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BB went to a play. After the play, the author answered questions from the audience. The author was built like a refrigerator and had skin the color of morning coffee when you’re about to run out of half and half. He’d grown up in one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that’s half black and half Jew, and he had this to say about the salient difference between blacks and Jews: “Black people never make jokes about slavery, but Jews are always cracking jokes about the Holocaust.”
It’s true!
The great lingua franca of sarcasm, I call it.
Abe and Moishe are digging their own graves under the watchful eyes of the SS lieutenant. Moishe finishes the job, puts down his spade, and spits scornfully into the open pit. “Moishe, Moishe,” Abe entreats. “Don’t make trouble!”
If you laughed at that, you experienced a moment of satori.
You grokked the inevitability of the two men’s fate; the ludicrous reliance upon assimilation and tacit compliance that had gotten them there; the futile, “Fuck you!” that came too late. You got the situational overview.
That’s why I like humor. When it works, it’s epiphanal.
###
For years and years and years, I had a recurring dream. Well. Not precisely the same dream every time, no. But the same dream format: I was at an elaborately set dinner table. The plates were heavy china with slightly slanted rims ringed in gold; the flatware was silver; the glassware was crystal. I was an adolescent – sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. The other people at the table I knew to be my family members. The atmosphere was something like that listless lull before a cataclysmic thunderstorm.
A series of ominous thuds at the door, and then the door bursts open; soldiers storm into the room. They’re wearing shiny black boots that go halfway up their thighs. They point guns at us. They bark orders: Come with us now.
The other members of my family do what they’re told.
But I say: Go ahead and shoot me. I’m not going anywhere.
This isn’t an act of defiance. It’s just that I know that wherever the soldiers plan to take me will be worse than dying.
In some iterations of the dream, one of the soldiers shoots me. In others, he levels his gun at me with his fingers on the trigger. Once or twice, I’ve actually died.
I haven’t had the dream since I moved back to the East Coast seven years ago.
###
In 1969, I somehow ended up at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert. The anti-Woodstock! Someone got shot; there was Hells Angels violence. I was a long, long way from the concert stage, could barely hear the music except as subsonic bass waves emanating ominously from a point that was lost in a the hugest crowd of bodies I had ever been in. But the general vibe was very ugly and not what I’d signed up for: I was very stoned on acid.
Generally when I got stoned on acid, part of my mind always dissociated and remained unstoned on acid. I referred to this part of my mind as “The Nanny,” and it was one of the reasons why I was able to take as much acid as I did – a hundred trips or more – and always maintain when called upon. The concept of “maintaining,” after all, was not an alien one to me: I’d spent much of my life on Planet Earth “maintaining.” Even at the tender age of 17.
But for whatever reason, at Altamont, The Nanny had deserted me.
And I was stoned on acid in this ravaging hoard of humans that looked like nothing so much as gnomish miniatures straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas, indulging in sodomy, cannibalism, and other grotesque and unholy debaucheries.
I had to get straight fast, I decided. So I could get the fuck out of there.
So I decided to drink.
Understand that I did not do very much alcohol back in those days. To this very day, I don’t do very much alcohol. Alcohol kinda brutes me out, doesn’t give me the luminescent edge I like in my recreational drugs.
But anyway, on that day, I grabbed a jug of very cheap wine called Mountain Red and began chugging it. And I remember that wine tasted like every kind of human excrescence that could possibly be blended together. It tasted like sweat and saliva and piss and cum and shit and menstrual blood all mixed together, and I decided at that moment that I was never gonna put myself in that type of a situation ever again. I was never gonna be around that many people ever again. It just wasn’t… safe.
I can’t remember how I got home from Altamont, and, of course, I didn’t keep my resolution.
But it continues to inform much of my behavior.
I don’t like concerts.
I don’t like being in spaces filled with people where anything can happen.
Whenever I’m in a room with more than 10 people in it, the first thing I do is check out the escape routes.
When I heard about the Orlando shootings, I thought of Altamont. And I began recollecting the experience – once again – to Ben.
Ben just snorted. “Oh, come on. That was 50 years ago. Get over yourself.”
Not likely.
Don’t make trouble. Just be quick on your toes.
It’s true!
The great lingua franca of sarcasm, I call it.
Abe and Moishe are digging their own graves under the watchful eyes of the SS lieutenant. Moishe finishes the job, puts down his spade, and spits scornfully into the open pit. “Moishe, Moishe,” Abe entreats. “Don’t make trouble!”
If you laughed at that, you experienced a moment of satori.
You grokked the inevitability of the two men’s fate; the ludicrous reliance upon assimilation and tacit compliance that had gotten them there; the futile, “Fuck you!” that came too late. You got the situational overview.
That’s why I like humor. When it works, it’s epiphanal.
###
For years and years and years, I had a recurring dream. Well. Not precisely the same dream every time, no. But the same dream format: I was at an elaborately set dinner table. The plates were heavy china with slightly slanted rims ringed in gold; the flatware was silver; the glassware was crystal. I was an adolescent – sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. The other people at the table I knew to be my family members. The atmosphere was something like that listless lull before a cataclysmic thunderstorm.
A series of ominous thuds at the door, and then the door bursts open; soldiers storm into the room. They’re wearing shiny black boots that go halfway up their thighs. They point guns at us. They bark orders: Come with us now.
The other members of my family do what they’re told.
But I say: Go ahead and shoot me. I’m not going anywhere.
This isn’t an act of defiance. It’s just that I know that wherever the soldiers plan to take me will be worse than dying.
In some iterations of the dream, one of the soldiers shoots me. In others, he levels his gun at me with his fingers on the trigger. Once or twice, I’ve actually died.
I haven’t had the dream since I moved back to the East Coast seven years ago.
###
In 1969, I somehow ended up at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert. The anti-Woodstock! Someone got shot; there was Hells Angels violence. I was a long, long way from the concert stage, could barely hear the music except as subsonic bass waves emanating ominously from a point that was lost in a the hugest crowd of bodies I had ever been in. But the general vibe was very ugly and not what I’d signed up for: I was very stoned on acid.
Generally when I got stoned on acid, part of my mind always dissociated and remained unstoned on acid. I referred to this part of my mind as “The Nanny,” and it was one of the reasons why I was able to take as much acid as I did – a hundred trips or more – and always maintain when called upon. The concept of “maintaining,” after all, was not an alien one to me: I’d spent much of my life on Planet Earth “maintaining.” Even at the tender age of 17.
But for whatever reason, at Altamont, The Nanny had deserted me.
And I was stoned on acid in this ravaging hoard of humans that looked like nothing so much as gnomish miniatures straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas, indulging in sodomy, cannibalism, and other grotesque and unholy debaucheries.
I had to get straight fast, I decided. So I could get the fuck out of there.
So I decided to drink.
Understand that I did not do very much alcohol back in those days. To this very day, I don’t do very much alcohol. Alcohol kinda brutes me out, doesn’t give me the luminescent edge I like in my recreational drugs.
But anyway, on that day, I grabbed a jug of very cheap wine called Mountain Red and began chugging it. And I remember that wine tasted like every kind of human excrescence that could possibly be blended together. It tasted like sweat and saliva and piss and cum and shit and menstrual blood all mixed together, and I decided at that moment that I was never gonna put myself in that type of a situation ever again. I was never gonna be around that many people ever again. It just wasn’t… safe.
I can’t remember how I got home from Altamont, and, of course, I didn’t keep my resolution.
But it continues to inform much of my behavior.
I don’t like concerts.
I don’t like being in spaces filled with people where anything can happen.
Whenever I’m in a room with more than 10 people in it, the first thing I do is check out the escape routes.
When I heard about the Orlando shootings, I thought of Altamont. And I began recollecting the experience – once again – to Ben.
Ben just snorted. “Oh, come on. That was 50 years ago. Get over yourself.”
Not likely.
Don’t make trouble. Just be quick on your toes.
