I started this bit about Havana when I was shoveling gravel in the backyard of Tony Winter's house. I guess it doesn't matter if I name names. He's got the typical suburban tract house and a couple of immense animals that fill the backyard with a noxious smell that is critically absorbed into the gravel he's put back there. We were helping him shovel in a fresh load, and yes, it did need even more rock, considering the size the his dogs, but there was also the pool to think of. The dogs are fond of swimming in that pool and it carries a fresh coating of scum from the dirt they bring into it.
Which all put me in mind of Havana half way through the exercise. There were four of us, the home owner, his brother, my girl, my self. There was another woman in the house who was studying. She is in the same field as my girl and they are knowledgeable with one another on certain subjects, handwashing being one of them, I suppose. Certainly after being in that backyard, I was germ concious.
Havana came to mind in the strength of the heat on the fresh rock. It is about the end of November and in Tempe, on a good day like this one was, it was eighty plus degrees out there in the full sun. That was nice. The smell of the other rock wasn't so nice but there it is, you cannot have it all. Like the dogs eating my biorhythm book and my girl saying when I was going to chart the new baby, 'please don't'. It's what you call summarily dismissed and as much as they might grieve about it later, it's what they did. What they said, who they are. I talked to her father about it and he told me to forget about it. Of course, I didn't really want to mend any fences with him either, but there it was, on the table, like Havana, waiting to be spoken about.
This must of all happened there, on the warm island in the Gulf, in the mid fifties, about the time that ol whatshisface, Gene McCarthy, was baiting hooks on the hill flushing out the radical few who thought it was cool to believe in extrasensory perception. I'm not even going to use the word he was after because in this time, it's probably a good way to get that disease that Guevara studied. Has something to do with cross dressing also, the way I observed it. I've been thinking about this topic of Havana for going on two weeks now and it's still a little confused how I want to address it.
What I do know is that rocking the back yard in the mild heat, they all said they usually do those kinds of projects in the middle of summer when it's blasting hot. I nodded, couldn't see how it could feel to be in that much heat, recognized I was thinking of a place that had some destiny to it. I tuned in on that.
It was watching the motorcycle diaries movie that got me into the epic of Havana. Then my middle son was telling me about Guantanamo Bay incarceration facility where we're not nice to the clientele. My thought is that we're bringing them back from a place no one should go, like what happens to the rock in the backyard when the dogs have been at it...don't you just regravel now and again, I thought? You take the whole clump with you and pretty soon it's down to a little square.
It was the ethic of the Cuban cigar that was behind the whole Cuban thing. I know they make a good pulled pork sandwich, and then there was the idea that pigs eat anything but if they consume hair, they get stomach problems. So always shave the head if it's a body, oink, oink. Think how many bald heads are running around these days...like it's so cool to be a chrome dome. Hmmm. Little things that fit together in a complex bundle of wires and consequences. Why would everybody want to be bald? What's so cool about it?
Are we going somewhere?
I'm up really early this morning. It's not even six yet but it's almost. I was doing that when I was in Mesa as well, getting up before dawn, to tap on the little laptop in my room. One day it wasn't there anymore because it had been given to the tv system installer. When I got home, my satellite service had been altered. I didn't get the Havana story written down because it was and is still coming to me in fragments. I think it was something like this:
early on, before I knew what I know and was here and there and Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman ever, there was a Cuban part of me that was an adult and not six years old and I was a friend of a doctor of leprosy who had come to Cuba to practice. I may have even been his wife, I don't know that part but I know I was like Marilyn Monroe, same blonde curls and sheath dresses and heels and lipstick and all that. My doctor husband/friend if he were so, had a practice in Cuba, in Havana and he dealt with contagious disease and I served cold drinks on a plaza by the house where you could hear the sea but you couldn't see it. Like where I live now, the sea is booming and ripping up the MOUND as though it were nothing. It is flooding the backyard as well so it is something...
ONe day we had a visitor named Fidel but you know, back then the cigars and the bears, they just went with the practice of being beatnik and exposed and liking to think of oneself as an intellectual, which we all did. I got my share of poems and so forth and perhaps the young doctor wasn't my spouse but perhaps I had several admirers and chose to spend my time with one and then the other of them. That could be. I don't think it was though, I think I was the one that pulled the books off the shelf and explained about protective coloring, disguise, camoflauge, genetic mutation. I must have known something about it and that's why the island itself became what it became, of a sort, we don't go there like we go to Hawaii, because it's not the most friendly place in the world, not like Cancun in Mexico, the beaches nearby the ones I've always wanted to explore. Maybe that place isn't that friendly either, maybe it's all protective coloring.
So the idea of leprosy as a disease spawned in filth and gestated in despair was one that my colleague, if that's what he was, explored and with the tune of latin rhythms clacking in a dancing beat, the use of tobacco was discussed in terms of a purifying agent. It was known as detrimental to the lungs, but the gases of the aveoli affected in the progression of the disease, did that not have some consequence in things? Developments...and were there not ways to speed things up and gestate some kind of cellular cure? It was heady days and then into that courtyard came spitfire and the very disease itself, in terms of plain flannel suits and dark ties and cotton shirts mostly in white. Pointy straw hats for the heat and sunglasses for the glare, which they were capable of at any hour, and the means to the end with the idea that we wouldn't imitate so much as reprocess. The little deadly contagion was useful in this end but how is more a martini than it is a concept. Like a Cuba Libre, who grows the mint? Which on a hot day in that courtyard in the sun with the latin music champing away in a yayaya, the dark hair and eyes of the Indian combined with the Spanish aristocractic bearing, not that they didn't have their own but they were uncouth in many ways, stubborn and blunt, it came about that such must be so, if one were to come across good friends in low places, that it would have to work. How it did, why it did, where we are now..another story. Something along the lines of what Dana said to me when I left New York..."The problem is cannibalism"...didn't ever figure that out, but did get the gist of things.
The solution, as we saw it then, with our chacha and rumba was that the cigar would provide the blind. It was a good cigar then and it is a good cigar now. There's no difference in the production except you have to have green army clothes on now to qualify for a puff. Who needs that. Then we wore cheap suits, Florsheims if we had them, heels for the ladies, and we all had our hair done. It was hot but there was a sea breeze to cool us because it is an island. And you can't make an earthquake out of a green army uniform population. Most everybody takes the sea change cure there. They started doing that right when the flannel suits came along in their bland whiteness with a slight buckle just below the knee. They were many and soon they were few and everyone became a part of the green army and smoked cigars. It was a natural progression. Not a very friendly one, to hear it told, but children will repeat the harsh words of their parents as easily as breathing. And that's what that became, in a word, a way to recycle ourselves in the face of a thing that had gone quite wrong, in the wrong hands. The one was objectified by the other and wished to correct it, the compadres. Everyone injected, the objectors laid out, but how...we were not about that in any way. My favorite line, I think, was 'Maybe it's an orchid?' To which the reply came 'Should we change the soil?' And, of course, we did.
It all seems quite scattered, what we were doing, other than entertaining, meeting friends, conducting business, being cultured and sophisticated, with certain promises not given but elected to choose from, in the eventuality things were achieved. And so the lace curtain came down like the great pile sorted in the back room that leaks...here we are and here we are and here we are. The rattan shades were drawn against high winds, the rains blotted out the sun. Peace and justice became an extraction process decidedly in favor of the unknowable. And I found myself staring in front of a mirror in my grandparents' house in Duluth. I was nine years old, full of freckles, a pixie haircut because my mother would cut my hair, and cut my hair. My eyes were staring into the mirror and I was aware of my conscious body. I suppose they were there with me, that we'd all gone there rather than to take apart one more flannel suit. I was brushing my hair and I realized I was here at nine for good, that that image was me that I was looking at. I decided I liked it. I couldn't see the aquamarine sheath anymore with the draped shawl collar, the patent heels from the really good store, the great white choker beads, the tube of red lipstick. I wasn't that person and they'd come along for the ride because there were two of them, Che and Fidel. When the time was ripe, they would correct comments and situations that came up but I didn't know this about them. They weren't who they were represented to be, that was for sure. The wind blows outside and ruffles the tarps that don't stop the one last drip drip and they kept coming and coming, for years, even today they stand up like ghosts of Jews and wag fingers. Pointing and stealing, the resource of ecumenity is despairing over it. The prices are skyhigh even in the thrift shops. Who knows and pretends these days? Socialites are busily culling the racks and reselling at the consignment shops, if the brand is right. That's called making a buck. Forget about the individual who wants to look good with no money, who is being threatened with repossession of everything. Let that go by the wayside and think about who's doing what to whom around here.
Once upon a time it was flannel suits, now it's lawyers and bankers and people who speak out the side of their head and then rotate that head in a complete turn, blinking at you as they gyrate. It's a little voice of a child lost within that megamass, not knowing how to get out, having been taught that to contradict and illeducate their listener is a surefire way for that person to know who put the wrong shoe on and where Fidelito really is.
Now I'm getting sleepy. And that's what tobacco did for Cuba, made a hazy aura in the fifties with the lubrication of Cuba Libres...
A similar innoculation as found in Lodz back in the day, when the cream was just right and hair bore no lice, what came of it, if it was fluent, was a good thing, if transitory and not too widely spoken of..what happened if it were used like a cheap suit, well, there was the negative biofeedback, the gerd reflex, a number of things, and pingpong never got to be a functional quality of it all, just a rattling set of drums without the music to set it off. There were quite a few hefty slabs of meat to process, it was done efficiently and with poetry and light on the shore and in the cane. Even today there is the reminescence of the cane in the wild iris after the first frost. What comes of that and the jumpy beat of the music, the heat, the noise of the big city itself, the boats at the docks waiting to ship off for other ports, every place they went part of a place they would not go.
Isolation and containment, you're not my friend anymore, the freckles on my face pigmenting the tanning skin like a blooming field of brown sugar across my nose and cheeks. Where I had gone and where I claimed to be. Falling asleep now. Don't know if I've described it adequately or at all..made a stab it though I think
Which all put me in mind of Havana half way through the exercise. There were four of us, the home owner, his brother, my girl, my self. There was another woman in the house who was studying. She is in the same field as my girl and they are knowledgeable with one another on certain subjects, handwashing being one of them, I suppose. Certainly after being in that backyard, I was germ concious.
Havana came to mind in the strength of the heat on the fresh rock. It is about the end of November and in Tempe, on a good day like this one was, it was eighty plus degrees out there in the full sun. That was nice. The smell of the other rock wasn't so nice but there it is, you cannot have it all. Like the dogs eating my biorhythm book and my girl saying when I was going to chart the new baby, 'please don't'. It's what you call summarily dismissed and as much as they might grieve about it later, it's what they did. What they said, who they are. I talked to her father about it and he told me to forget about it. Of course, I didn't really want to mend any fences with him either, but there it was, on the table, like Havana, waiting to be spoken about.
This must of all happened there, on the warm island in the Gulf, in the mid fifties, about the time that ol whatshisface, Gene McCarthy, was baiting hooks on the hill flushing out the radical few who thought it was cool to believe in extrasensory perception. I'm not even going to use the word he was after because in this time, it's probably a good way to get that disease that Guevara studied. Has something to do with cross dressing also, the way I observed it. I've been thinking about this topic of Havana for going on two weeks now and it's still a little confused how I want to address it.
What I do know is that rocking the back yard in the mild heat, they all said they usually do those kinds of projects in the middle of summer when it's blasting hot. I nodded, couldn't see how it could feel to be in that much heat, recognized I was thinking of a place that had some destiny to it. I tuned in on that.
It was watching the motorcycle diaries movie that got me into the epic of Havana. Then my middle son was telling me about Guantanamo Bay incarceration facility where we're not nice to the clientele. My thought is that we're bringing them back from a place no one should go, like what happens to the rock in the backyard when the dogs have been at it...don't you just regravel now and again, I thought? You take the whole clump with you and pretty soon it's down to a little square.
It was the ethic of the Cuban cigar that was behind the whole Cuban thing. I know they make a good pulled pork sandwich, and then there was the idea that pigs eat anything but if they consume hair, they get stomach problems. So always shave the head if it's a body, oink, oink. Think how many bald heads are running around these days...like it's so cool to be a chrome dome. Hmmm. Little things that fit together in a complex bundle of wires and consequences. Why would everybody want to be bald? What's so cool about it?
Are we going somewhere?
I'm up really early this morning. It's not even six yet but it's almost. I was doing that when I was in Mesa as well, getting up before dawn, to tap on the little laptop in my room. One day it wasn't there anymore because it had been given to the tv system installer. When I got home, my satellite service had been altered. I didn't get the Havana story written down because it was and is still coming to me in fragments. I think it was something like this:
early on, before I knew what I know and was here and there and Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman ever, there was a Cuban part of me that was an adult and not six years old and I was a friend of a doctor of leprosy who had come to Cuba to practice. I may have even been his wife, I don't know that part but I know I was like Marilyn Monroe, same blonde curls and sheath dresses and heels and lipstick and all that. My doctor husband/friend if he were so, had a practice in Cuba, in Havana and he dealt with contagious disease and I served cold drinks on a plaza by the house where you could hear the sea but you couldn't see it. Like where I live now, the sea is booming and ripping up the MOUND as though it were nothing. It is flooding the backyard as well so it is something...
ONe day we had a visitor named Fidel but you know, back then the cigars and the bears, they just went with the practice of being beatnik and exposed and liking to think of oneself as an intellectual, which we all did. I got my share of poems and so forth and perhaps the young doctor wasn't my spouse but perhaps I had several admirers and chose to spend my time with one and then the other of them. That could be. I don't think it was though, I think I was the one that pulled the books off the shelf and explained about protective coloring, disguise, camoflauge, genetic mutation. I must have known something about it and that's why the island itself became what it became, of a sort, we don't go there like we go to Hawaii, because it's not the most friendly place in the world, not like Cancun in Mexico, the beaches nearby the ones I've always wanted to explore. Maybe that place isn't that friendly either, maybe it's all protective coloring.
So the idea of leprosy as a disease spawned in filth and gestated in despair was one that my colleague, if that's what he was, explored and with the tune of latin rhythms clacking in a dancing beat, the use of tobacco was discussed in terms of a purifying agent. It was known as detrimental to the lungs, but the gases of the aveoli affected in the progression of the disease, did that not have some consequence in things? Developments...and were there not ways to speed things up and gestate some kind of cellular cure? It was heady days and then into that courtyard came spitfire and the very disease itself, in terms of plain flannel suits and dark ties and cotton shirts mostly in white. Pointy straw hats for the heat and sunglasses for the glare, which they were capable of at any hour, and the means to the end with the idea that we wouldn't imitate so much as reprocess. The little deadly contagion was useful in this end but how is more a martini than it is a concept. Like a Cuba Libre, who grows the mint? Which on a hot day in that courtyard in the sun with the latin music champing away in a yayaya, the dark hair and eyes of the Indian combined with the Spanish aristocractic bearing, not that they didn't have their own but they were uncouth in many ways, stubborn and blunt, it came about that such must be so, if one were to come across good friends in low places, that it would have to work. How it did, why it did, where we are now..another story. Something along the lines of what Dana said to me when I left New York..."The problem is cannibalism"...didn't ever figure that out, but did get the gist of things.
The solution, as we saw it then, with our chacha and rumba was that the cigar would provide the blind. It was a good cigar then and it is a good cigar now. There's no difference in the production except you have to have green army clothes on now to qualify for a puff. Who needs that. Then we wore cheap suits, Florsheims if we had them, heels for the ladies, and we all had our hair done. It was hot but there was a sea breeze to cool us because it is an island. And you can't make an earthquake out of a green army uniform population. Most everybody takes the sea change cure there. They started doing that right when the flannel suits came along in their bland whiteness with a slight buckle just below the knee. They were many and soon they were few and everyone became a part of the green army and smoked cigars. It was a natural progression. Not a very friendly one, to hear it told, but children will repeat the harsh words of their parents as easily as breathing. And that's what that became, in a word, a way to recycle ourselves in the face of a thing that had gone quite wrong, in the wrong hands. The one was objectified by the other and wished to correct it, the compadres. Everyone injected, the objectors laid out, but how...we were not about that in any way. My favorite line, I think, was 'Maybe it's an orchid?' To which the reply came 'Should we change the soil?' And, of course, we did.
It all seems quite scattered, what we were doing, other than entertaining, meeting friends, conducting business, being cultured and sophisticated, with certain promises not given but elected to choose from, in the eventuality things were achieved. And so the lace curtain came down like the great pile sorted in the back room that leaks...here we are and here we are and here we are. The rattan shades were drawn against high winds, the rains blotted out the sun. Peace and justice became an extraction process decidedly in favor of the unknowable. And I found myself staring in front of a mirror in my grandparents' house in Duluth. I was nine years old, full of freckles, a pixie haircut because my mother would cut my hair, and cut my hair. My eyes were staring into the mirror and I was aware of my conscious body. I suppose they were there with me, that we'd all gone there rather than to take apart one more flannel suit. I was brushing my hair and I realized I was here at nine for good, that that image was me that I was looking at. I decided I liked it. I couldn't see the aquamarine sheath anymore with the draped shawl collar, the patent heels from the really good store, the great white choker beads, the tube of red lipstick. I wasn't that person and they'd come along for the ride because there were two of them, Che and Fidel. When the time was ripe, they would correct comments and situations that came up but I didn't know this about them. They weren't who they were represented to be, that was for sure. The wind blows outside and ruffles the tarps that don't stop the one last drip drip and they kept coming and coming, for years, even today they stand up like ghosts of Jews and wag fingers. Pointing and stealing, the resource of ecumenity is despairing over it. The prices are skyhigh even in the thrift shops. Who knows and pretends these days? Socialites are busily culling the racks and reselling at the consignment shops, if the brand is right. That's called making a buck. Forget about the individual who wants to look good with no money, who is being threatened with repossession of everything. Let that go by the wayside and think about who's doing what to whom around here.
Once upon a time it was flannel suits, now it's lawyers and bankers and people who speak out the side of their head and then rotate that head in a complete turn, blinking at you as they gyrate. It's a little voice of a child lost within that megamass, not knowing how to get out, having been taught that to contradict and illeducate their listener is a surefire way for that person to know who put the wrong shoe on and where Fidelito really is.
Now I'm getting sleepy. And that's what tobacco did for Cuba, made a hazy aura in the fifties with the lubrication of Cuba Libres...
A similar innoculation as found in Lodz back in the day, when the cream was just right and hair bore no lice, what came of it, if it was fluent, was a good thing, if transitory and not too widely spoken of..what happened if it were used like a cheap suit, well, there was the negative biofeedback, the gerd reflex, a number of things, and pingpong never got to be a functional quality of it all, just a rattling set of drums without the music to set it off. There were quite a few hefty slabs of meat to process, it was done efficiently and with poetry and light on the shore and in the cane. Even today there is the reminescence of the cane in the wild iris after the first frost. What comes of that and the jumpy beat of the music, the heat, the noise of the big city itself, the boats at the docks waiting to ship off for other ports, every place they went part of a place they would not go.
Isolation and containment, you're not my friend anymore, the freckles on my face pigmenting the tanning skin like a blooming field of brown sugar across my nose and cheeks. Where I had gone and where I claimed to be. Falling asleep now. Don't know if I've described it adequately or at all..made a stab it though I think
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