Let's just say it was an artistic success. One reason for that was writer/poet/musician/
performance artist David Franks.
He wrote four stories for us, stories that could have run in the New Yorker.
This was the second story he wrote for us, the first being on a job he had as a phone psychic. That's what he refers to in the open. I'll put that up also, after these first three.
This is from the June 1991 issue, Issue #2.
All of the capitalization and punctuation and spacing are David's.
That incarnation of HARRY lasted only 6 memorable months. David died at age 61 in 2010 in his Fell's Point apartment. He was working on several projects at the time.
I was the Editor-in-Chief of HARRY at the time he wrote these. This is the first of four, meant to be read in order. I'm very happy to bring these back to life. I wish I could do the same for David.
-----Tom D'Antoni
By DAVID FRANKS //
*What I am doing here is abandoning the straight-ahead pyramid journalistic style of "Confessions of a 900-Number Psychic" in favor of what I call the "Big Gulp" techinique. It is an attempt to invade my own privacy; it is a way of talking about the self, of capturing what's gets lost in the story. D.F.
I tell stories & some of them are true:
What I wanted was to be alive & dead at the same time:
Though it is his Church, his Temple, his place of obeisance, ablution, genuflection, & prayer -- the average bathroom was never designed for the alcoholic:
The daily ritual:
TO GET UP, EVENTUALLY, & VOMIT into the toilet bowl is easily accomplished. The flesh is willing & the receptacle is waiting. But to vomit and urinate in said bowl simultaneously defies gender in a most egalitarian & comical fashion. The man must clutch penis, bend to bowl, vomit, straighten up, guide penis, release, hold, bend, vomit ad nauseum. Woman must sit, release, urinate, rise, turn, bend to bowl, vomit, gulp, repeat ad nauseum.
What is missing in this circle game of binary dysfunction? Any true Alki worth his gestalt is no mere circle-er but rather a full-fledged dervish & his higher power is involuntary -- diarrhea!
To VOMIT, URINATE, & then to simultaneously accommodate this unruly river of shit into one's morning toilette is Nature's garet HA! HA! HA!
DO I HEAR STRAINS OF BACH from outside the bathroom door? Forget it:
MOST WESTERN EARTHLINGS share at least the memory of such rigors. So much so that it is regarded as a Rite of Passage.
UNLIKE THE ALKI, most earthlings go on to do incredible like learn from past behavior: THE STOP!
RECENTLY RICHIE HAVENS recorded a song, "I Want to Live for My Country." I wrote the lyric to this song & in one of the chorus's I wrote, "...We learn out geography through terror/we live our history on T.V.".
TODAY I WAS READING EMERSON'S "LIFE" & I noticed a similar perception. Emerson observes, "We learn our geology the morning after the earthquake on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains."
A RECOVERING ALKI LIKE ME can look at 10 or 20 years of their own lives & view the wreckage & start naming the victims as if they were strangers, as he had no part in his own life.
I WAS A BOMBED BABY BOOMER & 'whilst boogie boarding on a sea of booze, I began to lose balance somewhere along the asphalt. My experiences were becoming truly modern -- like sub-atomic particles they became recognizable only by their residue: women who deeply loved me became baffled, blaming & terrified. Books, songs & performances that were pushed by believing publishers, agents, etc. were left in abeyance. Positions that could have easily grown in duration & scope were lost or stunted in politesse.
BESIDES DRINKIN' N' DRUGGIN' I was always in a mad, mad pursuit of Romance:
MY IDEAL ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP was a person who was not too drunk, who had no last name, who would do unspeakable things until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and then turn into a pizza:
THERE WERE MANY MORNINGS when I looked over & I thought that's exactly what they had done -- you know those mornings when you wake up & you find yourself lying next to "IT":
& you don't know who "IT" is,
or what "IT" is,
or what you've done with "IT,"
or what you've promised "IT,"
& this is mind-boggling at 6 or 7 in the morning with a Celestial hangover when birdsong is totally hideous & "real people" are on their way to work & you don't know whether you're at your place or not but that you have to leave without waking "IT" up,
& then one morning you wake up,
& "ITS" awake,
& "ITs" looking at you
& suddenly you realize that you've just become "ITS" "IT"
IF YOU ARE NOT A PRACTICING ALKI, or don't know one, the insanity of the Alki is comical -- a real rip snorter. Who else would get sick & fuck up their lives (& those of the people closest to them) day after day, & then respond by getting sicker and more fucked up day after day?
MANY, INCLUDING ALKIS themselves believe this is some sort of dramatic perverse willfulness. The point is though -- this is a disease that strengthens the will & it does so with a slow lover's hand.
PRACTICING ALKIS ARE AS DISHONEST with each other as they are with themselves, so much so that they think they are unique in the most diminishing ways.
FOR YEARS I THOUGHT I was the only one who hid bottles so no one would know the extent of my drinking. Once I went so far as to hide lime gimlets in the window washer under the hood of my
Porsche Spider, as if anyone who was not deranged would think to look there in the first place. Furthermore, I didn't even like lime gimlets, but didn't they look exactly like window washer fluid? Once at a meeting, I spoke to a blind Alki who hid liquor bottles from his wife in the toilet bowls, closets, & other secretive places around the house -- his wife was also blind!
"WHY ARE YOU DRINKING?" demanded the little prince/
"So that I may forget," replied the tippler.
"Forget what?" inquired the little prince who was already feeling sorry for him.
"Forget that I am ashamed," the tippler confessed, hanging his head.
"Ashamed of what?" insisted the little prince who wanted to help him.
"Ashamed of drinking!" The tippler brought his speech to an end and shut himself up in impregnable silence.
---Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
MY FATHER & I had gotten along miserably since he was as old as I am now. One year my father went into the hospital for a risky operation & my brother called me & told me that I had better come home.
I FLEW HOME TO MIRAKESH to tell my father that I loved him & that I always loved him & I knew he loved me too in some simple passionate way that had become as equally grotesque & impossible for him as it had for me.
THE FACT THAT MY FATHER'S LOVE was not up to my standards was none of my fucking business, but I didn't know that then. My father loved me to the best of his ability--the best he could.
Two thinks happened:
FIRST, I GOT DRUNK ON THE PLANE, arrived at the hospital drunk & stayed drunk. Second, my father did not die & we have not spoken one civil word to this day.
IN PRE-DWI 1980, I moved to an undisputedly sexy city in the sunny South, took a prestigious position at a University, & began dressing in marvelously appointed garments
JAMBALAYA, CRAWFISH PIE, FILET GUMBO --- ah New Orleans! Mardi Gras, the French Quarters, the House of the Rising Sun--ah the drugs! When I first moved there you could get the same stuff that killed Bruce Lee for $50 a bag--ah New Orleans!
IN NEW ORLEANS IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to gauge my drinking. It was pre-DWI, the bars were open 24 hours a day, there was no way to conspicuously close them down.
THE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY complained if the cafeteria only carried three kinds of beer for lunch. The faculty had institutionalized its drinking to the point of an imprimatur. Classes were closed for two weeks during Mardi Gras. All the super-markets served drinks, so it was commonplace to walk down the aisles with a grocery cart--drink in hand.. Ah New Orelans! It is the city that invites people from all over the planet to behave as they would never dare to at home--& alcohol is the elixir. After sometime I felt something was odd & that maybe it was me--I went to my first AA meeting.
YOU COULD TELL IT WAS MY FIRST AA meeting by the look in my eyes, an expression that could only be described as that of a lost dog trapped in traffic. Three things happened, & nothing did & my life was changed forever although I was the last to know.
1) a student of mine called out my name: "Professor Franks"
2) someone at the meeting mentioned "God"
3) after the meeting, the man who was leading it gave me some information to read, & a Michigan Test to take to see if I thought I might be an alcoholic. He told me not to drink for a few days & talk to him if I felt like it. I thanked him for his concern, left, went home and got drunk, & did not go back to an AA meeting for 5 years.
I CARRIED ON IN MY HEAD. "They" had broken my anonymity by calling out my name--as if this really mattered to a room full of people who did not know my name in the first place.
AS FOR THE "GOD" PART: I figured they were going to preach to me. Try to convert me. Shit--I wasn't Christian in the first place. If I'd stuck around "they" would have set me real straight. Religion has no part in AA, & the spirituality that is at its center is absolutely of your own choosing.
My higher power is a trans-sexual Mau Mau.
IT WASN'T UNTIL YEARS LATER that I realized what had happened that night: the man had simply asked me not to drink for a few days and to come back & talk to him if I felt like it.
IF I HAD BEEN CAPABLE OF SIMPLE HONESTY, that night I would have clearly realized that at that point in my life I loved drinking more than any woman on this Earth, than any friend on this Earth, than any parent on this Earth, than any child on this Earth--& talk about loving yourself--shit--I was falling off the planet like a pillar of dust!
20 YEARS LATER & IT'S CHRISTMAS EVE & in no symbolic gesture my feet are cut and bleeding. Dumb & walking on the cut glass of broken bottles; dramatic & walking, bleeding in the street in the snow:
& IT'S OVER HALF MY LIFE & it's 20 years & the poet's not writing, the professor's gagging, the lover's not lovable, the son can give nothing back but misery:
WHAT I WANTED WAS TO BE ALIVE AND DEAD AT THE SAME TIME--right up to the door that locked behind me, where time froze, where before any sanity became possible I was forced to face insanity (my own) beyond my wildest dreams.
And no one has yet surrendered the secret of who put the bottle of brandy on Poe's grave every year.
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