Welcome to the Cirrhosis Motel: Last Days

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Last Days

The gas station attendant’s
smile didn’t really mean it and
he didn’t even know,
we’re all in for it
when the gas is gone
and that bread on the Safeway shelf
has nothing to do with hunger.
The possum lying dead
in the rushing street lives,
a roadside marker for poets
always resurrecting consequence,
a metaphor for mistake,
his teeth pointing at the last
perfect day on earth
passed doing sixty.

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An Elegy

City of Red Roses Motel

It happened over the years. The T and the Y fell off our motel sign just after the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. We meant to get it fixed but it just seemed we'd misplaced our motivations somewhere. Then the O and F dropped shortly after McGovern lost that landslide election to Nixon. It just never got fixed and we sort of got used to it. And then the E and D stopped working, just suddenly wouldn't light up anymore. That was around the time that Hendrix and Abbie Hoffman and Janis all got lost.

Anyway all that was left for people driving by to see, besides the vacancy sign was 'Ci R ROSES' Motel. We decided to fix it and then the Reagan landside happened. That was when we realized our motel sign was really some kind of Ouija board from another dimension, some power greater than ours, a kind of alien cultural anthropologist probe taking the temperature of our human condition.

We decided to leave it alone, after all, we'd just lost Kurt Vonnegut and we felt this thing knew. Ever since then, we haven't gone near it.

Epigraph

“Jehovah has his Devil, Achilles has his Heel, Mohammed has his Mountains. Don Quixote has his windmills; and Sherlock Holmes, God bless him, has his Moriarty” (from Watson’s journal). Dr. Watson—“I assume you’ve met Prof. Moriarity face to face?” Holmes—“I really couldn’t say. The man is a master of disguise and so is everywhere. He’s the greatest enemy a man could have.” Watson –“you’re just like Don Quixote, you think every thing is something else.” Holmes—“He had a point but carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That’s insane. But thinking that they might be, well—all the best minds used to think the world is flat. But what if its not? And what if bread mold might be medicine? I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death! Because you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong: we never left. Look about you. This is paradise—it’s hard to find, I grant you—but it is here, under our feet, beneath the surface. All round us is everything we want—the earth is shinning beneath the soot. We’re all fools! Moriarty has made fools of all of us.” “But together, you and I can bring him down“ from “They Might Be Giants” by James Goldman

Introduction

I was born in the Forties in Portland, Oregon, but I actually began the slippery career of life in 1948 in the maroon bricked, Shattuck School in Miss Lincoln’s first grade class. It was there and on the playground outside that I was introduced to the continuous shifting equation of joy, confusion and fear, the intricate stitch needle work of chestnut tree, dog, pumpkin, slug and street sign, and the ever-changing dictates of my personality, whose hidden center remained mysteriously constant. Eisenhower was my president, and the stiff, short, thick-necked, Mr. Bullock was my principal. The country was well-behaved and so was I, even in the 6th grade swimming pool when the difference under the girls’ wet swimsuits stung me over and over.I made the acolyte’s sacrifice at St. Stephen’s Episcopal. They stole me away from vacant lots and abandoned houses on empty, tempting Sundays and locked me in cold buildings of arranged stone. They dressed me in robes of their fear and told me things about a God and a Jesus I could not know they could not know. I lit their candles for three hundred and forty-two Sundays, in return for a little brown and red service pin. Then, on to high school and an introduction to the hidden curriculum, graduate work for Dick and Jane and Spot—further commandments on thinking, feeling, and behaving.Slowly my body grew and enlarged as if I’d swallowed a time-release magic mushroom from Alice’s wonderland. To the urgent brickwork of puberty, cars, clothes, school and money was added the rough masonry of love, death, sex, politics, religion and shopping.Thus I entered the high-rise cement world of grown-ups. Another Bush is president now and the country is still well-behaved.I’m still alive, I lust, lie, cheat, and steal—but only when it is the right thing to do.

Welcome to the Cirrhosis Motel

"Good taste is the death of art." Truman Capote