Harlow Flick dreams he’s “Beat”, hard, and testifying.
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At the Library, box sets of Bob Dylan Sid Barrett Robert Frost, hippest place in town. Unlike other slim volumes of poetry, this one’s thick and hardbound. I begin in my sparse single lamp gloom room, where he told me about the racetrack, and losing his way in high L.A. hills, and his rectal exam, and his whores. I thought, “What is this stuff, without form or beginning or end?” So I thought about Liberty Bell where we snuck in beers and stood in the infield because it was cheap and we liked being near the horses. Auschwitz was always there, with a brown bag pint, shabby overcoat, sunken whiskered skull, grainy death camp bum, and I wondered at his life. Then I thought about driving south to the in-laws. I was supposed to take Interstate 40 west, but knowing no difference I took Route 40 west and we wound the night through mountains and valleys. Hours lost and a nestled one-horse factory town with everyone out for softball and sweaty beers under moth lights. I was fascinated, but then the MG overheated and my wife was furious and I knew our days were numbered. And I thought about the time I locked myself in the bathroom dropped my drawers and assumed the position, with a hand mirror and pulling a cheek with the free hand, reflected, a grinning throbbing burning purple hemorrhoid. How I loathed what my body produced. So I thought about this girl in the bar when I was a year divorced, and she talked and touched me dirty so I grabbed her tits in the alley and drained oxygen with a lust kiss, but up came her roadblock so I left alone. The next day they said she wanted to date me but she was just meat to me, so I decided celibacy is best for a crackpot like me. When morning came, I parked outside with a thermos of black coffee and a non-filtered cigarette and waited for the library to open. I wanted to read what else I had done and pretend to be Beat and hard. |