Nightscape

Quiet now, only a lonely French horn from an overhead speaker in Rue de la Course on Magazine, my turf for more than a year in this old Golgotha New Orleans, while I slept in a van with a curved brick wall at the deep flooding end of a parking lot at Napoleon and Tchopitoulas and tried to get it together without success. Going soon, don't know where don't care either, just out of here near-broke I'll be within a week of SS payday coming Wednesday thanks to my stupidity doing free work. I owe money to people and to a pawnbroker for tools I hocked and can't let get away again. I've hocked so many tools over the years, and yes, pawnbrokers are kin to the scum of the earth.



Everywhere I go around this town everybody even the nuts look stable and mellow. I'm the only one freaking out I guess. Well, I grew up in the forties and fifties, and I'm hot. Cool came later and I guess I never got it. I don't even care anymore. Like Dylan said, "I don't know which is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool/You know all about the brass ring/You've forgotten all about the Golden Rule."

I met some pretty nice people this time, really nice people, writers, directors, filmmakers, cameraman, actors, and their friends. They gave me a role involved me a little and befriended me, sort of, and of course that's a dumb thing to try with a somebody as fucked-up as me. I don't like most people and don't want to meet them, but I am not a born-misanthropist. Like a real asshole I fell in love with one of them, and then like a doubledip asshole I tried to express it. Whoa, Mike. Get a grip. You ought to know by now it scares the shit out of people when you are honest with your feelings. Remember who and where you are: Mike Havenar on Planet Earth in the United States of America. It doesn't matter who you are in love with here, it's only a passing phenom. Just stop.



I'm thinking West Virginia until July, a down-to-earth place with mountains and miners, dirty old working class towns and the isolation of mountains, plus my old marine friend Ralph Pack, oldest-known friend now that the others are dead. Or maybe the Keys. Never been there and I hear it is hot. It can't get hot enough for me. I don't know and don't care, it depends on how much money I can make winding down the road. They say the economy is bad. Really now? I always thought it was bad, so what's the difference? When I can't find work, there isn't any.

Women. Jesus H. Christ. I wish I'd been born one, it would be easier to get them. But being a becoming-misanthropist, what would I do with one? Oh, tenderness, sex, intimate talks, dancing, laughs, companionship, all the normal things I've been missing since I left my wife 35 years ago. Maybe I could wangle a massage or who knows, even a few nights of relief in bed.

Act your age Mike. You're old and wrinkled, jaded and gray, a walking cadaver scarred inside and out, visible to all but yourself. The ones you desire see you as an old grandpa with quaint ideas and too many flaws to be modern, hip or even remotely sexy. Your eyes are too sad, you cry too easily, and underneath it all is a fury that would make Che wince and Jesus weep.

But Che is dead and Jesus is probably laughing his cosmic ass off at me.



Everytime I look back at something I wrote yesterday or last week it looks excessive. Feelings come and go and I seem to take it to the falls. I don't know how to take it easy. Caffeine slows me down. My mind stops on Trazadone four or five hours. I'm rolling with my feelings all day and night, my eyes are trying to see everything and something is always pressing to be expressed. I can't be in love without expressing it AND THAT'S A DISASTER and I can't be angry without letting it out either AND THAT'S ANOTHER. I would go mad if I had to hold it all in though. I might yet go mad, become a blathering idiot in the middle of Decatur Street, put in a strait jacket and taken away to Jackson State, catatonic and glad of it. But I'm overexaggerating again. I don't want to be there. I want to be on a deserted beach in Tahiti with a joint the surf the full moon and Nicole Kidman. I'm here in New Orleans with this, however.



Another lovely woman with her breasts out; but drunk, and, being an alcoholic too, I left her alone except for that photo, which she was hardly aware of. I feel for you honey, but I'm no help right now. You wouldn't let me help you anyway. Then this:



Nightscapes of New Orleans through eyes & mind of vanishing Mike, dissapating like snow in warming springs like smoke in a wind like dust in rain like lonely old men with too many memories and too little time to express the meaning of it all, or any of it. Only airless concrete nightscapes nearly devoid of people and just crawling with friends and lovers.