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THE UTILITARIAN, AMERICAN-STYLE PB&J: AN ARTIST'S BEST FRIEND
She never made me eat school lunches at elementary school. I was spared the sloppy joes and scary-looking meat in the hot lunch tins. Instead, I got the same thing every day: a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on wheat bread. It was a simple and dependable meal (with an apple and a Sunkist juice squeeze) that I could quickly down in order to use the maximum amount of my lunch break to play dodgeball or handball.The PB&Js continued into junior high (they sold pizza on campus, but it was greasy as shit) and then into high school. I was given lunch money in high school, but I just saved it to buy alcohol on the weekends. And my mother kept making those PB&Js.I am not much of a cook. Maybe it’s because I don’t remember my mother cooking much when I was young. She cooked a meal every night, but my favorite was always Thursday nights when she would just lay out sandwich fixings with some nice French bread. That was the special meal of the week. And hell, I can’t blame her for not spending time on cooking. She was raising me while still finding time to do her paintings.
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I.Liz, Liz, LizzyLiz and Monty
Grand dame, Gorgon Martha
Versus your sliver tongued beau
Sir Richard as George.
That was the later you,The you that passed through Cleo-
Patra, and brought down a studio;
The you that was James Dean’s
Shoulder to cry on in Giant;The young you that played Monty’s lover
In A Place in the Sun, and his heart’s support
In life. Could you comfort him
After his crash in the Hollywood hills,When his face was readjusted
And he became frail and busted?
You climbed into the accordioned wreck
And pulled teeth from his throat.Poor Monty, he became a shadow,
A slouched figure in too-big pants.
You got big and drunk and weird,
You went on General Hospital.Every once in a while they would drag you out
To give an award and you’d slobber on the mic.
But you were all those things from before
And all those versions of you, frozen on celluloid,Especially in long-lens close-up,
Opposite Monty, at the dance,
So young and natural,
And that look right at the camera:“I love… [gasp] are they watching us?”II.Monty, Monty Clift,
You were the first.
Before Brando and Dean.
A new American way of
Fucking with the camera.Your soul fluttered
Behind your stone-still face,
A Donatello statue emanating
Deep life on the flickering film.Burly Burt Lancaster feared you
Because of your latent power,
You played your character in
From Here to Eternity like a humanKnife in a Hawaiian shirt.
In A Place in the Sun, the longing
And sorrow and sociopathic
Intensity vibrate through
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Like nothing before or since
A minimalist artwork,
Motionless as it clobbers.Afterward, the audience was silent. They didn’t know what the heck to make of the act. It’s not like it was funny; he wasn’t even trying to be funny. He was just playing a song in a weird outfit. He looked out at us with these kind of dead eyes. But his eyes were also kind of sensitive in the corners. It was like they were glistening of knowing something more than we did.Then he stood up and walked off. The MC, this loungy, slimy kind of guy who was losing his hair, did this sarcastic weak clap and said, “The Hollywood Cowboy. Well, what the fuck? I don’t know. I don’t book 'em. I just announce 'em. See you on the range, Hondo. Heh, heh.”I couldn’t find the Cowboy backstage. And he wasn’t in the bar with the rest of the amateurs talking about their comedy troops and YouTube channels. He wasn’t out front, either. I looked both ways down Sunset—nothing. I went back in the lot to get my car, and there he was, still with his wig on, behind the building. A stout little man with black curly hair was yelling up at his face.“…Now, you go the fuck back to freak town and don’t come back here no more. This is a comedy club, funny town, not arty fucking freak town.”“Fitty,” he said, cool, despite the little man shooting pellets of spit every time he talked.“Fitty? Fitty? Oh, you want fitty bucks? Ha, ha, ha, ha, fitty bucks? Ha, ha, ha, ha, you want fitty bucks? Ha, ha, ha, ha,” he was forcing the laughter and his face was a tomato. “You can have fitty fucking licks of my cock, you fucking fairy cowboy dumbshit.”
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I looked around for love,Love
And I knew by then
That love wasn’t worship,
That love was ease.Love was the smooth river
Of forgiveness that takes all
Obstacles, pollution, and debris
(Love is of man, he sets the rules),
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And leaves them in the ocean.
I like the beer bottles that collect
Along the shore, the trashFrom diaper boxes, and Clorox.
These are the rainbow-colored
Punctuations stuck into nature;
They are the man-made thingsCorroded by my love.
I assume things will pile
And pile until the piles
Take over. But sometimesThings are washed clean,
Like when a hurricane comes
Through and takes out houses
As if they were cardboard.Love is not of man;
Nature sets the rules.
I’ve lived a life,
I’ve learned a few things,And this is a new lesson:
It says, surrender.It was strangely good. Eerie, and not really like anything I had seen or heard before. Like Bob Dylan, but fucked up. He lit another cigarette. The blue and white Parliament Light package made me happy, especially when he tucked it crumpled into his front jacket pocket. His lighter was light pink, like a little piece of candy, tiny in his big paw. After the tongue of fire lit the cig, he slipped on some Ray Bans, and still with that wig. He held up my money.“Lez get something to eat.”I drove. He directed me over to Swingers on Beverly. The night was thinning into the wee hours, but there were little pockets of people between the neon and florescent lights of West Hollywood, where clubs were closing, spilling out their contents onto the sidewalks. He said nothing in the car, just looked out and smoked. He was funny in my little black Prius—they were two things that didn’t match, like Chewbacca in an episode of Gossip Girl. I know. Stupid.
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