Where Have You Been, You Ask
I was trapped in a book, René Daumal, page 351, The skin of light enveloping this world lacks depth on one cheek and la peau de lumiére vêtant ce monde est sans épaisseur on the other, and if you look closely at my face you can still see my gravure there. Never really knew what en face meant, now I do.
I was frozen in window glass, laminated at the sex store next door, stuck there for years, old man leering at the mannequin in black bodice, the crowds passing day & night seeing the ghost of me there, drooling.
Stuck on the Métro traveling Balard to Créteil, back & forth, same seat, warm in there, didn’t want to leave, and when they quit for the night they left me alone & I sat in the dark car watching rats jump onto the platform and the kids with their spraycans jazzing up the tunnel in sweeps of cobalt, dayglow yellow. I stayed for days, learned the stations, Liberté, Poissonniére, Michel Bizot, met three buskers on the platform & they fiddled for only me, and on the last day when I gave them my wallet they swore they’d give it back and they will — any day now there’ll be a knock on our door …
I was trapped on the tread of a bus tire in the rain, two-dimensional, and as the bus made its way I felt every cobblestone, every smashed bottle, every cigarette. But I’m the better for it — I’m well-traveled, brother with rubber and when they peeled me off, pumped me up, they applauded, and I bowed, flexed my new biceps.
I was in a mausoleum. Stole in, brought my chicken sandwich & Orangina, cozied up in an empty crypt & napped. It smelled like roses in there. I heard the metal gate snap shut, padlock click, and I learned there are no vowels spoken in columbaria, it’s a consonantal rumble, and you’d think it’d be all M’s & R’s, but N’s are in there, too, a little S, a wind of F — it’s frightening—but the worst are the Zs. Let me never hear that low Z spoken again. When the gate opened and I could hear sirens I headed out, free.
Speaking of speaking, another day I lived in a voice: the choice not mine, exactly. I was thin, I was weak, stood at a corner waiting for the light to change & was sucked upward in the intake of a huge woman’s sneeze, and there I was — you asked, so I’m telling you — clinging to the epiglottis, my feet on her laryngopharynx, and when the sneeze-storm came & went, when she coughed to dislodge me. I held on, the larynx has these footholds, little tracheal bands at the bottom, I planted my feet there, refused to fall — the vocal cords are slippery, & I knew that if I fell, esophageal, it’s acid all the way down, and I wouldn’t be talking to you now: you wouldn’t be able to ask me where I’d been.
I was tortured by a hundred “Gypsy violinists”
who exaggerate, for they are not really a hundred but eighty and not really all violinists but a cell of cellists & a passel of contra-bassists & a clutch of clarinetists & two guys pounding brute hands on open pianos but otherwise all violins. I thought it’d be good to see the advertised Gypsy violinists but clearly they were not all Gypsies — and the poster said Gypsy, not Roma, I should have wondered about that — some of them white as me & maybe Irish, too, but the stringy stew they served was awful — I was up in the cheap seats, the heat of the rich rising, it was unbearable up there, and they had us in these little cages imitating box seats, but these were designed to obviate escape, and the violinists played and played — Bumblebee, of course, Carmen, and in the midst of it all I started to fall asleep — I do that under stress, in all their din I couldn’t stay awake, kept dreaming of strawberries in the refrigerator, woke to hear the Gypsy violins murdering Death & the Maiden, slept again, dreamed strawberries sprinkled with sugar this time, must have dozed ten times, must have slept an hour, see, I can exaggerate, too, but I don’t hurt anyone with my violin when I do it, I woke again & it was Strauss while I was thinking of the berries, worried now they’d rot, thinking how kind it was for Susan to have left them & now more goddamn Strauss, Blue Danube, and the crowd calling for an encore, and wouldn’t you know, it’s “La Vie en Rose,” a year-long version & at last they liberate us, unbolt the cages, I hit the streets, take the 80 bus home & pour my strawberries out of their basket & clean & slice & sprinkle sugar from a yellow packet & here I am, out of violin prison, writing with my left hand, eating strawberries with my right, the only music the sound of my spoon, bling, not a Gypsy violin in earshot.