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July 21 Courtyard Hotel Somewhere at Courtyard Hotel 20 miles south of Boston. Room 242. Rocky and I hi-5 in the hallway as we simultaneously refer to the same chick as a cock-tease, coming at the subject from two very different directions. Inside the room it the usual Harrod scene: Books, movies. -- The camera with which his father, Les, shot the weaver on in brada of droon ( wha?) and the sound equipment, 16 mm reels, equipment everywhere. On the TV with out the sound up some documentary absurdly atrisian ladder bezz (eek) time-laps wribly (omygod) of ochre caverns, cliff dwellings, and that dream-dare blue New Mexico sky. And the shower left on a little, trickles with water fountain soothing sound
July 21 Aunt Nancy, February 19, 1966, on her birthday "I wish you were here!" song on the radio, appropriate as I steer old Dan's minivan straight to Peabody, MA and Puritan Lawn Cemetery to visit, for the first time (in my memory, anyway) the last resting place of my dear, sweet and supposedly schitzo ('60's diagnosis) self-dispatched paternal aunt Nancy McKinney. This is to be the first stop today on a planned 3-graveyard tour to include cemeteries in Lowell and downtown Boston to visit the graves of Anne Sexton and Jack Kerouac, tho' I understand eecumming and --- are also buried in Anne's neighborhood. Here now at Puritan Lawn, sitting with Nancy, age 22 at the time of her suicide in Feb. of 1966, her birthday in fact. Nancy and I share a Flying Dog Pale Ale and get caught up after so many years apart. Now that I've been sitting here a couple of hours (sitting, lying, crying, swapping swaps, doing a rubbing of the grave with clumps of grass, I feel a vague recollection of writing here before once, perhaps as a very small child. It would seem our lovely Nancy doesn't entertain a whole lot of visitors. […] It's only recently, thanks to my own battles with my mental health that I have become curious about Nancy, how she lived, how she died. An overdose, intentional, it would seem. What else? Not much! Not much is ever said. So, here I sit at 4:30 in the afternoon on a sunny, pleasant July day in New England staring at a bronze plaque and just ... being. This is the second such bronze plaque upon which I have seen my family name. The other belongs to Nancy's younger brother David, who followed her into the ether roughly three years later, by way of the sea. That plaque exists as the only unnatural thing in Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine, an exception our government granted the McKinneys after all efforts to recover David's body failed. I gently knock my beer bottle against Nancy's bronze remains in a kind of toast. "To you, Nancy, and to all who are young and lost, to themselves and, later to us." I pour a small "psyche-meds" size portion of beer on her grave and watch as it slowly crosses the letters of her name, dripping down and into the ground which is she. Large geese walk the grass here, their honking salutations echoing through the trees. There is a lovely lake, the drinking water for the citizens of Peabody, MA, so says the sign. And did I mention that grandpa McKinney, perhaps thinking he himself might like to go to rest beside his first-lost daughter, bought a cemetery "Package Deal" of four adjoining plots! Nancy remains alone today. I should like to lie beside her, to have that
second nameplate on her very grave. But something tells me the hierarchy
will never allow it. We'll see about that. -- RSM
July 21 Notes from sushi bar, downtown Boston with Harrod Blank. Harrod: "I had a man stalker, I've had midgets as groupies, a dwarf groupie in Miami Beach. Her mother tried to have me to dinner: 'Please take my daughter out.' Laurie, the dwarf, would wait for me at 6 am where I was staying. A retarded, hairy dwarf, she would rub her butt in my car! You could see the wear holes in her jeans shorts. I had to run away, jump fences to get away from her. I was lonely at the time, so it was, well, painful. The irony is Miami Beach is the 5th largest modeling capital and the models though me despicable 'cuz of my art, but the dwarf loved me. July 21 Daily Scribble Rip-rap, clackity clack, shoom, schoom, rharrr-rharr, woo-woo kzchunk-kzchunk. I transcribe as the Oak Grove - Forest Hills transit train sings its song of movement, chunking and shrooming and flunking and booming over tracks how old? Over old bones and the granite tailings of three of four centuries of men while men from guys with powdered wigs and snuff encrusted nostrils and dill dregs of what we have become, this train of shoppers and greeters and service industry nameless, faceless hand jobs daily strokers, this pile of bones over which we roll. I roll tonight on a mission from God, from Anne and Jack and Charles and Henry and Hunter my goo-roos to write and trip the light fandango, fartsmoogonzoidal I beam don Vito's zap-zap DSL web connect. Whip him off a bad-ass letter of regrets and freebies and I wanted to say, "Hey!" This is why: I get the big bucks, baby. You gotta love it! You better love it, but then I can't say that, can I? Got to be meek, meek me, future inheritor of the Earth, of so the Good Book says. They whoosh to the studios and they whoosh on the train and BRRRINNGG! That loud ass bell that says time to go, doors closing and for a moment I'm right back in elementary school, that same bell, and why not? Melrose home to my childhood, the better half, the first walk at Franklin Elementary with Big Dan and Nicki Fordulus and Joey Dovcette and shit, those were the days -- Lovely Jackie Charotte came and tried to kiss me and we all shy and not giving it up -- man if I could go back for just one day and get that kiss -- mmm! Busker Rico playing guitar for cash at Downtown Crossing and in my pocket
blocking the dollar I mighta tossed him was a Flying Dog Pale Ale I was
planning on drinking enroute but didn't, so here, man, have a beer and
keep on playing that guitar. Its all that matters.
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