Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

168. KNOCKED UP AND PUNCHED OUT TOGETHER (Heartbreak & Wonderment) - nyc, 1965:

Heartbreak and wonderment are both the same thing - you lose a million feelings and you get them back again : but it wasn't like not trying : third-floor rooms and hardwood floors pasted thick with spilled Gesso while people passed along the boards one way in and another way out already half-famous or sick at least to be on their way somewhere - Nigerian drummers and folk-singer trios the madmen of the glen and fake cowboys dripping with lust and everybody trying hard to stay drunk on red wine and speak only the deepest most profound couplets they could think of and the 'theory' was (I'd heard it said) to just spew and spew and put as much out there as possible no matter either way if it made any sense at all but just get it out there so it could get 'covered' - interviews talk records gossip and all the rest - and then (if you 'hit' - which meant 'fame') you could 'make up the rest later' any reasons for it or meanings you might be asked about : they all wanted fame and fortune and probably all got it with the plumed-serpent fakery of a hundred different bodies : Bobbie Zimmerman the Jew-boy hobo rebel Mary Travers the hand-picked fair-haired unreal blond-baby American Herbert Kaury Tiny Tim Phil Ochs Lenny Bruce Lenny Cohen and probably much later Lenny Kravitz too - feeble warriors in the enfranchisement of false reality and I saw them all squandering time and pickling people ANYBODY later useful they kept 'em in brine - preserve the chance for any opportunity until the big-time comes and I saw them all loitering as it were in whichever late loft would have them - jazz guys paint artists sculptors the indigent piano players with forty-five fingers and the rest with rent parties wine parties drug-addled music blasts lasting 3 days and 3 nights too with people and taxis all coming and going and bicycle girls arriving fashionably late from whatever chunky fashion shoot they'd just finished the Warhol buzz the Happening crowds the patty-cake monsters from Tompkins Square Park and the klieg-light faggots and the Off-Broadway stars every and all the very same bastardized butt-fucking meglomaniacal crowd of somebodies from nowhere or nobodies from somewhere or something like that : we scrambled thirty eggs one morning thrown into a pail and stirred over an outdoor fire at a backyard-pit behind a loft - just kept it swirling with milk and it all came too bland pureed like paint but people ate it anyway chunky or not and no one cared and 'He Who' (their name for Bob Dylan) was puking in the back weeds in his old suede jacket YET AGAIN and this was before Blonde on Blonde when very little mattered and the pukefest jacket by then had become ALREADY very famous more famous than HIM and I saw Michael Olatunji one morning riding a bicycle down the stairs until he fell off and the entire thing went sailing amidst his drumming peals of laughter : it was about that time that the incredulity of it all finally hit me and I realized I could say and do anything I wanted to too and if I covered it well enough no one would doubt - it was all that fantastically simple and perverse and I talked to anybody who talked Joe Pine to the Milky Way to David Susskind and they ALL were looking for 'heads what could yap' and anyone would do - some Joni Mitchell type to Marchand Donaroo and there were so many legends back then in that day that I lost count without even trying (but hey - the eggs were OK).