Cebu, may 23, 2017
Hotel room blues. Alone second beer if drink it. Make it last. Her other husband back at home, and that on top of hill with swell view, under foreclosure. The man hired lawyer, yes, she says, it’s possible to save it but.
No one will quite understand the preturbance of the debts of what he feels for her. She is a big time player in a small pool here in Cebu.
They are leaving in a week. Her business collapsed here because her niece the director had no compassion or honesty about her. She went from living in the Dondo part of Manyila to a good part of Cebu.
He thinks he can’t write honest about her or everything going down cause it might get back to her and hurt her. No such thing. Thinks of the song…don’t go to town disabled, tied to a wheel chair.
He has sat and wondered, about her, and began search Craigslist out of fun stopped himself. Stuff about Trump bothers him. When he first went to states through Ellis Island at age 9, Ike was a broad grinning general, honesty impersonated, America milk and honey, projections and intuitions of great years ahead. Now, Turner classics become a mania, whereas Americana on. Global stage, evidences the naive optimism that would turn his vanishing adulthood into a liftime of adolescence, defy the times, as well as put forever brackets on natural highs , and sorrily lows for that matter. Someday, winning a Nobel prize would be great, as him and a guy named Lee, formed a projected future friendship, bonding from a sorry skinny kid to alley his desperate failure with the upper crusted kid he learned to hide from, a lesson well learned from his ma and pa, both hiding from reality, he because of fear of frequently changing ideologies: always wanted to stay on the right side, and she because ineptetude drove her to exclaim to her mom , the confessions pietetude, when on her bedtime knees, she beseeched the good lord to spare her of the eternal indebtedness caused by extreme wealth.
BUT THAT WAS THEN. and now that image greeting, he most of all wants to remember when, and ho back in time to one particular tree in Los Angeles, that was marked a decade later by a newly babtized flower shop called my secret garden.
They are do to leave in one week, and she is not responding to his love vibes as she used to. Her forlorness focused now on a variety of shambles, of a multitude of failed business ventures, and losses of hard earned and inherited fortunes only loosing their faint luster with the passing of each year, and the start up of a new business.
Sitting in this hotel room, aptly named Mandarin Oriental, while others would gladly walk along the debris of Cebu’s better neighborhoods, he stills his aching heart, hoping when she reappears, he can still feel and sustain the feekings. that now envelope his heart, appearently , only.
The tree in the park will still be there, the heat so sticking here, the swarming humanity, devalued to the point of an incredibly naive smile to attract, could, if he wanted to attract yet, but he loves her, her. Second husband back in ol’ La, and as he is writing this, he could think of one redeeming rationale to put ink to paper, stuck to him, as the sole surviving tool with which to diminish the angst of writing for its own sake, whether to seem like garbage, or memoir ridden non entity, or a free flow image begotten recorded of floating scales suspended in air: that Michael Wilding Jr. wrote one tiny little saga of his own try at the 60’s inspired commune life’s transformative forceful effect to out bemoaning, and introverted home bodies, to face life as it is, get involved, even if, drug induced states leading to awfully recanted shades of continuum from shyness to paranoia tried to shut the doors of perception so available to those whom only an internal dialogue, preferably on paper can come even close to liberate.
Now the second husband entrenched and enscombed in tha foreclosure property proudly overlooking a cascading , firefly of thousands of points of light in the San Fernando valley, cooks his modest meals, always displaying the marriage cirtificate which allowed him entrance into the land of the brace, cooking on a small camp flame. It is with his son now that she is out with, although there is no physical thing going on between him and his wife, before he left, he touché
He touched her knees. So what? He thought, even if they suddenly disrobed and had sex, he would love her, after so many a summer, the swan, the swan of Leonardo, so exotically and lasviciouly displaying elections smothered by the tons and tons of mystical union and magical understanding, oh no, scarlet, don’t take it to town.
You are just chicken shit, that’s all, no life low life. Only dream scrapes, wannabe tries and plenty of images dredged up from cavalier times of below the threshold.
First time as when how scare as the milk flow like white bold, and just by thinking of something not on recall, but the recoil was assuring, things back to normal.
Then after standing on a street trying to engage a black woman to pay a weeks pay for a half and half, and did it went home proud containment of thought, no longer a virgin.
There is absolutely nothing going on , husband to a woman married to another man with five sons, each of them a confidant, speakin’her language, and all dimunitively expressful of his communication all infurmity which matters very little here.
When his daughter lived here years ago, came here to save her from a haunted house, which became national news, she changing her name to Star, whereby sorting unspoken narratives yet to come, where it will be examined why such name never was justified, he still obliged a kind of spiritual linkage to Scarlet. But now, she is the one, who it is beginning to look like doesent give too much of a damn, but his love, the love that resulted in four children and six grand children began to encapsulate the sum total of his compensating magnet for lack of a better word, for the ever present feeling to fend a force of overcoming the futile and ever unceasing fear of abandonment.
They are leaving in one week, and the first week filled with activity to salvage this newest of failed businesses, came to a halt, when he expressed little interest to pursue her dream.
Back there, the renewed interest in grass, of another reality obsessed him, while here, as he told Star’s husband, very strict law as had prohibited such endeavors , at the cost of severe punishment, even the
threat of extra judicial execution.
So cool, the fear of cool, where everything is near hundred degrees of solitude. Everything there becomes possible, and now after restitution of that dream suddenly collapsing into a heap, not unlike that with which Hart Crane wrestled with , at one end White House shimmering fantastically in the red desert of Cuban abandonment, Hemingway inspired hide away, whereas the Brooklyn Bridge grey and tomb-esque, leading to but never getting to a blazing other end so hopeful but so unforgivingky disappointing in the end.
They came back, chattering away, she saying she could not bring the promised chicken, but later will have fish. The guy , the son, said they ate. The thought did not occur to him to ponder on why he was not invited.
Let it be he recalled the early John Lennon inspired message in that now a classic oldie, and he thought, that perhaps when ready, the fruit of what he planted could attain a harvest, even if of strangely twisted metaphoric content. Still, all in all, it is worth it.
I want to give him a name, but best, he is really a man with no bane,
With no name, better leave him like that.
A horse with no name comes to mind, using it here is merely a superlative.
He stares out of the 23rd floor, the dusk has earpten away at the edges of a grey street, points of light like fire flies begin to swarm over an uncertain lower realm.
If only he could take Scarlet tonight, but even then, when it still had a buoyancy and urgency to rise to the challenge, her response was guarded, mysterious and enchantingly geared toward a self perception clad in the vestments of hidden purity. For she was only 16, and for a brief moment in her life scape, thought of betaking into the service of the Lord in the nunnery.