A statement that stuck in my wisdom teeth.

The second half of the sixties, Manhattan.  We were all in different colleges, avoiding the draft.  All guys.  Females did not hang with us; they had better things to do.  Some had dorm curfews.  The fuel was cheap alcohol, maybe some shitty Mexican ganja now and then.  The saloons were either up on Broadway near Columbia or down on the Village margins.  There was one place midtown near the Port Authority that Joey liked because it was so sleazy no one minded us.  Joey Gleeson was not the leader.  He was the chronicler. 

Every few months Joey would release a new mimeographed compendium of his edited reporter’s spiralbound pad notes of things said when we were assembled.  The quotes were always attributed.  This established, of course, a certain competitive spirit.  We may have been young men not eager to fight in Southeast Asia, but a contest of words was inviting.  You wished to see your byline appear as often as anyone else’s. 

Wit is an ancient word, originally meaning to see or understand, way back before anyone had even heard of English.  Of course, its meaning has been whittled back with usage to the point of Oscar Wilde.  Well, we did our best to get recorded.  All improv.  One trick is substitution: take the next obvious statement and replace one term or phrase with something from another mindset. You can train yourself, like learning a simple card trick.  It does not need to be erudite, but with that group that was spice and might garner a grown. 

Was our “wit” often cruel and what is now called politically corrupt?  Yes.  I have no idea where any of those offensive lads wandered, no alumni newsletters or veterans’ reunions.  It was New York.  We all boarded separate subway trains out of that decade. In the seventies, I heard that Joey had a play produced at some festival that was composed entirely of statements lifted from those mimeographed chronicles.  I did not see it, but the one review I heard said it was beyond Beckett.

July

Long freight, soy smell

diesel horn thru town

at every grade crossing

folks turning the radio up

each lost in own thoughts.

Triple digit temp day

air-con on, windows up

solo inner-space capsule

closed and complete.

*

Livestock now, a mixed

consignment, silent, staring

thru their slat-walled cages

at the passing panorama of

their one and only, final trip.

I try to remember which New Yorker I used to crumble up the ganja inside.  The portrait of a Black man on the recto page.  At least another pipeful there in the gutter.  Short term memory loss or just too focused somewhere else?  An article I got bored with.  I was listening to the rain.  The downpipe from the gutter spout is gone; that sound tells me volume.  Once I re-remember something, I won’t forget it.  Years later—total recall, like stars in the firmament.      Why does that weekend in Salem keep repeating?  We weren’t married yet. You danced in the pub with the man in the wheelchair.  I even remember where I parked the car and the old-cigar smell of our smoker’s hotel room, the name of the cab driver—Ken—who got lost.  There is an album of those old mental newsreels of you.  They honor your memory by refusing to fade.