"Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colours, and
interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE."
Tristan Tzara
"Dadaist Manifesto", 1922.
Note:
The following little song, loosely modelled after Allen Ginsberg's beat
epic, "Howl," but playing more with sound, berates and celebrates the ribald
issues of young men in the world's navies: maturation, sanitation, infatuation,
masturbation, regurgitation, communication, libation, saturation, privation-all the
"ations" of crazed and infantile nations…
or "The Game's Afoot" by Lazlo Kovacs
For C. Acheson, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip K. Dick-all those mad to live.
Feedback to: WaltersS@pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca
At a Victoria apartment Atch appeared, brown-toothy grinning and quaffing 6ix-paks of gaseous yellow beers
we combed the cupboards for black rum to go with ½ filled bottles of mixes; Atch expands, "The Game's Afoot," says he.
See, he gets into these extreme fixes--
Atch on a scarred wooden bench, stoop-shouldered senior rating, a proto-Nietzschean "Ubermensch", short of something classified
who clung seasick to iron-painted rails atop tumultuous tides
who paraded on Sunday mornings to fife and clappers of brass, best spit-polisher, first in line for growlies in steel galleys
who shined belt buckles, webbing, & wild gas masks
who attracts the unorthodox: country-music old fossils who look fine from behind, retarded little gals with vacuous eyes, men in drag, fat women who sigh & sag
who steal his stale beer, lip smacking & chuckling & burbling in sour little sounds from jellied guts, sluts
Atch (who any little thing turns him off, more picky than he should be) tuts
who prefers the witless, spectacled shy young thangs with ravenous appetites & bedsheet seepages & dark hair in bangs
who daily dream of hot-flash liaisons with hairy hunks in hotel rooms, flasks of gin by fake mahogany side-boards above the Gideon bibles
and Atch, to his chagrin
can never escape these scenes: cant find the door in dramatic exits, cant think up good lines, cant tie his ties, cant see without the specs he fears'll be punched into his tiny red eyes
"The Game's Afoot", his favourite phrase for standing in leather laced vest and steel-toed boots in barroom corners, double-fisting double rums, as frozen in ancient anchor-jerker grooves as an ant in amber
who's looking always to get laid, a rambler in limbo, with eyebrows arched in puke-green pool-halls of Halifax Micmac eternities, tatooed arms akimbo
Atch--naval drinking buddy, troublemaker, speedreader, D.T.'s aspirin-swallower by cold coffee scratch-a-match morning fright-lights
who's proud of his stories of horses and whores in Amsterdam, 100 pint-clubs in sun-downed London, combat zones in parochial Boston fight-nights
who, knees cracking, blind, belly full of gas, cruised into the petite behind of a bright red dress he found abeam a beer sign
through blurs of swirling bodies from the backsides of flophouses like Joe Camoe's or the Red Lion (of downtown navy neon blues)--she whirled around--
a toothless grandma, fer chrissakes! Agrinnin & gleamy old Atch's too stunned,
spinning skulled, to get out blathers the seamy advantages of no incisors; quails and
quakes--"Le
Danse d'Atcheson!"--shouts
or Atch, at Rosa's, spots a seventeen year-old sailor piss away his life on a fortyish fleet hag who's been around for aeons-in-flagons
whose fattish thighs aplash on upholstered bar torn stools, who's never on the wagon, Atch--
who spills the glasses off a busboy's loaded trays, is misunderstood, drools, brays, is attacked by a blood-faced 300 lb monkey in black
who squats on granite curbs, wretches silently to the smattered applause of pimps and wimps, gulps, glares at his gargantuan watch, growls
"As you were!" straightens with a hiccup--snegglies in his beard--caught in an argument with a bald feminist and pierced eyebrows that peered
who outwits him with each of his nosebelching cries, "I...I...I..." he giggles, tries to lie; she flicks the cigarettes with a contemptuous wrist
I wouldn't want him any other way, he, much missed
schnapped--trumpets slipshod empirical philosophies pacing in livingrooms
trapped--in honky-tonk shite-zones of booze-swilling, puling, winking
"whatevers"
who dwells in naval bar eternities, reeling back into the apocalyptic beds of hostile holes and hairy-tongued hungover dogbreaths
who draped dropped clothes of smoke and cologne over lame-legged chairs & broken telephones
who dealt with lost wallets, sweaty-bras--who in hell is she?--morning desperations to gnaw off yer arm than awake to money-owed, deathspawn'd
who started the party onboard grey-painted old-plated ships, buying 50 cent beers from salvaged pop machines, between trips, Moose Milk curdles, brains aflame
who went ashore in twos or threes, through swinging doors, to pubs & insane pool & pinball games
then clubs to be teased, crazed dirty-shirt dances on speckled hardwood floors
who couldnt sleep without cigars and a 6ix pack or two, a pill, hands in innocent pockets, playin pocket-pool, playin the cool fool still
who watched his prowling French buddies lose--perfumed, mustachioed--present as always at chaotic closing times
glaring mournfully at the white-bread beauties at the next wet table, working it, dreaming of adolescent fair-haired loves in Quebec's green plains--"je t'aime, mon cherie"--midst the crumpled cellophanes
who in teary sequences, fought & fidgeted, huddled at outdoor hot dog stands tossing off greasy surprises in salty, slit-eyed contentment
who farted, pissed, & spitted against steamfrigid concrete walls of Cold!
No-one believes these fleet songs and ditties, raping place o'er the flattish edges of the firmament, in ports, by a crowd of uncombed unruly's.
After years of such living we see ourselves one bright winter morning below the classier club dames we've known from drooling distances--
below the games, from the turgid fleshbeds of cross-grained, gaudy, babushka'd "goddamns"
which first-class ass, sit big-haired, legs crossed, in superb strobelight profiles & fancy flowered pinks, dangling thin mint cigs & sipping umbrella'd drinks
who can afford to ignore the roar & shining faces of adorerers galore; navy scum can't pray for, or pay for; they must be tricked, or picked!
As was I, with reason!--my transition, my (for Atcheson) true of olde, backslapping, elbow-in-the-ribs Bachelor's treason...
Time's passed. We smiled to ourselves those sated scenes of our anarchistic youth; Atch
whose only crime was a side of fries, a big plate of chicken thighs (and, yes, a few other men's wives), chews thews of gristle and skin, and suddenly subsides
who yawns, an errant eye fixed on a fly above my prickly chin, thrusts a bruised ham hock into his gaping maw, chuckles
as the booze runs out as it always does at just the right time; the few last dreg'd drops we nursed, we suckled.
