NEEDLING

TWO WORLDS

Tonight, I went over T.'s immigration forms for the green card. I met him at the hotel / restaurant where he works. We’ve been over the forms several times. I think we got them this time. It’s been two months now since he’s received the application form. He should send it off in the next few days. So tonight, he invited me to diner at the hotel. We had some couscous and some red wine.

It’s so far removed, how could I even come close to describing our talk. He told me in his village in 1991 they didn’t have electricity. That he grew up doing his homework by candle light. That everyday they walked to the next village for work or for school or for whatever. For hundreds of years they’ve always walked. It’s about five kilometers away, so it’s about one hour’s walk. One day a few years ago, a man from one of the two villages bought a car and started offering for a small fee a shuttle service. At first they all thought he was crazy, why would anybody pay when we’ve always walked. He didn’t have any customers. But little by little, people started taking the car. Why walk? Why spend one hour walking when for a small fee I can be there in five minutes? Then T. went on about the man in the desert who on his camel takes two months to cross the part of the desert he’s been crossing his whole life. One day, an aviator stops by and asks him why he always takes the same route with his camel. I don’t understand, said the man of the desert. Well, the aviator said, what takes you two months by camel takes me two hours by plane. Why don’t you let me take you? And the man of the desert looked at the aviator and said, but if it only took me two hours, what would I do the rest of the time. And he took to his camel and once more for the umpteenth time, he started his two months trip.

But if you had exactly what you wanted, where would you go? Would you stay here in France, go to the States, or go back to Kabily?
To Kabily, of course.
Then why go through all this trouble to go to America?
I can’t stay here. I can’t continue living like this. It’s very hard getting papers here. If I could have a regular situation in America, why not.
You’ll have to learn to speak English.
I know, I’ve been trying but so far I haven’t been able to.
And you don’t to want to move back to your village?
There’s nothing there, you know. People don’t have anything.
So you came to France.
Sure… everybody in Algeria wants to come here. You know, there’s this Algerian comic he says all the Algerians they came over to France and the French they were getting crowded, so they went off on their boats and found this place on the other side of the Mediterranean sea and said to themselves, look here, there’s a nice empty place, why don’t we move in.
When did the French move in?
In 1830 around there. They didn’t make it to my country till 57. Twenty seven years later. But that’s because we live in the mountain, you know, and it’s harder to invade. All the invaders when they’ve come to Algeria, first they take the flat lands and then they take the mountains. Most never take the mountains. You know, in my country, every time there’s a problem, we just climb into the mountains and hide. Nobody can find us there. That’s how we’ve remained Kabyl throughout all these centuries.
Sure, that’s fine, but you know, first you had the Romans, they took the plains, you guys climbed up the mountains while they settled down, left you guys alone, integrated with the locals. Then came the Germanic tribes a few centuries later, they invaded the plains, and since you guys had integrated with the Romans and the Romans with you guys, you all climbed up the mountains together to get away from the Germanic hoards. The Germans settled down, integrated with the locals, got accustomed to the weather and all when the Arabs came in. By this time the Germans were also part of the crowd so they climbed up the mountains with you guys to hide from the Arabs... and the Turks came in at one point... and finally the French.
I never thought about it that way. We’re one big mess.
Like most everybody.
It’s true, we got all kinds of people living up in the mountains. Blacks, Arabs, Jews... and the French even, we got a few of them too. But most of them left after the French war. The Jews too, they all left with the French.

I don’t know how to write this conversation. I questioned him and he told me he had eight siblings, two of them have moved here with him to France, and it is the 45/50 or more hours of work a week they put in working for low wages undeclared, underpaid, doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do that they’ve put all their other siblings through school. At least T. is lucky, he works for a fair boss. Still, if you took all the hours he works and then took the pay he takes home every months and made an average, you’d come way under the legal minimum wage in this country. He and his brother share a hotel room downtown where they have no kitchen and cannot bring girls. His brother is a dishwasher all week, every morning and every evening getting only the afternoon off. On Sundays he works for his uncle in another restaurant.

These guys are good people, but I can’t even come close to understanding the world they come from. And trying to talk about it, I only manage to sound patronizing, possibly condescending, at the very least sympathetic to their situation which I can only understand maybe an inkling because I’ve grown up as an illegal alien. But not even then.

You’ve never lived without electricity?
Never.
Imagine, I never even knew electricity anywhere in my village before I was twenty.
I can’t imagine. I just can’t.

Then we talked about the power going out for a few hours throughout such a large part of New England. What if the power went out for good. Right here in Paris, throughout France... throughout Europe. What would we do? We cannot live without energy. We have created a world in which we are totally dependent on so much useless activity - brassage d'air - so much useless activity which requires us to work and make money just so we can continue with more newer and more efficient useless activities. We have got ourselves caught up in such a fragile contraception which could so easily tumble and break. Tomorrow, there is no more petrol, every gas station closes down, the electric plants shut down, the factories must close their doors. A few hours later after the shock and people realize their world has just turned around 380 degrees... it is complete chaos, anarchy... complete all out revolution, everybody on top of everybody, killing anything that gets in their way. First it starts with looting and stealing. Then it turns to killing to defend your property. Then killing just to defend yourself and your family. Then killing to survive and find food. Especially in the big cities which cannot live without energy. In a few days everything as we know it is destroyed.

How could we survive such a world?
I don’t know.
We’re so dependent on all these totally useless things. We don’t need phones, cars, trains, computers, electricity to fuck, eat, and drink. We were perfectly alright before. I mean, we weren’t any more or any less savage, intelligent, creative back then. It’s just now everything is faster.
We’d all have to move to the country.
Thank god we still have a few peasants who know what to do to make food, how to plant a few veggies or milk a goat for example. I certainly don’t know what the hell to do.
I know my way around a chicken barn. Me and my brother we raised chickens for a while, to sell them and make some money before moving here.

The French, they could never take the mountains. They killed most of our men, and the last one of us standing was a woman. She’s our Joan of Arc, you know, a real fighter. She led our people and it took the French three of their generals to capture that woman and to finally win against us. She was the bravest. And when they did catch her, those bastards, they decapitated her. Like Joan of Arc, they burnt her alive.

We ended our evening watching the English get beat by the Portuguese and getting eliminated from the European Soccer Championship. People were screaming at the tiny fifteen inch television screen in the bar in Kabyl and in French... there was even this English guy who came in to catch the last few seconds. The people in the bar of various backgrounds were cheering for one team or for the other indiscriminately. Some were for the Portuguese, some were for the English. People would come off the street to ask the score, automatically speaking with “TU” regardless of race, ethnic background, or social position. When the European soccer cup is in question, everybody’s a friend if they’ve got that little screen going.

PINK IN THE AFTERNOON

Had a book give away party last night. I cannot take them with me. And it feels good to clean myself of all this weight I carry around. Already I will have minimum three suitcases of various sizes full of things… mostly papers with more things written on them… words are merely objects two dimensional… with me on the plane and probably two or possibly three boxes of books flying towards Texas on a postal plane.

The primary problem is one of laziness as I have not exercised the most important muscle one possesses. The memory. Or the brain. Or that thing we have in our cranium cavity. I am horribly guilty of sloth and drunkenness. If it weren’t for those crimes, I could go everywhere I go with merely the clothes on my back. With possibly only a little rustle sack thrown over my shoulder inside which a couple change of underthings folded next to my toothbrush and some tea bags. I don’t have any bibelots, useless tracasseries, little memories packed inside kitchy objects reflecting moments past and gone… little memories which through my eyes might inhabit those silly useless objects. Our constant need to project on inanimate objects the blurry images of our banal past. Through these objects, often accompanied by packs of cheap photographs, we carry wherever we go the burden of our silly lives. I am even more egocentric than that, doubly guilty of vanity, as I do not carry any of those objects, I carry hundreds of pages of notes that I call “Daynotes” on which I scribble useless daily banalities related mostly in the form of self-deprecation, self-destructive drinking bouts described or lived directly on the page… leading to inevitable melodramatic – and pathetic – scenes of loneliness exteriorized... then relived over and over again…

I carry these with me before anything else as the written proof that I have like most men created absolutely nothing of importance, of value… not even of sentimental value, the cheapest and possibly the lowest form of value.

And… to top it all… I AM IN A GOOD MOOD RIGHT NOW.

Clouds and light rain intermingled with long moments in the sun. I have gone to the movies and saw a first feature-film filled with endless little jewels spread throughout. I cried during a scene when this man sitting in a car was watching a group of his friends eating a picnic in front of the car inside which he was sitting with the filmmaker and one – another one – brings him a slice of rhubarb pie and he eats it while it starts raining and everybody runs to cover. I laughed throughout the film. After the film I ran home to research on the internet for the principal character of this film – the man eating the pie in the car – a poet I have never read or even heard or read his name… a man who is the principal element of this film which starts out as an interview… kindda… a man who is published by several small presses in France. One of these I found is based in Paris and has a bookstore in the seventh. What they have by him is an 800 page epic poem. Tempting...

CLOCKING THE DRUNK

00h03

Three minutes past the midnight hour
I clamp down …

Francois!
Yeah.
Will you be outta here soon?
Soon enough.
What I mean, is… uhm…

Clamp down the cords in rhythm
and in key…

00h07

Seven minutes into a naked glass
faced with a naked decision
the prince calls in sick and tell his mother
“give me some time
I know not…”

Francois!
What?
D’you feel sorry for all that?
Sorry for what?
For all that?
…
For all that…
…
For all that!

Seven minutes and I will tell you the time
like an enuch stranded by the swimming pool
of his mistress…
needing advice…
I will stand by you the princess
like a stone faced with the torrent
and a bridge
of which it claims to be the foot
I will clamp down my voice
deaf and unheard
to a steady scream from beneath the river

00h19

I am the naked man fat like a lost stool
deciding on the excuse
before he takes his time with the last drink…

I am the last drink thick with a green shade
living on the last dime
before I fall and decide on a fat chunk of ice…

I breath you after hours…

DRINKING PERRIER AND SCOTCH

Tomorrow is my last day. I’ve barely written about all that. My body is revolting against me. Turning red, burning from the inside out. It’s not because I’m leaving my work, but because I’m about to change my life, leave my friends, go back to a country I had decided never to move back to.

In a month from now, I’ll be on a plane to Texas and I’m stressing about it. All these years in France… all these years yet I’ve never visited the places I wanted to. Because I didn’t have the money to go anywhere, or the time, or the courage. Either I had all the time in the world and absolutely no money – several months behind on my rent, borrowing money from friends and foes, and thus tied down – or I was working full time to pay off the money that I owed, the debts that I owed, et cetera. Either way, I was here in Paris.

Maybe not brave enough to drop everything, grab a small back pack and go on the road. Maybe I don’t know. Tomorrow is my last day at the hotel. This week I must clean my studio. Friday afternoon Pierre invited me to go with him to the Limouzin. If all is done, all is cleaned out, all is taken care off, maybe I can with only a small back pack, a couple change of boxers, maybe I can walk off towards the south and visit those countries I’ve always wanted to visit.

This week however, everything in my studio must be done and over with. I must close this chapter properly and honestly.

CONDOLENCES

During the masturbatory funeral bonanza the Republicans are putting on for that actor turned president who recently died, I’m suggesting that all of you turn down the volume on your televisions to MUTE and listen to Ken Freedman’s The Commemorative Ronald Reagan Hyper-Patriotic Blowout as background music. I’m not sure whether the funeral show has been played on your primetime TV yet, and if the celebratory politico-denial-like-speeches and lies have already been diffused, if the horse carriage carrying JUST SAY NO’s husband’s casket has already gone down Washington’s streets… I don’t know… and I don’t care… still, if you were unlucky enough to live through Reagan’s years, if unfortunately for you, you were a conscientious sentient human being between 1981 and 1989, then you should listen to Ken Freedman’s show. You might get some enjoyment out of it.

REMINISCENCE BEFORE PACKING

Seems like there’s nothing I can do to rectify the mess in my studio. I need time, patience, more time, trash bags, and willingness to work diligently for several hours at a time. I am sure that if I put my head and my arms to it, I could have the whole place cleaned out in two or three days. At least have all the stuff that needs to thrown away or given away out of here. That would leave me with all the stuff that needs to either come with me to Texas or be temporarily relocated to Claire’s basement. The furniture, if I can allow myself to call it that, is going right back to the place I found it: the sidewalk. I might even leave it here for the next occupants. The bike I’ll unfortunately have to give it away, because I can’t pack it up for the plane, and because already it hasn’t been used in months on account of it needing a new back wheel, and the prospect of it rusting away in a basement is too much. I’d rather somebody was making good use of it.

It sure has served me good and proper. I’ve been very rough with it, have taken it literally thousands of kilometers. It deserves better than a basement, or me. I’ve treated like an unwanted stepchild for the last several months, ever since I came back from my long trip from the States a year ago. I haven’t had the money to buy a new back wheel until recently… and now? Well, why should I spend the fifty Euro needed, plus fix the breaks, grease the chains – it needs a new chain too – and so on, when I won’t even be in France but a few more weeks? Selfish of me, I know. I’m also way out of shape physically, and taking on the Parisian streets with my mean machine once more might prove fatal… so I’ll give the poor sucker away to one lucky individual.

But here I look at my bike as I write this sad passage, and I think back on my trip from central France to Gironde and back up to Normandy… all those hills, those unending hills where at the beginning I had to step off my bike and push her up to the top… cars driving by me, honking at me in a friendly or mocking manner, usually a friendly manner… waving at me saying stuff like : Courage ! And then once I passed the major breakthrough, before I knew that I would be able to keep going, that point when instead of pitching my tent, I rented a hotel room… instead of giving up that day… I couldn’t take it anymore, too difficult… and on that particular day, I’d barely ridden twenty kilometers or something and I stopped in a village, had a sandwich and a drink while sitting on the village square looking and feeling miserable.

I called a friend of mine to tell him I was giving up, that I was taking the first train back to Paris… and he said, look, Francois, just take it easy, go rent yourself a hotel room, have a big nice diner in a restaurant, spend a little money on yourself, do your laundry, sleep in a nice bed… and in the morning, think your decision over again. I did just that, and in the morning I felt like I could take on unending kilometers of pedals up any hill god wanted to put in front of me. I got back on the saddle and the hardest hill of the trip, the largest hurdle had been fought and won…

I look at my poor little bike that I’m going to leave here in France instead of ridding it through the hills of Charente, those hills covered with sunflower fields, Pinneau de Charente vineyards… that little cemetery on top of a hill I stopped at one day with a strong wind blowing the tall Pleureurs across the stone walls on top of that hill overlooking hills of sunflowers and dark clouds on top… what a reststop… I’m not sure I could ever find that place again even if I crisse-crossed every road in that country… and then came the flat country of Gironde, you can do eighty, one hundred kilometers in one day and be fine… but there, the best was while camping out on that large camp ground and getting up every morning to take an easy ride to the morning market where the oyster men and women were waiting for me... right there on the street, you could start your day with a dozen oysters and a bottle of white wine… then go to the beach, take all your clothes off, and doze away your morning between dips in the Atlantic ocean…

My bike, it’s going to be a hard one to give away…

STARTING TO DUST MY WALK-IN CLOSET WHICH ALSO SERVES AS THE ENTRANCE TO MY STUDIO

Moved a few things around in my closet. My hands acted out, started stinging all over...

My spiral journals, all thirty-three of them, fit in my little carry-on suit case. Medium size Claire Fountain spiral notebooks inside which I’ve written my journal, where I’ve glued postcards, newspaper articles, photographs, letters, emails, story ideas, poems… loads of drunk desperate entries… bad verse upon bad verse… little pieces of papers torn off from whatever… thirty-three numbers since 1998… I started them when I went to Spain that year taking a break from my first hotel in Paris. I was a night clerk back then.

That’s not so many. All of them in my little carry-on suitcase on wheels, there’s no room left for anything else except a bottle of whisky wrapped in one of my old sweat shirts – just in case I’m on one of those horrible cheap flights where you have to pay for drinks – and a sandwich for the two hour wait at the airport. In my other bag I have to fill it up with notes to my unfinished screenplays, unfinished novels, various versions of unfinished short stories, poems and other bad prose pieces.

What if they loose my bag? The bad copy of “Pancho in spite of himself” I’ve carried on different trips thinking I was actually going to work on it, is my only copy. I don’t know what happened to the floppy I saved a back-up copy on. The hard-drive I was using at the time, burnt out on me a couple years ago. What will I do if they loose my bag? They only let you take one small bag in the plane with you. Should I leave my bag in France in Claire’s basement? But what does that solve? What if – I know it’s highly unlikely – what if I actually find the motivation and energy to rewrite some of those bad manuscripts? What good would they do me in a basement underneath a late 19th century building behind the Butte Montmartre when I’ll be in Texas? So I have to risk having faith in the airline industry? Why can’t they have fucking trans-Atlantic charter boats? At least if it sinks, I’ll sink with all my bad writing…

BURNING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

In a week, I’ll be done with my job. My psoriasis has come out full force. My right hand is bright red with white liquid oozing out of the top of my hand and forming a crusty little shiny crust. Not pleasant. When I was a teenager I was a among other things a dishwasher at the local steak-house. All the soaps et cetera were murder on my skin. Whenever I would get a bad attack of this stuff, the inside of my arms looked as if I had used a metal brush on my skin several times, oozing blood from where I scratched myself, and white stuff from my body trying to cope.

There was a waitress with whom I talked a lot. She believed every silliness I told her. When my arms got real bad, I would tell her there was nothing to worry about, it was merely a rare and relatively armless variant of leprosy. That you couldn't get contaminated, only if I touched you with the "infected" sections of my arms. Then I would chase after her around the restaurant with my arms outstretched. A bit like a zombie. I thought it was real funny. But then again I was fifteen years old.

I didn’t have too many friends when I was a teenager, other than other unwanted surly and or bizare individuals. My best friend when I was a senior in high school read physics books for fun – we had decided to build a laser gun to kill all the other high school people… we never got around to it thank god. He was very tall, big shouldered, awkward, and worked for a short time as the delivery person for the same restaurant... but somehow, he managed to get lost in our little town everytime he'd go out for a delivery, half the time coming back to the restaurant with the food an hour or two later, after the clients had already called back to complain and somebody else had already had time to deliver and come back to the restaurant. He was a good guy and I’ve unfortunately lost touch with him.

Every time I look at my right hand, I see a dead lobster just out of the boiling water instead of seeing my hand. That’s what’s happening, I’m cooking from the inside out. The burning sensation is so strong at times, I have to imagine that my hand is not part of my body, that it is an foreign limb momentarily attached to the rest of my body and that I should not feel one bit concerned.

All those poor lobsters I grabbed from the bottom of their aquarium just to throw them in the boiling water when I worked at yet another restaurant, the one in Lincolnville, Maine, on the rock coast… how many lobsters was that? Lots of them. I have taken a lot of lobsters to their death.

You grab them after rolling up your sleeves. Two pounders. One and half pounders. One and quarter. You got to tell them apart more or less. Not the same price. Grab them right under the head from the back and pop those thick rubber bands from their claws without getting snapped. Place them in the boiling water asking them forgiveness… forgiveness to feel better about yourself whenever you hear them scream from inside the pot.

Sorry little lobsters… so sorry about that… but god damned, do you have to taste so good? Is it our fault that your flesh cooked just right and served with some melted butter is so damned fine to eat?

I look at my hand and wonder, if I stuck my hand in a big pot of boiling water, then took myself to my table and lay my right hand on my plate to pick at it with my left hand… then to bring it up to my mouth and eat it after dipping my fingers in a pot of melted butter… suck on those fingers to the bone, crusty skin… steamed potatoes to go along with that, and some horseradish sauce…

How good would that be?

DENIAL AND FAILURE

Each day brings me a little closer to the end of my stay in France. I’m starting to get nervous about it. Like the end of my contract at work, planned for the 8th of this month… well, I went ahead and pushed it till the 15th. As if that extra little bit of money was going to make any difference whatsoever. It will… I’m not in a situation where a couple hundred bucks doesn’t make a difference… but in the long run, extending my job an extra week only succeeds in pushing the date and time when I will have to deal head-on with the consequences of the decisions I’ve taken. Procrastination. Why do today what I can do tomorrow? Specially if it’s difficult and to a certain extent painful. The end of my job represents the beginning of the end of my stay in Paris, France. I don’t want to leave Paris, but I have come to the conclusion that my life will not get better, financially speaking for one, but also professionally speaking, if I continue to live here. That, apparently, the best I can do is be an underpaid, overworked hotel clerk. That is the extent of my accomplishments in this country. I have nothing against being a hotel clerk, I do however have a problem if being a hotel clerk is the only opportunity available for me. It then ceases to be a means to another job, or a step to further me in my little quests of daily life, and it becomes a constraint, a judgment call from society on me. I don’t mind not making any money, I only mind not having at least the hope that I could if I wanted, better myself in a professional manner, that I could envision to do something other than being a hotel clerk, that I could further my hopes of belonging to, or to be active in a profession which is more rewarding, not financially speaking this time, but intellectually and emotionally. That or those opportunities have either not been available for me in Paris, France, or I have not known or figured out how to make them available to me during my stay. Leaving is an admittance of my failure, to an extent. Extending my job one more week is one more week of denial where I do not have to face my failure head-on.