MangoZeen - Thailand, Bangkok, Pattaya to USA, NewYork, Brooklyn, the webzine of Peter Smith
on a LIRR train from Montauk.
Racing through the southern tier of Suffolk county.
Cars stopped at train crossings.
The blank faces of commuters released from work___
I so wish I was one of them.
Accepting my fate of 9 to 5 job monotony.
If in a car
Home only minutes away
Wife or second wife
Children waiting.
Oh joy___
Instead
Jamaica bound
To Clinton Hill
At least an hour away
Oh joy will have to wait___
Flowers are exploding all across the East Village community gardens. The temperature is in the 90s. The air in our apartment has no oxygen. The streets only have a little more. Alice and I have lived together for the last month. I haven’t worked a day. Alice is heading home to West Virginia for Labor Day, the traditional end of America’s summer, although astrologically the equinox is three weeks away.
I wander downtown. The Jones Diner is packed with blue-collar workers. The staff is third world. Two secretaries shriek in New york accents. Their boyfriends remain silent and eat their lunch. I order a bagel and coffee. At 1 the diner clears out. Everyone has gone back to work. Two Greek children draw in books at a corner table. Strangely they speak Spanish together.
Has anyone ever changed their sex to become a hermaphrodite?
A BEACH DREAM
I am at a Cape Cod resort with Alice
Our cottage a wreck.
My Uncle Jack,
The son of a Boston Homicide Captain,
Visits with kids, all of them six years-old
He complains, “This place is a mess.”
I recall his first beach house on the Falmouth Heights
It was so big
Sand deep on the wood floors
My Aunt never cleaned anyplace___
Later we are at the beach
I rescue a child from drowning
I drag him onto the pier
I lose my balance and fall into the water
Ropes entangle my limbs
Deep underwater
No bottom
I wake up before dying.
<
September 1, 2021 – Brooklyn
A hard rain all day. I haven’t left 387. I wrote from the 1979 journal, napped, and ate several small meals. I only spoke with Jake and Brigette and then only briefly. I have really talked with anyone on the phone or texted someone about nothing.
Brigette painted me as a hermaphrodite. They had heard my tale of the Hermaphrodite statue at the Louvre. Their friend Soap had a tattoo of l’Heramphrodite on her arm. I would love to see it one more time, except it’s raining buckets in Brooklyn and I’m not going anywhere, until after my procedure at NYU. Trapped like a laboratory rat seeking reincarnation as a marble statue.
Two Labor Day weekends ago in Maine my brother-in-law and I had several discussions about whether it was better to BBQ with charcoal or gas. The world’s leading leisurologist voted for gas and I bowed to the swami’s greater savvy on this subject. Some subjects you have to leave to the experts.
Written Sep 9, 2020
Fashion has long dictated that no one should wear white after Labor Day.
The tradition began in the Gilded Age and many modernists of mode deem that the ban was instituted to separate the elite from the hoi polloi or lower classes, however the real reason was probably that at the end of summer people returned to the city and the smog of coal smoke, an enemy to white.
That be said, the author Tom Wolfe has worn white throughout the year. His first suit was to emulate southern gentlemen i.e. plantation slave owners, but the material was too heavy to wear during the summer, so the novelist waited till winter, completely freaking out the gentry class. According to Wikipedia Wolfe has said that the outfit disarms the people he observes, making him, in their eyes, “a man from Mars, the man who didn’t know anything and was eager to know.”
Not everyone agreed and Norman Mailer said, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.”
Of course Norman Mailer was never known as a man of sartorial splendor and his bias was rejected by Coco Chanel, the czarina of style.
“Women think of all colors, except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony.”
She was right and few people sported white better than the ‘droogs’ of CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
No matter what the age.
Got Milk.
Still no lights in my apartment
ConEd shut off.
Alan Vaughn showed up from Florida on route to London. At lunch today ,” he said, ” i love to travel.” then proceeded to tell me all about the demise of his fair with his winter living, natalia, aKA seven rooms of Gloom
“You know I’d come back from trips planes Trains. And feeling beat. I’d open the door, and that should be. Sitting watching some terrible French television show she look up and Mumble something like hello and go back to her dreariness. In the end I had to tell her to go and she took it really easy. Came the next day got her things, ” what do you think was I wasting my time
Alan looked at me for truth
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her in the winter or rather being with her in the winter but let’s face it enough was enough. That girl suffers from some form of pseudo-catatonia. It was time for her to go___ anyway you had to recover after the Thomas Cole disaster. That she lost that sale didn’t help.”
Alan’s face scrunched up at the mere mention of Chee’s name. After all the rumors that they were an item had been heard even this far from the schemes that she. He had seen her brothers this morning midtown. Never Can Say Goodbye.
After all it was spring and April is in the coolest month of all in Miami but London. Winter takes its time dying there.
“How is it with Chee anyway,” i know I asked damn well the answer would be forthcoming and wouldn’t you know it before he could say a word the waitress place at bacon and eggs right on cue. Yes the old man Magic still comes through.
Hudson spring almost
The last lash of winter when black waffle river
Shark fins cutting through the Hudson
The Sun
Swollen with doubt
Shine or not shine
The street lights dim
For the dawn and the cold wet wind swirls off the river
As empty taxis swish away
On the West Side Highway
Where the lights
Inot New York’s dying night.