Sunday May 11, 2003

A HELL OF A VIENNA. Along 10th Street, very far east, I walked behind four middle-aged Puerto Rican guys. A pretty young girl was walking toward them, then shifted her path to walk diagonally across the street. She was wearing a t-shirt and some sort of muslin pants that billowed a bit from her legs but not from her ass, and the thin fabric strained against it each time she stepped.

The four men did not break stride but turned their heads, then their shoulders, with admirable slowness. This is the patience that comes with age,

One of them made a soft noise, which seemed to me not disrespectful but appreciative.

"Go talk to her," the man next to him said.

The man said nothing and his friend repeated it.

They were wearing grey slacks, all of them, different shades of grey, with a slight flair at the cuff that was raffish in an early-80s way, though the slacks were of a roomier cut than they might have favored back in the day. They wore sport jackets -- one of them, worn by the man who had made the noise, was of mustard yellow leather -- and patterned, button-down shirts.

"She a schoolteacher," said the man in the mustard yellow jacket.

"So?"

"We got nothing in common."

I immediately flashed on this Bukowski poem:

and all of us
getting together later
in pete's room
a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,
packed in there
without women
without cigarettes
without anything to drink,
while the rich pawed away at their many
choices and the young girls let
them,
the same girls who spit at our shadows as we
walked past.

it was a hell of a
vienna.

3 of us under that stairway
were killed in world war II.

another one is now manager of a mattress
company.

me? I'm 30 years older,
the town is 4 or 5 times as big
but just as rotten
and the girls still spit on my
shadow, another war is building for another
reason, and I can hardly get a job now
for the same reason I couldn't then:
i don't know anything, I can't do
anything...

Boethius found consolation in philosophy while under an unjust sentence of death. For rest of us, if we're lucky enough to have it, there's poetry.