See Ya ‘Round, Kid
Now I’m dragging my heels. Now my eyes are rolling back into my head where they came from. They’re terrified by what they see there, in my head, in the cradle of the birth of their vision.
My ears hear their plea. The hair stands up on my arms. My voice cries out in gibberish. I’m about to levitate, shoot straight into the sky like a rocket. My dreams egg me on. “Go for it, big boy,” they say, with no small degree of sarcasm, irony, fear and loathing all mixed into a sickly green batter.
My dreams are always stealing my thunder. They like nothing better than to corner me in a deep pocket of REM sleep and slap me silly. “Take that out on the street and see where it gets you,” they say, and my eyes freeze in place. The alarm goes off and my cock springs up like a magic rabbit. Another day in Rodeo Town.
Puff the Magic Dragon. Magic Dragon, a fine weed out of Columbia from back in the Sixties. A worthy adversary for REM sleep. A dream come true. Packaged in cellophane.
Anyone trying to convert you to anything is out to ruin your life. It’s about the only absolute truth in the universe. I say about because there was that split second right after the Big Bang when anything went. “Let there be light,” said God, and lost control of the whole shooting match.
I ran this by Bukowski once on a three-day drunk down in L.A. “Hold your cards up close, Bennett,” Bukowski said. “Hood your eyes. Blow smoke in their face. They only have one face, that’s what you need to remember. Aim for the eyes, watch them squint. Go all in.”
It worked for Bukowski, but I wound up on the street with a tin cup and a blind seeing-eye dog, chanting, “The end is coming, the end is coming…”
“Now you’ve done it,” Bukowski said. “Now you’re going to have to go for the throat. See ya ’round, kid…”
