Mike DeCapite - New Work

photo by Ted Barron

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A mourning dove woke me up. His cooing was so loud I thought he was in the room. I opened my eyes and located him on the window ledge, and then he was gone in the bright day.

I get up to make tea. The sentinels of dawn are at their posts. They’ve been there for hours, in their housecoats, windows open, looking out. They see to it the sun clears the BQE at the end of the street. I don’t know why it takes two of them—maybe they don’t know about each other.

I open the bars and climb out on the fire escape. There are heads of Mercury projecting, I learn, from the ball-and-dart arches above my windows, and the putty’s dirty around the frames. There’s a big white rooster in the pigeon coop across the way. There’s a painted plate that once showed the name of the fire escape’s manufacturer. Rust has seeped through the crackled paint of the catwalks and stairs and scrollwork, which may once have been tan or beige but are now faded to an indeterminate hue. You can’t tell the color of anything in daylight this bright.

I like the view from the middle of the air. The mysterious thrill of a streetlight fixture seen too close, in dreamlike proximity or scale. The way the some convergence of shadows on a window ledge makes it a place, or the relationship between the leaves and a liquor-store sign seems to define an area. There’s a Mexican-restaurant sign in San Francisco, down near the bottom of 24th Street—a sign slightly too big for its height from the sidewalk, nestled in pendant leaves. I wanted to be up there…in the sign, somehow, or in the air in its vicinity…to inhabit it in some way… And I’ve always been curious about those windows that you see coming off the 59th Street Bridge, above First Avenue. They’re painted the same blue as the building, like a Louise Nevelson sculpture. They seem private…unobserved, untended…like an open secret… I see these places as places to live. “I want to live on that ledge,” or “How long could I go unnoticed living in a guard box on the Manhattan Bridge?”

I know I’m supposed to have something to say, but I’m happiest when I’m just a recording device. I don’t have anything to say. I write from an impulse to catalogue, to inventory. The frustration of not being a visual artist, I guess. It’s exhausting that everything should mean something. The human curse. I can tell myself I’m just out harvesting details, but something in me needs to arrange them so they mean something. Maybe the real impulse is a frustration at not being God, who, after all, is pretty hands-off. It’s not His expectations that are so tiresome but our own. It’s probably my greatest disappointment, not being God. Having to be something, rather than everything. Having to be somewhere, rather than everywhere. Climbing back in, I notice how much louder it is out there, even with nothing going on. It’s the roar of forever.

I take the L to Sixth Avenue. White bars of light on the subway stairs, sunlight reaching along the tiled wall from above. You come up from the subway, everything is white. Then it all goes back to what it’s supposed to be: sprays of greenwhite blossoms down 14th Street, the street and pavement dry, the curbs and manhole covers wet.

At the Y, the treadmills face the street. I watch the raised letters on the Salvation Army sign, the lowering of their shadows. The few bare branches of a little curbside crabapple which bounce above the panel of pebbled glass have sprouted leaves in the last few days. I cool off walking around the indoor track. Down below, twenty heavyset old women are ranked down the nearest lane of the swimming pool, squiggly black lines at the bottom and white snakes of light slithering on the surface. The women are doing their Saturday morning water exercises in their swim caps, their enormous breasts bouncing in the water. Sometimes, life is really great.

“It’s nice, not too hot,” says a voice in the steam. “Not too hot.” An old man is in the showers, bent like a lamppost—his cock and balls so discolored and soft and distended that they look like an old pussy—soaping his parts as best he can, careful of his balance, a vestige of white hair plastered to his crown, his eyes bright and steady and patient, as though he’s looking out of a mask.

Before meeting Will for lunch, I mill around Sixth Avenue, considering laddered shadows of fire escapes on yellow brick and the white round blossom petals in curbside puddles and between the pavement sections and around the free-newspaper boxes. I buy a field guide to New York City trees and stand around like some flyblown eccentric looking up at the blossoms and incipient leaves, studying bark, trying to match them to the pictures in the book. For a week I’ve been nagged by the white-blossomed trees in my corner of Williamsburg, on Havemeyer between South 3rd and Metropolitan, and here they are again on 14th Street, on 17th, all over. They don’t have any leaves yet, so it’s hard to match them in the book. But I find an entry that’s close, the Callery pear. I pull a branch down, I’m examining the blossoms, people squeezing by, jackhammers all around. I’m not sure, I go back to the book. It says, “Where to look for Callery Pears: Williamsburg, along Havemeyer St. from Metropolitan to South 3rd.”

Back in Williamsburg, Our Lady of Driggs Avenue, a willow tree, is coming back to life. She hangs over the bus stop, pale green against the blue sky. I recognize her suddenly as someone I care about, someone who’s been good to me all along and required nothing in return. I spent twelve years away and here she is. It’s something, when you think about it, to take what the world hands you without the ability to move from one spot or complain. There’s a magnolia tree in full bloom in someone’s backyard, and a wandering limb of forsythia, just one, a lit fuse leading into a tangle of dry brown sticks.

For days on end it’s grey. Havemeyer is a corridor of white blossoms, which only add to the solemnity of a dark morning. A week ago the branches were bare, and you could see all the nests—bird and squirrel—exposed to the sky. Then the blossoms appeared, from that world beyond time where things come from: pear blossoms above the 99-cent store, the video store, the Verizon truck, the dirty red-white-and-blue bunting that flaps over C-Town. Even now there’s more green mixed with the white. Already they’re beginning to fall…they don’t last long on this side of the veil…the dimension of time. Next time you look they’ll be a certainty of baby leaves.

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E in red neon, a pair of sneakers hanging from the moon. Sitting on the bench outside the Atlas coffee shop at Havemeyer and Grand in the lukewarm night, the lighted blossoms emitting their peppery fragrance and the video sign blinking and people happening by and gathered outside the Iglesia Adventista 7MO Dia and the 99-cent store still open and cars sliding up to the traffic light, I feel like the fair is in town. In the crosswalk box, a white man walking. In the restaurant window behind him, his counterpart walking the other way. The changing traffic light reflected on parked cars, on the payphone box, all night. It’s all taking place quietly, as though the sound were absorbed by the blossoms or we don’t quite trust it’s spring.

A cab rolls up, window down. Cicada sound of its receipt-dispenser. Nothing’s right anymore, nothing’s much good. Maybe it never was. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Hank Williams told me this twenty-five years ago. Did I think it was just a funny song, or that he was just singing about himself? At least I know I’m better off on my own. There’s the dread, which mostly comes up when I’m between places, or it stays in the corners, or under the stove. But there are also these moments, now and then, the moments of forgetting myself.

Spring thunder, one a.m. All these bare-bulb windows hanging this way and that in the rain. A yellow, a pink, two blues. In the morning, the lights are still on in two rooms across the street. My first though is Man, am I glad I no longer live in rooms where the light stays on all night.

El Canario Barber Shop, Jack’s Cancellation Shoes, splashes and bursts of white, recent ones, as I move south on Havemeyer. Up the stairs to the J platform, past second-floor windows, weather-dirty awnings. Evelyn’s Party Supplies & Tuxedo Rental. The building behind me has a carved wooden cornice, and last fall there was a bird’s nest inside one of its busted modillions. The nest is gone—here comes the train.

I make my way through the moving cars—opening doors to the external racket and stepping over the relatively motionless linkages—and stand at the front, looking out through the acid-looped glass. The rails are open ahead, lying in metal reflection of the sky from their brown roadbed of ties and girders, splitting neighborhoods, shearing past tenements. A third-floor room piled with bales of insulation and bed frames, trophies in the window of a tap studio, the silver sealant painted on tar rooftops, the spinning ventilator crowns. Ninety percent of what I see I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t have the words. The various systems and workings and the authorities which preside over them, architectural elements, birds and trees, the parts or functions of the carriage I’m riding in or the trestles which support me. To go through the world in this kind of ignorance—the sheer volume of it—must have some kind of negative psychological effect, no? Up above the streetworld are tarbuckets, bottles, balls, shoes, cups, leaves, the sky in puddles. We head into a curve with a pigeon flying ahead of the train…

The old Maimonides cemetery—with a Star of David above the stone entrance gate at Autumn Avenue—is triple-fenced and barbed and razorwired like a prison, though that can’t keep the spring out, or the birds that are working the grass. In the near distance, a dark sky has breathed light into a single white-blossomed tree, like God choosing a servant. I walk along the iron pikes, past the next cemetery, looking in. FATHER…MOTHER. Then up the crumbling, rusted stairs to the platform, and the train rolls in. ZAMOR…FURMAN…WING.

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A long excerpt from RUINED FOR LIFE! is featured in the Paris/London-based online magazine 3:AM. My thanks to Matt Wascovich for his ongoing efforts on my behalf, and to Andrew Gallix, 3:AM’s editor.

Don’t you love the way people say “pop culture” as though it elevates their fascination with celebrities to a sociological interest or an intellectual pursuit? What, it’s a field of study now? “Oh, I’m interested in pop culture.” “No you aren’t, you just like to watch TV.” It’s a stupid term anyway. There’s no such thing as pop culture. Culture is culture, it’s all the same thing.

I went to the hot-rod barber shop to get a haircut, and when it was done I was talking to Joey. A girl came in out of the rain in a long black puffy coat, looking a little surprised to find herself there.
She said, “Is this a barber shop?”
It was a fair question. Joey’s big blond acoustic bass was standing in a rack, and the place was filled with guitars and rockabilly memorabilia, and there were a couple of car doors that had been left there for detailing.
Joey said, “Yep, it’s a barber shop.”
She said, “I never saw a barber shop with…guitars, before… I want to get a haircut. I want to get it all cut off.” It sounded hypothetical, as though she’d like to get a haircut herself someday. Just making conversation.
I nodded, encouragingly, and said, “Okay, Joey, I’ll see ya.”
She said, “No, don’t go! Stay and chat with us a while! Do you work here too?”
I said, “No, I just got a haircut.”
She said, “It looks nice! Do you want an umbrella?”
She sat down and pulled a big black bag up into her lap.
I said, “No, thanks.”
She said, “Really! Take one, I’ve got lots of them outside. You can have one!”
I said, “Okay.”
She unzipped the bag and handed me a giant children’s book, a board book with Tweety Bird and Bugs Bunny on the cover.
She said, “This is an umbrella!”
I had a weird moment. I felt that one of us was getting the words wrong. Like in a dream, when someone hands you a marshmallow and says “This is a lamp,” and somehow you understand it to be true.
She said, “You just cover your head with it!”
I said, “No, that’s okay.”
She said, “You keep it! That’s your umbrella!”
I said, “Thanks, but I don’t really want to walk down the street with Tweety Bird on my head.”
She said, “Why not? Tweety Bird is a good person!”
I said, “Okay. Well maybe you can give this to a kid,” and I offered it back to her.
She backed up in her chair and raised her hands and said, “Oh no, I can’t take it back now that your fingerprints are on it. Would you just do me a favor and set it on that chair?”
I put it on the chair and said goodbye to Joey. As the door was closing she said, “Your hair looks nice!”
Okay? So I crossed the street in the drizzling rain to wait for the 61. I was standing under a leaky awning trying to light a cigarette. A guy about ten feet away says, “You need one?”
I said, “What?”
He said, “You can use one, right? I know.” And he reached into a bag and pulled out a bright pink children’s puzzle in a box.
“No thanks, I’m okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Have a good day!”
And then he carried the bag over to a car that was idling at the curb. He stood there in the rain, motioning for the passenger to roll her window down.

See Spring Cleaning and April Fool’s Day.

Jocko Weyland, photographer, artist, editor of Elk, world traveler, and author of the celebrated skateboarding history The Answer Is Never, has written the best piece anyone’s ever written about my novel Through the Windshield. The piece appears in the spring 2008 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books, which will arrive on newsstands next week, and which is now available for purchase online.

Andrew Klimek, working under one of his many guises toward the disruption of indifference, the overthrow of reason, and the establishment of a new poetic reality, has included a short passage from my novel RUINED FOR LIFE! on his blog bugmelater.com. The passage accompanies a Les Baxter birthday post today.

Jeff Morrison’s dedicating his radio show to Jones tomorrow night. It can be streamed at kwmr.org from 9:30 (approximately) to 11:30 EST, Friday night, February 2/22.

To give an idea of the scope of Jones’s imagination, here’s a list of some of the titles from tapes he gave me.
“Aquamarine #1”
“Brighton Beach Memoirs”
“Processional”
“Fairground Polka”
“Wine Dark Sharks”
“Nissan Commercial”
“Requiem for a Fool”
“Afro Blow”
“Rajpur by Rail”
“Forever Lost (Nocturne)”
“I Am the Waitress”
“Brooklyn Serenade”
“Essence in Accident”
“Moe Rap” (a rap featuring Three Stooges snippets)
“Squirrel Pot Pie”
Themes for Great Carpets
News from the Firelands
Sunday Morning 5 a.m., Cold, Drunk & Lonely: Pammy’s on a Bummer

This is from something I wrote for a Spin magazine article called “A Day in the Life of Rock ‘N Roll,” which appeared in January 1991. (I’ve posted something new about Jones, with seven of his songs, at Ted Barron’s music blog, The Boogie Woogie Flu.)

Two a.m., crunching an old borrowed Buick down an icy street toward the lake. There’s a little turnaround at the end. I leave the car there and get out for a look. Ten inches of snow have fallen since morning, but now the snowing has stopped. Below the steep glowing cliff, the icy metal stairs, Lake Erie is a ghostly stretch of frozen white for five hundred yards from shore. Beyond that is darkness, and then Canada, and then the North Pole. Cleveland gives you a vast, impersonal kind of winter: you find yourself stranded in the cold of outer space, blasted by the stirring of global winds… The ice of the lake creaks, once. I grab some beer from the car and walk a few houses back. Big winds are booming through an orange sky, tossing bare branches… I’m glad to see Jim Jones’s light on.
Jones is the guitar player for Pere Ubu. His dog Ozzie brings an obligatory bark to the door, Jim brings a smile. I follow them to the kitchen. Chris Yarmock is at the table, another Cleveland underground legend. Another legend with a day job. Chris and Jim are old friends. Long ago, they formed the notorious Easter Monkeys. The house is warm and peaceful. There’s a pot of chili on the stove. They’ve been sipping from a half gallon of Windsor. Jones gets me a shotglass.
“How come you guys weren’t at Moser’s tonight?”
“I haven’t really been going out much lately,” Jim says.
Yarmock says “Yeah, y’know…I was gonna head down there but it didn’t work out…I came over here instead.”
Jones pours Ozzie some beer in a bowl and we follow them into the livingroom. He lights a fire. Ozzie laps at the beer.
We sit sipping the whiskey…Ozzie gets up, patrols the room, lies down. The fire crackles.
Jones puts in a tape of some demos Ubu’s recorded for their next album. Just the band, without David Thomas. It’s immediately evident which of the songs were written by Jones.
“This sounds like one of yours.”
Jim: “Yeah, this’s one of mine… I’ve been really into waltzes lately. I told David I’d give him a waltz for every album.”
Chris: “Why, is he into waltzes?”
Jim: “Yeah, I guess. I’ve got an album’s worth of waltzes in case I ever get to do a solo album. … I got a waltz album, a covers album, a classical album…an industrial album…”
He puts another tape in.
“What’s this?”
Jim: “This’s the stuff I do upstairs.”
The things he does upstairs, it turns out, are sketches for songs——all instrumental…keyboards and drum machine and a little guitar.
“You do these on a four-track?”
“No, no…I’ve got a digital loop machine I record into, and that goes into my boombox, and then I play live through a microphone over that.”
A sort of quiet march begins…bare keyboard chords…reminiscent of John Cale…and then a pretty descending synthesizer figure takes up…some rhythm guitar… Like a pale afternoon that comes and goes without much incident…subtle changes in the light…the vague pull of memory… The next one is faster. There are chase scenes, carnival rides, hairpin turns, moments aloft, but each song seems to be suffused with a patient, keening loneliness. Like ideas that find their way across an open lake.
“Jim, you make a tape of this stuff?”
He hesitates in answering.
“I won’t pass it around.”
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
[At one point I went upstairs to take a leak. From the landing I caught a glimpse into the room where the wizard worked, in his castle by the lake. There were a keyboard, and a guitar leaning on a stand, and shelves of tapes. The room was waiting there for Jones to get rid of his guests and put the chili away and sit down to work, at whatever late hour, or tomorrow. I remember Boris Karloff’s line in The Mummy: “I am too engaged in my work to accept social invitations.” Something like that.]
“Hey, what ever happened to that Easter Monkeys album?”
“Somebody’s supposed to maybe bring that out, actually.”
“Really? After all this time?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to hear the tape of that.”
Jim puts it in. Pours Ozzie another shot of beer.
The Easter Monkeys were one of the best bands I’ve ever seen: Mr. Chris picking up a saxophone, squeezing a few notes out of it, tossing it aside, throwing himself across a table of drinks, barking vocals from the floor and exclaiming from mid-air while the band chimed and growled and fed back behind him… When they were onstage it was like a black wind blowing through the club.
Tryna get to heaven…
With a .357!
They were ferocious but controlled, and their power was as much in what they didn’t say, didn’t show, as in what they did. They let you wonder. If ever a band deserved to get out of Cleveland it was the Easter Monkeys, and the silence between the three of us while listening to the tape was touched with the knowledge of that fact.
Ozzie gets up, suddenly, and starts barking.
“Ozzie!”
“Hey Ozzie, calm down.”
The dog comes to each of us in turn, barking as though to keep us from slipping into nostalgia.
“Jim, what’re you gonna be doing?”
“Well Ubu’s getting together in January…we’re gonna write the next record…”
“Uh-huh. What about you, Chris?”
“I think I might get laid off from my job. Which I’m looking forward to, so I can stay home and write.”
“I’m gonna take off. You need a ride home, Chris?”
“Naw I think I’m gonna crash here on the couch.”
I left them there, by the frozen lake.