Sat Oct 31

Overcast afternoon + halloween + coffee at Ethiopian joint.

Salvadorans ran the kitchen at the Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph where I worked one summer in college. It's shuttered now.

Later in the evening waiting for our clothes to dry and S. to arrive for a late dinner, reading Richard Wright's haikus:

How lonely it is:
A rattling freight train has left
Fields of croaking frogs.

The Radio at 4 a.m.

From 1979 to 1982 there was a show on pirate radio that could be heard on Sundays from 3 am to 4 am in Richmond and El Cerrito and spasmodically on the car radios of drivers along the Berkeley and Oakland border. The show was called “Numbchucks” and featured interviews with subterranean writers, filmmakers, first-edition book dealers, organic farmers, and former boxers.

The most riveting segment on each program was when the host, who went by the name of Smedley Yi, opened up the phone line to callers. There was ever only one caller, who Yi referred stubbornly to as “caller” as though to cloak the man in the possibility of multitudes.

Yi and the caller had an antagonistic relationship from the beginning, according to long-time listeners. The caller would come out swinging about some position Yi had staked minutes earlier about Octavia Butler or Nam June Paik. Their voices would puff their chests out, then duck and weave looking for a weak spot.

When Yi reached a pitch of exasperation with the caller, as he often did, he would interrupt and insist that they needed to go to a commercial break. Then he would swiftly cut to himself aggrandizing about a regional brand of potato snack or delivering a hushed public service announcement about what to do in the event of an earthquake. He was most adamant about spare batteries, which seemed irresponsibly magnified beyond keeping a reserve of bottled water, for example.

Is there anything as simultaneously intimate and remote as the voices of a live call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning when you are awake? Are they not saving your life?

The show eventually went off the air. But five years later, reports came in that Yi was once again on the airwaves, roughly in earshot of the same coordinates, but on Wednesdays from 4 am to 4:30 am. Also, he was calling himself something else and the format had changed. Each segment involved his calling an 888 sex line and asking for a maid, or a professor of Eastern Religion. The segment would follow their stomach worm conversation, which was about 30/70 sexual.

The show was called “Numbchucks.”

I used to wait in another room, listening to the voice of my husband talk to other people as he made his way toward me. I would make no effort to move or otherwise make myself known. I could say I wanted to anticipate him with every one of my senses. Or I could say the truth, which was that I wanted to be found.

Reading House of the Sleeping Beauties

I was reading Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in bed. An old man visits a secret brothel that specializes in girls who are heavily drugged so old men who have lost their virility, but not their lust or longing for young minxes, can fondle them freely as they sleep.

Beside me, he said he was tired; his lower back hurt.

Repeatedly the old man flirts with the idea of violating the house rules by forcing himself on one of the unknowing virgins, naked and milky beneath the blanket in that room swathed in crimson velvet.

He even imagines strangling one, and wonders if that act of violence would be enough to wake her.

I ran my hand down his front and pressed my breasts against his back. He rolled on top of me and spread my legs.

On the old man’s second visit the proprietress says the girl he will have that evening is more experienced than the others. The old man speculates that perhaps the girl had long ago stopped thinking of the men who lay beside her, and leave their impressions on the sheets in the morning.

Kawabata writes, Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

In the end, the most the old man does is place his finger in the half-opened mouth of a slumbering girl. He wipes the paint from her lips on the strands of her hair, and docilely swallows the two white pills the proprietress offers each night to sink him into his own oblivion.

I thought you said you were tired.

I was. Then why did you touch me?

Because you said you were tired.

What are you, one of those sleep fuckers?

Subtitles, Shartlesville

We moved a lot in those days. I’d walk the streets pretending to be a deaf-mute. But no one ever tested for me, except a kid behind a bodega counter who asked me if I was stupid.

The first time after we did it, she leaned back and said, “I could’ve used a little more teeth with that.”

Another thing she’d do: ask me, “Do you mean that subjectively or objectively?”

Who gives a shit. It’s what I know to be true.

“If lonely, read Lonely People Magazine, 10 cents, PP Box 178, New Haven, CT”

“Mr. Lonely Man, Join the Chicago Friendship Club for results. Hundreds of ladies belong. If sincere, enclose stamped envelope, 3928 Broadway, Chicago IL”

“100 Ways of Kissing Girls, Illustrated, 30 cents, American Sales Co. Springfield, IL

A little advice from me to you: Don't be afraid of beauty but stay away from nostalgia and you'll be good.

Maybe I’m not the thickest book on the shelf. But in my defense I was never above anything. I was always right there.

Walking to Meet Abe and Mark for Lunch in Hell's Kitchen

For years I’ve stood sentry

My profile by night

Brute threat and as false:

Perhaps you find it odd that a statue

Should speak to you now

As a dog. It’s new

For me too:

Clock of pumps

Loosie shuffler

Spilled oranges, newspaper sop

Little girl who named me:

Nicked and debauched

As I am

Dumb as a 2-liter bottle of RC Cola

None the wiser, no

None so careless

as the protected

as the loved

Subtitles, Sept

I'll take that lamp that lights a room like the sun scallops the sea

I'll take those jewels, eyes swallowing the narrow face of no one's house cat

I'll smoke the dope that makes me tremble w/o sauce

I"ll buy the political theory that evaporates from inside a board game hourglass

Forget about my type. Kick his ass

I'll take the blanket textured like sand caught in the heat of your neck

I’ll take the night, capsize it to cover you

I’ll take that lamp that cools a room like the moon wingtips the sea

I'll give you double for that wabi sabi undergarment/Monday afternoon

One day you'll give me that long Satyricon stare which is why I practice writing dialogue

Little Shipwrecks

Little shipwrecks hunched at the bar, diamond in the nostril of night

The check casher’s eyes blink like digital clocks + camphor

I was forgetting to “feel better”

I was ready to tell you everything, like so much cold chowder in weeping parlors

Left my glove in the ashtray of your narrow pelvis, a ruse to earn your confidence

ESL will have to do at this hour + the candied instrumental

of a military dirge strung from the soft underbelly of a fungus

Let me put it this way, tenderly

a rotten yolk passed between two mouths