and I put it down in front o f me, a nice pile, substantial, and I
am firm ly sitting on a stool and I have spread m y elbows out
on the bar to take up enough space to declare I am alone and
here to drink and he don’t know I don’t have more money and
I order m y Stoli on the rocks and I ain’t making no move to
take m y change or m ove m y money so he relaxes as if letting
me there will not do monumental harm to the system that is in
place and that it is his jo b to protect and the bodies close in
around me to protect me from his scrutiny and the noise closes
in around me and I am swallowed up and I disappear and I am
completely cosseted and private and safe and I feel like some
new thing, just new ly alive, and there’s the placenta hugging
me and I’m wet with fucking life and I stare into m y fucking
drink, m y triumphal drink, I stare into it as if it’s tea leaves and
I’m the w orld ’s oldest, wisest gypsy, I got gold earrings down
to m y knees and I got foresight and hindsight and I am a reader
o f history, there’s layers o f history, vulgar and occult, in the
stu ff and if you lit a fire to it yo u ’d burn history up. And shit I
love it; a solitary human being covered all over by noise, a
dense noise that bubbles and burns and cracks all over you like
fire, small fire, a million tiny, exploding fires; or a superhuman embrace by some green, slim y, scaly monster, it’s big and all over you and messy, it’s turbulent and dramatic and
ever so much bigger than a man and its embrace is overwhelming, a descent, an invasion that covers the terrain, a
crush o f locusts but you aren’t repelled, only exhilarated at
how awesome it is, how biblical, how spectacular; like as i f it
took you back to ancient E gypt and you saw something
sublime in the desert and you had to walk across it but you
could; it wraps itself around you like some spectacular excess
o f nature not man, yo u ’re crawling with it but it ain’t bad and
it ain’t loathsome and there’s no fear, it’s just exactly extreme
enough and wild enough and it says it’s nighttime in human
history now in Am erika and Moses has his story and you have
yours and each o f you gets the whole universe to roll around in
because everything was made to converge at the point where
you are amidst all the rest o f life o f whatever kind, com position, or characteristics, it’s a great mass all around you, the blob, a loud blob, Jell-O , loud Jell-O , and yo u ’re some frail,
simple thing at the center and what you are to them doesn’t
matter because the noise protects you from knowing what you
are to them; noise has a beauty and noise has a function and a
quiet girl sometimes needs it because the night is long and life
is hard and pain is real and you stare into the glass and you
drink, darling, you drink, and you contemplate and you
drink; you go slow and you speed up and you drink; and you
are a deep thinker and you drink; and you have some hazy,
romantic thoughts and some vague philosophical leanings and
you drink; and you remember some pictures that flash by in
