What fucks you up most in life is this picture we all have in our heads about how shit is supposed to be. Pardon my French. – Barker Ajax
“I don’t want to earn my living,” Oscar Wilde said. “I want to live.”
Pulitzers came out. I didn’t win again. Same with the Guggenheim. Practically given up on a MacArthur grant. Beginning to think this “genius” thing is an actual requirement. Long ago gave up on Time‘s The 100 Most Influential. I did get a call from People magazine. Just knew immediately I’d been named to the Top Fifty Sexiest. Remember reminding myself to be humble – me like the geezer version of Sean Connery – and it turns out you can get a year’s subscription for $19.95.
If you think about it and you know I haven’t, the Forbes’ Four Hundred is the list you want to be on. Turns out Forbes has four lists. I used to read Forbes, got it free off the top of IBM executives’ coffee tables. Money porn, it was for me.
Trump, last I looked which was a minute ago, is ranked #259. He’s only #715 on the billionaire list. Gives you some idea about how great the economy has been for the Top 1% of the 1%.
Forbes says, There’s never been a better time to be famous. The world’s 100 top-earning entertainers pulled in a combined $6.3 billion pretax over the past 12 months, up 22% from last year; eleven superstars crossed the $100 million threshold, more than double the number from the last two years combined.
I stopped trying to be rich and famous. I can almost hear my Dad saying, “Norma, was that what he was trying to do?” Imagine me a big dog lieing, laying, horizontal, yeah, that’s it, imagine me horizontal on a shrink’s chaise lounge and I tell him, I am not going to worry about it.
How does that make you feel? he asks. I arch my left eyebrow and I tell him the truth. Like a quitter. Like I’ve given up.
You have rarely even tried, so who would notice anyway? a voice said. Don’t believe it was the doctor, because, well, that’s just a mean thing to say.
Some dogs are too wild to live among men. And I had to have a job to survive and nobody would pay me to be me, so I would get a job and gain sixty (60) pounds and stop running and stop writing and let’s not go there.
I am back now. Long time now. As I suspected, it don’t pay good but it’s a helluva lot of fun. Did you ever notice how life is tough enough if everything goes normal? Trying to come across as a guy who didn’t live a big life and is fine with that. Now I am trying to be fine with being fine with that.
Let me tell you the truth. I am a student of “the news” and I am aware of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein and Wilbur Ross and Kellyanne Conway (a couple of Russian hookers to pee on everybody and we’d have us a party.) Mar–A-Lago and Davos and Within The Beltway. Beards. Influencers. I got into college on my own. Mom didn’t bribe nobody.
My high school senior yearbook has a awful photo of me with “U.S. Senator” underneath. Wanted to be a lawyer who wrote erudite best-selling novels on the side while balling broadway actresses. Rich, famous celebrity. Interspersed with quiet weekends at my reclusive farmhouse before returning to the limelight. Which hypnotizes.
Our family subscribed to Life, Look and the Post. I am a Gene Krupa, Lenny Bruce kinda guy and I blame Jack Kerouac. Two drug addicts and a drunk, that’s no way to live a life. Chicks dig you, then you die.
Let me quote myself: “Chicks dig you, then you die.” Still not sure – at this late date – I have a problem with that.
I lived life like a Henry Miller character. Like a leaf afloat on a babbling brook. Rushing rapids and eddies. Whirlpool. Blessed periods of smooth waters, not too swift. Roaring falls.
Meanwhile, forty percent of the electorate supports gratuitous cruelty. Babies in cages? No problemo. That’s foreign, from one of those Mexican countries, means “whatever.”
What is a big life anyway? Fly for free to some place you don’t want to be to lie to a crowd of cheering people who are happy to believe anything you say? Your television show is a big hit and everybody wants you. Win the big race and worry about how you are going to improve while spending your time being rich and famous? Are you happy rushing from one place to another to say over again the same thing to a bunch of strangers.
Maybe I hoped to be rich and famous more than I actually tried. Give you that. But I kept being pushed into the crowd in the cubicles with the uniforms and the plastic name-tags. Rich and famous, whatever that was, seemed better than the herd headed over the cliff.
Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
Henry Miller said that. That’s what I was trying to avoid. From maybe about the fifth grade.
What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.
He said that, too.
Feel like I am still not yet too old to emerge. Don’t know about gushing. I don’t gush. I might spurt maybe.
I tell myself I am rich and successful. Former means the bills are paid and the latter is relative. Only have one relative and she thinks I am sweet and special. Special in a good way.
I can still go to the mall and not get mobbed by adoring fans. None of their cloying mail to answer. Nobody cares what designer I’m wearing. Can’t even spell papparazzi. No off-shore bank accounts. No purple ostrich jackets. No federal lies to keep straight. Living the small life, there is no need to have an alibi.
Maybe that’s what I was looking for. A life where I don’t have to cover my tracks. Maybe not even leave tracks.
The wayward wind is a restless wind.
And it blows.