MM MANHATTAN 1
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I had absolutely no idea what I'd gone to New York for; and later, in Los Angeles, even less so. Only that I should look for Miss Berman as soon as I arrived in New York, a woman of German descent who headed up recruitment and public relations for one of the hottest nightclubs in Times Square (but if someone hadn't told me, I wouldn't have realized). I'd given up prospecting, dropped out of college, and fled a romantic relationship, and after ten days of meditating on an empty stomach in the dark, that opportunity appeared, if you can call it an "opportunity"... aaah, but how happily I breathed the tainted New York air through the pale rays streaming from the moon into my nostrils, after a restless period of long waiting and the immense, turbulent journey through the nights of the Mexican wilderness (I've never had a problem pointing a gun at someone when it came to saving my own skin). Twenty-four years and the recurring feeling of a near, possible, and obsessively touched-upon fullness of life, but not yet achieved. At that moment, at the window of my little room on the west side of the city, lit by electric moons noisy with headlights, streetlights, and buildings, I was just my open backpack on the floor and the memory of Miss Berman scrutinizing me from head to toe, asking me what I'd thought of my first night working at Point 43. For a split second, my only reaction was to feel my heart pierced confusedly by the playlist from that early morning: an acidic, psychoprecipitated electronic pulse that evoked twisted bodies bouncing euphorically in every direction, within the black light that stole the clarity of clarity, reborn on the surface of the shadow on the other side of the mirror. Nothing could be less impressive to my eyes than that colossal sound system piloted by those pathetic DJs; I was certain there was nothing interesting. would happen in my life during work hours. In my view, my land-based invasion of the States had been merely a metaphor for facts and sensations. The ambient air at Point 43 was saturated with suspended particles, cocaine seemed to be blown through the air conditioning, amidst a very wealthy young clientele selected by their appearance at the entrance. The only thing I remember saying, throughout that entire first night, was a technical explanation to a crazy blonde model hanging on the bar counter who wouldn't take her eyes off me; even then, she seemed infinitely distant and not at all kind: "Agave azul (I said), a cactus-like plant that produces a huge piña: it's with this piña that tequila is made," and I poured her a drink. None of my coworkers understood my English well, but the girl thanked me for the explanation. The food Miss Berman sent up from the kitchen for me was very good (it had meat in it), and I made so many different drinks that first night that I probably messed up several, still very tired from all the traveling earlier in the week and the wandering around the West Side looking for a room.
I worked until ten in the morning and went out, walking sleeplessly through Times Square, thinking that, at its core, in its original area, New York was as tiny as a province; except that Prometheus (the Greek hero), whose admirably ugly statue I considered for a few moments in Rockefeller Center, while getting high like me (as soon as I arrived in the room), foresaw in his dream the straight lines of skyscrapers that subsist because the dream-giver was too lazy to destroy their image. The air I breathed in Manhattan at that moment was a mixture of carbon monoxide, oxygen, nitrogen, saturated fat, hospital liposuction residue, advertising, and heroin: the vulture gnawing at the statue's liver. And despite my efforts to be indifferent, disguising my emotions on the street, determined not to look away from potential trouble or the Migra (immigration police), my childish face flushed violently, my blond hair stood on end with every step, and I felt a kind of nausea, a contraction at the base of my skull, where nerves, muscles, and blood vessels intertwine. The icy, fetid breath of Manhattan passed over these sensitive tissues.
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ResponderExcluir----------------------------------being content with my own business and not caring about anyone else's, while a strange cold sweat beaded on my back on the bus, the wheels abruptly turning that immense curve on 72nd Street (I hate subways). What prevented me from properly evaluating the situations I was getting myself into was the fact that I didn't realize my young age and lack of professional qualifications, lacking the protection and privileges that, in New York, would only be possible for me with an annual income of at least thirty or fifty million dollars, being accepted (with a certain dose of sociopathy) as a member of the best clubs and artistic social circles, and having access to taxis, limousines, sports cars, call girls and models, doormen and security guards, press agents, and other illicit protective resources. But for me, NY was limited to my room, the buses and Point 43, which I could happen to find walking in Times Square personified in the figure of Miss Berman, a cosmopolitan Balzacian woman whose hips always made me think of sodomy and fellatio.
ResponderExcluirThe view from my room on West 9th Street was a portrait of the collapse of American bourgeois stability: a curve of asphalt with sewage drains and filthy sidewalks littered with trash cans; brick buildings with crumbling elevators and metal antenna poles on rooftops; and, further west, the Hudson River lay between me and the polluting industries of New Jersey. I drank a can of grapefruit and fell asleep in bed; I slept until 4 p.m., when I woke up thirsty from the joint. It seemed to me, for a while, that the indistinct life of the unconscious wanted to delay my sleep, and my head, still sluggish, filled me with contextualizing images: on some mornings, around ten or eleven in the morning, just before finishing my shift behind the bar on one of the four floors of Point43, Miss Berman would arrive, fresh as the morning, dressed in pastel colors combined with black leather with incredible competence: “Fred will call me at eight in the morning to find out what time we’re leaving (Barbara Berenson has already called and said that if we leave after noon, she’ll come with us, but no one is expecting much from this film: by taxi to 860, Broadway 860, on 17th Street, northeast corner of Union Square Park, where she, by the way, has rented the entire third floor to write her art magazine).
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ResponderExcluir“Oh, no,” she said, speaking to everyone and no one at the same time, forcing me to repeat her sentences in my head afterward so I could understand something: I never really mastered English. So, combining some of her phrases from different days, I realized she was an art collector. By that time, almost everyone had left: the waiters, the security guards, the DJs, and the customers; P.43 was still ostensibly open, perhaps with one of the non-American bartenders who worked with me already changed, taking one on the house. My job was to remove the tablecloths from all the tables and put the chairs back on them as the remaining clientele left, so the cleaning ladies could come spend the afternoon cleaning the carpets and sofas and mopping and polishing the dance floors. After that, I would wander aimlessly through Manhattan, passing Miss Berman's office near the building's lobby. Sometimes he would burn a joint of hashish near a fire escape that led to a sort of passageway after a flight of green iron stairs at the back of the building.
Sometimes, I'd burn a joint of hash near a fire escape that led to a sort of passageway after a flight of green iron stairs at the back of the building. I'd put on my sunglasses and begin my journey through the rarefaction of New York space: the idea of Promethean promotion fueling my eagerness to climb much higher on the social ladder, toward the free atmosphere of Primal Sin, in the purity of the ahistorical blue above the skyscrapers; feeling entirely available in the preceding solitude of this space to embrace some busty college girl in Central Park. "By the way, K, why don't you try for a scholarship?" Melissa Kent asked me one day, when Miss Berman introduced us at the McDonald's on the Avenue. She was a perfect busty American college girl, studying art at Barnard College, across from Columbia University. "Because I'm illegal. Because I hate studying. Because, in the narrow cistern they call university, spiritual rays rot like straw, and it's these moldy systems' fault; in the name of this same logic, in the name of these same moldy systems, I tell you: university life stinks!" Obviously, I didn't say that.
ResponderExcluirI said: – The Wolf of University Management is the same all over the world (he only serves to worship indexes and rankings, make inventories of published articles and celebrate with champagne each position climbed ------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluir------------------------------in international lists). Position in the spreadsheets determines the fate of researchers and departments; quantity wins, regardless of content (in this battle of numbers, academics create factories of articles that no one reads, sign each other's work, cite each other, and travel the world to promote their worthless texts). Empty events and useless scientific journals multiply, resources migrate from laboratories to public relations services, from research to marketing, from books to full-page newspaper ads and TED talks, the shortest route to TV. —I said. Melissa laughed and laughed. I really had no interest in studying; my life in Manhattan was nightlife, finishing work at dawn and sleeping in the afternoon: the only thing I wanted was a high-class life and a flow of dollars, but not the hard-earned dollars being collected at the end of the month, like on 149th Street, but the dollars that were ostentatiously torn up by the New Yorker elite on the nights of P.43, truckloads of dollars being spent and transformed into revolving navy blue light and the latest fashions and powder and false declarations of love recited with indifference in the suites of the best hotels in New York
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ResponderExcluir(but even that life, I only desired it as imaginary and demiurgic fuel for the practice of lucid dreaming: I saw Melissa Kent appear on P.43 with a different man every night, before being formally introduced to her. And I went to sleep in the morning in my West Side room with the image of her immense breasts swirling around my hard cock and in my head. I was lost to the world and she would become my first heroin channel in New York. Maybe that's why, that afternoon, I went to observe some architecture near her college, and at Columbia; I smoked a joint in the quadrangle in front of the Low Library while watching the future intelligentsia of the United States skipping classes outside their classrooms, with those faces of gay journalists who pay to be fucked in the ass. Pulitzer to the best of journalism (it was eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning now, and the good colored people of Harlem were heading to church; later, at the Paris Bar, someone turned on the rhythmic sound of an old ballad called Bottom Blues and that's how I got into my first trouble on New York soil: – There are 400 million firearms in US.
"Hey, you two!" said a black man at the table next to mine, apparently eager to promote peace. "Hey, you two!" (said the bartender behind the counter) "Don't fight over women here," he said, addressing the black man he was talking to, a tall, dark-skinned man with brown hair plastered to his head, looking at Betty with cold, black eyes that had a certain evil glint. "Who is she?" I asked the black man next to me. "My name is Betty Holmes," she answered, with some difficulty. "Just one more of Cásper's whores" (said the man with the slicked-back hair, rising from his chair), "I'm going to stick my knife in her!" Betty grunted and ran to me. "Don't let that disgusting cockroach hurt me!" she pleaded, her voice filled with terror. "I'm going to fucking kill her!" the cockroach repeated. We got up and walked to the partition that separated the two rooms. We looked into each other's eyes, and her mouth was slightly open, running the tip of her tongue over her lips to make her lipstick shine; she thrust out her breasts and wiggled her hips, using all the charms of her race to inspire me. "What did you do to him, Betty?" I asked.
ResponderExcluirBefore she could answer, the black man pulled an automatic pistol from his waistband and took the man's knife. "Just because she's black too?" the cockroach grumbled indignantly. The word "black" on his lips infuriated the black man: glass shattered and the sound of gunshots echoed in the room. But that wasn't what I wanted to know when I asked Betty the question; I just thought she'd fall for me when she saw me dressed as a bartender at P.43: now I imagined my new friend in high heels and a black lace dress dancing with me on the Ibiza dance floor on the second floor, oblivious to what I'd done to the cockroach. "After all," I wondered, "who hasn't grabbed a kilo of someone's base paste just to make a quick buck?" Anus africanus: I'd fuck Betty right there, in Miss Berman's office after she left, around eleven in the morning, without having to pay anything for it. "They'll never let me into P.43." —Betty said, but in my dream, I was a criminal, and that made her love me enough to blindly believe in everything I could do for her. However, that wasn't what Miss Berman had in mind for me at all, as I learned in the months that followed. Half the time, I woke up in the afternoon in my room
ResponderExcluirin West 9th, all messy from the dream, cleaning problems I solved by discovering a Chinese laundromat on Lexington Avenue, as well as buying socks, underwear, shirts, and pants on Third Avenue under the elevated subway. I wasn't the least bit unhappy those days, quite at home in Manhattan, the Prometheus of Rockefeller Center insisting on violating the secrets of my consciousness, installing literary machines of all kinds in the region of my brain, boosting my sleep and its spaceless and timeless ramifications, in which dripped all the possibilities for the realization of the unusual, the unplanned, the ultra-individualistic anarchy. The "happenings" I proposed to the Manhattan skyscrapers, during my aimless walks, were the poetic overcoming, on the most fundamental level, of the most important official flights I saw passing over those buildings. “Poor, massive skyscrapers,” I thought, “they need the consolation of my big, throbbing cock, of the fiery, spermatic chaos spurted by my glans onto their mirrored windows, transmitting to them the ambiguous-secret song of the Hudson’s sirens, bringing them good news from the hell of perdition, for example, the end of some dirty war in the Middle East:
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ResponderExcluir“The GREATEST fate... of the MIDDLE EAST... is being Asia MINOR?” Melissa Kent asked me, already in a good mood in her emergency room at the Catholic hospital in Manhattan, after confessing that I had been the only person she could ask for help without being embarrassed, scarred, and stigmatized for the rest of her life by that heroin overdose. Five doors away, there was a clearly dead blonde woman, with a look of horror on her face as her vital signs chart registered: “Temperature: 37; blood pressure: 12/8; respiratory rate: 18; pulse: 60,” even though her blood was so concentrated deep inside her body that it looked like she was lying in a two-inch puddle of blue ink. “Would you have sex with a dead girl, K?” Melissa asked again. “She’s quite pretty,” I said, looking at the blonde’s corpse. “I was referring to myself, idiot.” I recorded these things as an interlude of peace and reflection. I replied, "I've been dreaming every afternoon about sucking your breasts for a month now." She laughed and asked me to calm down and wait, now that I was so close to achieving my goal. "Can I at least see them?"
But she said not yet. To calm myself down, I started arguing with two nurses: one was the Jamaican woman writing reports; the other, an old Irish woman surfing the internet. “GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY!!” I yelled. The Irish woman, apparently, had a thick beard that she shaved off, leaving only a goatee like a gay Hispanic. “If there’s a better way to give a FUCK to the world (I thought), I don’t know of it.” “It’s not our problem,” she said. “The girl is already medicated and can’t eat anything yet: nothing to do but wait.” In any case, I had made them both laugh. “There’s a shortage of nurses around here, in case you hadn’t noticed,” said the Jamaican woman. But I had noticed: nurses from the Colombian Caribbean, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe; not a single American, much less a white American. I returned to Melissa's bedside. "When the white supremacist cult Nietzsche's sister founded in Paraguay emerges from the forest, its members will at least have a job," I said, with a heady air of Aryan and Roman superiority and a distinct hint of youthful excitement as I pulled some magazines from my backpack, the titles of which Melissa began reading aloud:
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ResponderExcluir“Stranger Things VI, Leg Show, Max, Fox, Lips; What’s This One?, The Best of High Society, Abundance, Club, Moans, Velvet, High Society, Ostentation, Behind It All, For Gentlemen... but why so many porn magazines?” she asked. “Avenue ***, on ****, they sell old magazines really cheap (“COME ON, SUCK THIS COCK AND THEN I’LL STICK IT ALL UP YOUR ASS, YOU’LL GO CRAZY WITH HORNY” is one of the lines from “Moans,” I memorized),” I replied. “And you’re addicted to porn?” she asked again. “No, I’m addicted to psychic energy transmutation. It’s my religion,” I explained. She said, “WHAT?”, her pale hand on the gearshift. “I didn’t expect that,” I said; her slender white thigh poking out from under the white bedsheet: and she would drop her shoulders a little, sinking her head into the pillow, and bite her lip from the concentrated effort and move her arm until it was straight at the elbow. “Ahhhhhhhhh, K, why didn’t you just say so?” and then: “See if anyone’s coming.” So I told her to take a look since I wasn’t going to come: because of that, they collapsed in ------------------------------
------------------------------any objections she might have to publicly displaying her future fuck toy: "You can see it from here, beautiful and quite large." But it didn't happen all at once, but little by little, through the night in the hospital until dawn, when there seemed to be no longer a division of time, and no fixed plane of observation, except that of the flammable substance that flowed through the veins of the moment, and, whatever it was, I would be following its flow; and when I looked out the window at the life I was leading to get to such a moment, I felt I would have to make a very risky and courageous move with my language undeciphered by the tribe, and then, if the sun that morning was now shining, it was too bright, or, if it was still night in the hospital, it was a very dark night, and the whole organization of the world was just a tiny part of the hidden machination of the various levels of attention I manipulated inside my head, and anything that was naturally deposited in the world around me became empty and artificial, simply by being relegated to the periphery of my consciousness, by the peculiarly absolute existential demand of the devouring focus of my spirit!
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