her bosom…she enticed them by spreading her legs apart, enticing those who would succumb to her moist secrets that she held fast and tight in the midst of the mist of her sweet and tender loins….
