The great Mandela cried, cried to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son had found his way, a strange way but a way. Freed from prisons and placed in solitary barred, steel-barred root rooms to wager his personal bet, bet of his life, on freedom. Freed from manacle shackled past get aheads, go aheads, keep your head down to get ahead, eyes straight forward, no lefts or rights, hell, no, meet some nice working class girl, find some forty years, a pension and a gold watch, and produce, produce what. And prison freed from now sour bourgeois dreams, bobby (kennedy) dreams, okay, okay but that is what they were and one need not be a Marxist (or marxist) to know that road led to perdition and without even trying.
Yah, and that road, that blessed bobby road, represented the character flaw, that certain tilting to the winds instead of against them like some old baby boy donkey ride Sancho Panza and his pal and all the windmills in Holland or Palm Springs could not change that. Yah, free, prison free and his dream hair grows a little longer each day and his dream beard begins to be bushy like some old time Old Testament archangel avenger of hurts, his own first and the other hurts. And like some righteous John Brown, just to name a name, a Calvinist avenger name, blown out of Kansas prairie fires and set smack daub in Harper’s Ferry hellholes he cultivates that long flow hair and beard, dreamed.
But a dame, pardon me, 1971 women’s consciousness-raising and righteous too, a woman always comes with it, the dream hair and beard. One hard night, one tossed night some apparition out of a Puritan dream, all quakerly and severe, he saw some Croton-on-the-Hudson vision. A woman passed momentarily in fierce struggles, fierce outside the walls struggle, not noticed, not noticed until that night, not pretty, not blonde, not, well, not everywoman, but fierce, fierce in about six difference ways and maybe, just maybe capable of fierce loves.
Another hard night, tossed too, a free-form dream of Chicago, hog butcher to the world, wheat fields and wholesomeness just beyond in now no longer John Brown-like prairies. A daughter, some brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-skinned semite butcher’s, a kosher butcher, maybe, daughter, who spoke of spirit dreams, and wrote blue-eyed poems and of goyim sillies, and he was happy, happy that she wrote of fierce blue-eyes just when he had been ready to throw in the towel. And then that certain character flaw, that fidget, that endless fidget, neither left or right, came in as he tried to have the whole world. Imagine that, imagine some fierce blue-eyed boy could shake all that, and forget those blue-eyed words in that blue-eyed poem. And shake (and forget) to endless sorrows. Hell, damn, hell.
This last time, the last restless night, came one out of hell Manhattan and one thousand and one anxieties, neuroses, and her own father time hurts. No righteous Hudson puritan or Midwestern semite daughter she. No, princess semite she. What a pair they will be. Remind me to tell you sometime how they met, dream met, in some snowy do-good cabin/assembly hall build to curse the darkness of one thousand wars and one hundred fights against those damn wars. And for a minute she, he, they were happy, happy in each other’s vagrant landless company. Then certain madnesses came forth. And short dope snorts, and peyote dream buttons, all mixed in sometimes blank, sometimes the door of perception but I just cribbed that, not the perceptions the thought, okay.
What a ride, lord, what a ride, and lusts and screams and crazed rants were just a little part of it before that damn fidget, what, redhead, blonde, dirty blonde, path crossed his way.
And fame, local lore fame, built out of impossible combinations of minute fortitude, hour righteousness, and day of reckoning, day of reckoning and passing with flying colors. And a certain swagger came to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. But no such feeling can (or, truth, should), last too long and in that Black Madonna night he began to fidget, fidget just a little. Some fidget ignited by refused dreams of white picket fences, dogs, and two point three kids (exactly two point three he never tired of saying as she, the Black Madonna, reddened at the thought). And he, he made for great leaps, and straw dogs. Hell it could have been easy, very easy but she couldn’t see it that way, and he didn’t except when he needed her refuge, lovingly or just shelter.
And on those shelter days no cigarette hanging off the lip now (she would not allow it see, not cool and it aggravated her condition, whichever one it was at the time. So no Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that.
Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. He cursed the darkness on those days, and the light too, for he had made that leap that he only heard about in his head when he had had a few dreams and was feeling warrior king brave to take on all comers, tricky dick, vance packard, spiro agnew, hell even sparring a norman mailer now that they were on the same side (or at least he thought they were on the same side, same side advertising for themselves and their heroics, their armies of the night collective moment). And dreams of being right, ha.
Then one day some news came from above, no, hell no, not that above, the above of mundane chain-of-command drop down and let you know freedom day was near. Anti-climactic, anticlimactic for a man who expected to grow old in stir, and kind of dug it (excuse beat reversion memory of Harvard Square leavings when he thought this world would be some literary break-out and not righteous avenger of hurts, did I said his own first of all. If he didn’t, he lied).
Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this was a road less traveled for a reason, and no ancient robert frost blasted two roads to guide one… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.
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