<< Beer Mystic #25: Woods

26 She loomed over me, offering hand and voice to hum and heal and yank me – mere abject throb of (un)fashionable protoplasm surviving on the oxygen contained in blood, out cold – away from myself. “Night is dark, / night is deep. / I swim an ocean in my sleep…”Her face a soft sudden source of lambent (de)light. Had I seen that face before – on a milk carton?
And from inside my black hole, the blackout had been dug deep by just enough beer [one too many?] so that my body could leave the confines of all flesh, to hover there among the elusive ripples in the fabric of space/time. This kind of spiritual pursuit means a lot of dirty clothes.
I was plainly down below myself, outside myself, lawless and pathetic, conscious of the unconscious, or... where up no longer meant the place I could fall from. I began to eat of my self here. Discover in this solipsistic excavation among the entre jambes, the hidden undersides just below the ribs, delectable pouches of fat, left there, lovingly stashed in anticipation of this very journey. Dreaming deep, / sleeping tight, / I swim my slumber sea of night.”
When I came to, I felt like a painting by Breugel, his Luilekkerland 1567 [Ed. note: Translated literally from the Dutch it means “Nice and Lazy Land,” but the official English title is Fool’s Paradise]. Breugel painted prostrate imbibers passed out in a field in the sun; one sat staring straight up into the sky, lithe and prostrate before the very source of spiritual inebriation. I could eat air, I could lift the nails off my fingers and eat them as eucharistic wafers. But I could not quite make her out – daguerreotype of saint or sadist? Had she no life other than the spiritual sustenance scraped from the temples of those worse off than herself? Was she not busy being harassed by the adulation of affection-starved strangers? And why had society come to think it strange [unwise?] for a beautiful woman to show compassion? [Ed. note: Her beauty goes unverified. Perhaps he was already dreaming of the film version of his story.]
“OH,” I heard her say. A signal, I presumed, that she understood how a hydrogen atom in a hydrocarbon is replaced by the OH hydroxyl group – producing alcohol. The alchemy of OH, premier phoneme of OM, the OH of oralized ecstasy, joins a gas, a spirit, to become liquor, comestible spirit.
She smelled like the perfume counter in Macy’s. Or a wall of honeysuckle. Was it her, then, who placed the tangled garland of urban wildflowers over me? Or the parking lot attendant, who ripped all the honeysuckle vines off the Cyclone fence and tossed them into the gutter and some on top of me so that he could watch from his tumbledown booth as the trans-labial hookers baited their bustiers with noisettes or small pieces of lean meat?
I remembered as a kid sucking the stamens of honeysuckle and trying to imagine myself as a bee. I knew what landscape I’d been painted into by now. I could not move. Pockets [like mind] turned inside out. Relieved of all their cumbersome silver by thieves – I swear – dressed as ravens. And it’s not even Halloween yet.
I had remained behind here as the last sentinel at the vigil on the sidewalk in front of the deli. It had been made over into a shrine with profusions of aluminum wreaths, plastic toys, bouquets of roses and carnations, some irises, lit candles donated by the botanica down the street, some opened [by me?] cans of beer, others unopened, sympathy cards taped to the security gate, all to pay tribute to Abdul, the owner of this deli who had been shot to death in a robbery the night before. He had been the end of my endless search for the perfect deli. The hopsly oasis in the middle of the concrete jungle.
Abdul, or Abbie, always knew the beers I required for my stringent feeding schedule. Abbie, always knew which of his 300 varieties of beer would slake all six of my various thirsts. And yes, Abbie, the apothecary of ale, was always right; the ones he special-ordered were always exemplary – Budvar, Animator, Jubileums, Verboden Vrucht, Piraat [Goudblond zwaar speciaalbier van hoge gisting met nagisting op fles]... each beer’s name now spinning me ever further into the memory of a man now demised. Abbie, who had extended me credit – “Never mind. Enjoy. Life is to enjoy.”
And it is inside his memory that I passed out and away [staying longest because I knew him best – and owed him the largest tab]. In fact, it was I who escorted his very soul to paradise, a place where one is always gay and inebriated – a beer garden.
But his death was the best thing that had happened to the ’hood since they put in the new sewer grates. Because it was the tragedy of his death that animated us all anew – I saw faces for the very first time and these faces actually made some sense. In front of the shrine that had been his deli we came together from warring buildings, divisive floors, individual slights, to stand around the warm fire of mourning. To heal wounds, trade confiscated mail, exchange security secrets, altered garbage cans, even hammer out a truce in the Boombox Wars. I left three prize bottles from my collection in honor of Abdul.
And then the coma dark... and her lips languid, loose as the petals of a wilting tulip, as they floated like a Man Ray before me, instructing me to sit in a cross-legged position “and block off your left nostril with your right index finger, breathe deep and slow through your left nostril. The left side of your body relates to your lunar capacity, which is the calming side of your nature.”
Suddenly words latched onto voice, hot air filled my lungs and it had to come out, and I could speak again. “You know, babe – can I call you babe?”
“Maybe Janice would make me feel more like a person.”
“Anyway, there’s a sandwich in every bottle of beer? A beer, dju know, contains 65% of the grain’s original nutrition. SHIT! I gotta go out to Queens. Pay my respects to his wife.”
“Who?”
“Abdul the dead.”
“Oh, yes. Your in no condition...”
“I only encourage you to observe the facts, Jaundice... How’s my hair? Where’s the F train?”
“Janice.”
  “Black stout, known as the jazz of beers, for instance, is known as a mid-afternoon restorative...”
“Just breathe in and out the way I sug...”
“I can’t breathe through all this snot... While other beers are utilized for their relaxing properties in the treatment of hi-strung individuals. Beer contains good cholesterol too. And you know that HDL – hi-density lipoprotein – is known to prevent coronary diseases?”
“May I suggest that we are all floating around in ‘self’ inflicted...”
“Hey, Clara Barton, we know THEY’d like each of us to feel so helpless and uneducated, that we actually start to believe that we are the sole cause of our own misery – like what inhabitors of the projects called the Big Vacuum...”
“...Yea, and in this so-called self-inflicted damage – i.e., you – we hope there’ll be some heroism in it somewhere, isn’t that right?”
“Getting really fucked up is like a mini-vacation.”
“You poor dear. You’re in no state to go anywhere but home. Get up and go now, your faith will make you well.”
“Home’s the worst place for me… Beer’s got so much stuff in it. There’s room for heroism, too. If you inhale the head, the carbon dioxide creates sensations of euphoria. And if you feel euphoric that means you are in euphoria. Like FEEL BETTER, delete the two T’s from BETTER and you got BEER.”
“Just relax. Don’t talk. Do you need an ambulance?”
“No. The archaeologist must expect to get his pants dirty once in a while. Beer contains like 500 milligrams of potassium! Dju know that? Potassium stimulates the heart, gets the blood flowing. It also contains iron, essential to hemoglobin, which helps capture oxygen for the blood.”
“The convincing seems already done. If beer makes you a spiritual genius, well then you need to be living proof. World doesn’t need any more dead Jesuses.”
“It’s also got like 100-some milligrams of calcium, which prevents bones from getting brittle and helps blood coagulate. This is important to me on nights like this. And then there’s sulfur in beer, which is known to prevent acne, psoriasis, and rheumatism.”
Anyway, what true sustenance a beer can be! Beer keeps one rolling off car fenders, oblivious to cheap perfume, and insulated from hockey talk. Needless to say beer is essential to life. Some life! My cheek had accepted the shape of the gutter. And suddenly she had me up and wobbly as a colt.
My hand, she said, had been out in a sort of rigor mortis beg. And when I somehow crawled back out of my makeshift oblivion, my head had once again not been kicked in like the story of the old man, the Elvis Impersonator, on East First. Head kicked to a pulp.
The bums that had lined up on the Sunday morning soup line had apparently placed some grimy chump change in that hand. Was it their joke? Or were they just killing time? Did the fact that I pocketed the 37 cents make me one of them? Did one of them actually say: “tottering at the night edge of a flat world”?
Bowery means small farm in Dutch. [Luc Sante begs to differ. “When I heard from Jude Falley that Pivo had said this (I won’t get into all that she said about him) I knew it was time to say enough is enough. He’s wrong and he should know better – him being from Lowlandia or Neithernorland – that the Bowery during Dutch rule was called De Bouwerie, or bower-path, that led from New Amsterdam proper to the surrounding farms. He confuses it with boerderij, the Dutch word for farm. Although one never knows with someone like him, he might be trying to create confusion so that the world more closely resembles his own mind.”] This seemed particularly cruel knowledge. And all the city papers were indignant because some of the bums joked about wanting croissants on Sunday mornings.
I thanked Janice for saving my life. We shook hands. She gave me her card.
“You gonna be late for work.”
“No. I am my own boss.” Liar! She held my hand in her hands. Asked if I was going to be alright. Gave me a moist airline towelette. Used one herself and departed. I stumbled home. Along the way nothing moved, glowed, stood still, blinked as expected, as advertised. Nothing appeared in the right place at the right time. Everything along the way fell in my way, earned my contempt and everything sent this contempt right back by refusing to perform in the manners expected of lights, crosswalks, pedestrians, curbs, garbage cans, railings...
“Fergit to kiss yer baby good night / drunk drunk drunk / oh, yeah…” Singing Junior Brown did not alter the fact that Djuna refused to even look at me. Her not looking at me had a way of making me not exist. I just did not exist. She had packed a box and was now leaving.
“‘Light doth seize my brain / with frantic pain.’ That’s William Blake, Furman,” said the voice of Nice on the answering machine. Djuna, in her haste, had forgotten to delete it. Yes, I was to come to know what truth of peace this journey would hold. No weather, no small talk, no Lite beer, no office intrigues, no bad radio, no deadlines.

“Open a can o’ beer, open a can of worms” is an old Senegalese saying. “Open a bottle of beer and you let out the genie” is another.” 

Beer Mystic Excerpt #27: Public Illumination Magazine >>
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bart plantenga is also the author of Wiggling Wishbone and Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man both published by Autonomedia. His book YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World received worldwide attention. He is currently [not] working on a new novel, Paris Sex Tete, which lies around like an apathetic, half-clad, dissheveled paramour while his new book on yodeling Yodel in HiFi, will no doubt be a bread-winner of epiglottal proportions. His radio show Wreck This Mess has been on the air since 1986, first on WFMU [NY], then Radio Libertaire [Paris], and finally Radio 100 and now Radio Patapoe [Amsterdam], the world’s most untamed and oldest pirate radio station. He lives in Amsterdam.