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Magoon In The Big Empty "I was drunk and I did not have a dime I was drunk and I did not have a dime I was drunk and I did not have a dime." Chorus "Singin' Hey, hey, hey-a-hey!" Every good man (woman) has a little hard luck sometimes!" (repeat three times and sing the chorus.) "Boston town is a dirty low down town" etc (Bluessong) I was singing at the top of my lungs replete with yodels and basso profundos while slogging through a waist high heap of wasted furniture, household goods, clothing, hard, glossy and soft goods of every description, but usable, I hoped, usable. Not merely TRASH. Altho' I must admit, so far, it relentlessly had only been TRASH. I was singing this when I looked up and saw several zombi-fied night of the living-dead-creatures lurching towards me. Now how did I get myself in this predicament you may wonder. I had left the rooming house about an hour before. The sun was out. The day was good. I had free time and I intended to use it well. I was tired of the room, the husband, the kid, the walls, and especially, the abject-and-so-forth, poverty. I was tired of the endless brave and golden, now mythical "score" that my husband was always about to make. I was, by god, going to do something about it and do it well. I was going to take my little knowledge and my good eye and find a saleable piece of Something, something to sell. I was goddam tired of being hungry and calling it 'fasting'. I was goddam tired of demurring to poverty like it was somekind of goddam god. I was tired as hell of being an alien in the fucking "affluent society". I was gonna go and get me some Affluent, yeah!! Today was the day. I was free and I was ready. I had been thinking about returning to the 'Big Empty' ever since Magoon had first showed it to me. It was an oversized brownstone with at least five stories to explore. We'd only peeked into a few of the rooms before Magoon pulled the curtain down by needing to leave, in the way only a junky can need to leave, right then. Before that junky moment, Magoon had shown me the way in, and shown me the Big Empty as if he were introducing me to the fucking Taj Mahal and he was the reigning Rajah. Yeah! The Taj Mahal of trash! But in those high ceiling, long windowed rooms with their plaster of Paris moldings and marble fireplaces, there were rooms and rooms and rooms full of TRASH. It was if the God of Trash had personally overseen its design. This outrageous scene of gratuitous waste, I knew, HAD to yield something important, something redeeming, or at least something redeemable for a few coins.
In the few minutes since leaving the baby squalling in the arms of another doubtful looking young mother, I had hopped the wall called "self" and set out on an adventure. The sky was blue, the day wasn't too cold. The street walked, too, swinging its hips hopeful and hopeless as any streetwalker, alive as I was, my companion, my elixir, my element. I had that feeling, that feeling of being at home in a way that, try as I might to be a 'wife, woman and mother' I never felt. For my trek I wore the same old blue jeans and sweatshirt. This time I tucked my hair up under the blue wool watchman's cap as I stepped smartly along to meet my destiny. Or to escape my destiny. In this persona I was male, no longer "Ramona", my wife and mommy self, but "Ramon". Pretty fucking dashing, hey? And, I could move, magically and in less than a second, between my two identities. No sweat. Easy. Being Ramon had gotten me into a world of trouble in the past, so I didn't let this happen often anymore. It had been a long time since "Ramon" had been allowed to freely manifest himself, so I was really, really happy. Happy to step out into the day, and happy to be in an identity that fit so comfortably I could relax completely. To hell with Hal and Beatrice, even with Magoon and all that. Today I would be the one to return Victorious with my Shabby but still Saleable sweetie in my arms. Some called it trash, I would call it an 'antique'. And I would find a buyer for it, even if it was only the repulsive Ferdinand-the-Greek, the odious slumlord we rented from. I would "score" too, and join the ranks of the real. Of the real scrounges anyway. Some called it scrounging but for me, it was the equivalent of shopping in Lord and Taylor's. Just for today I would be out there like the grown-ups, like the "hipsters, flipsters and finger poppin' daddies" I imagined others to be. Today I wouldn't be too young, too female, too married, too maternal. In the past few months, months in which I had married and born a child, Magoon had become almost my only friend and companion. Marriage seemed to make my here-to-fore arch-clingy mate Hal, want nothing more than to NOT see me or my big belly. And so, night after night I was alone. Until somehow Magoon stepped in every night and eased my solitude. "Don't ease, don't ease, doncha ease me now, say, "All night coming, baby doncha ease me now." And, like the blues song said, Magoon didn't ease up on me when I needed him. He would come by, late at night, when my putative 'husband' was out on a drug run. Sometimes Magoon would bring me something, a thick Italian submarine sandwich with everything on it, including the hot stuff, or a bottle of milk for the baby. Mostly he just brought me his company. But just for today? Magoon begone! Who needed Magoon to do this? I would do it myself. Very unMagoon was I. I forgot our friendship. I forgot myself's other selves. And I told myself that I would do it feeling a comfortability, a rightness to it. And there was a rightness to be found exactly where I was, in the Big Empty. So, I dropped down into the pit carved out around a decaying windowsill. It widened a bit at the bottom, allowing me entrance. There was one tiny moment of self recrimination. Magoon! This was Magoon's Big Empty! He'd been the one to show it to me. Show it, with his sensual, sly and ever so slightly sullen mouth curling into an almost smile, his head up and back as if he alone were 'lord of all that he surveyed', eyes hooded, but almost betraying a faint glean of what might pass for enthusiasm. Naw! Not Magoon. The hip-geoisie. The Daddy of Kool. The Speed Freak par excelance. The One who had been a Dope Fiend for longer than I'd even been alive. For weeks he'd been coming by the place, loaded, and loaded down with booty from just this house. Surely there was enough for me. Surely. Besides, who would ever know? My moment of guilt passed. I wiggled down through the hole in the foundation and fell the anticipated 3 or 4 feet to the floor. Faint light gleamed from the stairwell, where, at the top, I knew, I would find a wooden door peeled from its hinges cast haphazardly aside. Up I went past the door and stumbled on through the trash clogged halls, up again to the second and then the third and even forth floor. I reasoned that the lower floors were likely to be all "scrounged out". So I'd start at the top and work my way down. But, by the time I'd climbed to the third floor, I started feeling afraid. Afraid, afraid, afraid. It wouldn't go away. Afraid but defiant and hungry as hell, I went on. The paper and the cloth and the splintered wood seemed alive, clinging to my feet, my lower legs, as I went. It was a relief to arrive at the fourth floor, even if it did resemble just another huge pile of trash. I found the biggest room, the front room and looked around. Nothing. At least nothing apparent. This can't be, I thought, all dismayed. I can't have come through all this and not find anything. The treasures Magoon had unearthed! The shabby but handwoven rugs. The broken, but mendable chairs and tables. The brocade drapery, stained, but all the more beautiful for all that. The eight foot tall, 12 holder candelabra, it's wrought iron underpinnings so twisted and strained by the fire that had gutted the lower two floors that it had become a poem. I climbed over a huge pile of trash and went searching for the treasures that were surely here. I began singing "don't ease me now" to cheer myself up and to assure myself, that eventually, like the orgasm just beyond the blues singers reach, my trash will come! But, a hour later, beginning to get lower back pain from the motion of constantly stooping to pick through trash, I had not found a thing. Not one thing worth saving. Not one thing of beauty, or usability, or fix-it-uppableness. Only miles and miles of slightly slimy trash. I began to get frantic. In a half an hour I would have to leave, to get back to my poor little baby, whose fault this was certainly not. I didn't want to lose the small connection to another mother I had made. Therefore I became utterly fixed on clawing as rapidly as I could through mountain after mountain of trash. In this state, rooting and grunting, sweating and red with effort, hair sprung from under my cap, long since askew, I looked up and saw them. The looming figures. The surreal team. The pale beyond pale beyond pale and eyes and eyes boring into me. I knew instantly that when they reached me, only a few more feet now, I would be meat. Them lurching. I was still. So still that they might mistake me for a statue, but no, they were still coming. They couldn't move very fast. Why? Because of the trash and because, because, because they were stoned. Stone drunk. Stone drunk the way my mother used to be before she became animated and began to beat me. Stone drunk, so that no matter what I did they wouldn't stop. Beyond words, beyond tears, beyond any appeal. I couldn't move at all. I had no where to go. They were at every angle. All the same, a gruesome team of stoned monsters, monsters whose one thought was to get me! Help. I screamed in my brain, my tongue frozen. Help! I knew I needed to scream but it wouldn't come. Help, help help help help a brainchant telepathing out from my brain to some unknowing and unknowable source. Still, they were lurching. Nothing mattered now. Nothing would help. I dimly wondered through the hopeless mindchant of helphelphelphelp How much blood would there be? I didn't think they would find a lot because I had the sensation of my blood being frozen. If I would survive, if I would want to survive, how long it would take for anyone to miss me, how long it would take for anyone to find me, if ever, how dead would I be, would I have started rotting, finished rotting? Would I be bulldozed into a heap of rotting trash before they found me? HELPHELPHELPHELPHELPHELPHELPHELPHELPHELP Magoon was hissing at me from a doorway about 6 feet away from me. The monsters were spread out like spokes on a broken wheel. One was about 4 feet from the door, and a little to the side. Another was about 3 feet from reaching me! "Hist!" Magoon hissed. "Hist! Ramona, over here!!" Soto voice whisper, my first. Between the onslaught. Magoon has inserted himself. He is leaning forward. He is holding his hand out to me leaning forward as far as he can. He is holding his gloved holey gloved hand out to me like a courtier in a old fashioned dance. He is holding his hand out to me like a light, like a beacon, like my life is in it. It is. "Hist! Hurry, goddamnit!! Hurry up you goddam girl, you! Ramona!" and I do. Casting a quick glance back at my legions I hurry like hell to catch onto that hand and whist! I am through the doorway and flying across the trash out to the hall down the hall over the trash like a bigassed bird I can't even guess at what's happening cause its all happening too fast. We are down in the basement, without pausing for breath he is shoving me up and through the hole at the windowsill I am clutching at the mud it is sliding down but I going up and up and so is Magoon. WE ARE OUT! We are out and he says STOP THEY WON'T FOLLOW YOU HERE so I do. Magoon berates me for a few minutes for invading their home, for destroying their rest in the daytime, for openly stealing from them at an unsanctioned time. "They drink all night, then passout in the daytime. That's THEIR HOME you were invading. Bad enough for you to steal from them, but to do it when they were at home, hrumph!" "Who are they?" I gasp, although genetically, in my bones as it were, I know. "They're just alkies," says Magoon, more sophisticated. "The last of the bottle gangs. They help one another survive and they live by a very strict code. You would have been a dead girl if I hadn't gotten to you." I knew that. I hung my head, chastened. When I looked up he was gone. Magoon. Did he hear my mindchant? He was a creature of the night, too, not the day. Later on I understood that he'd been on a week long run which turned all the hours in 24 to dark, but I didn't know it then. Why had he been passing by the building? What instinct told him to go it there, to climb five flights of stairs and to look out for me? I will never know, but it is my belief that Magoon and I were close, just about as close as any two human beings can get.
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trash
was so thick, so creamy, so goddam opulent that it vomited out of each room into
the hallways and right down the stairs, as if it couldn't contain itself. Like a
situation of worship, the cache it lent was pure awe.