Playing Fair and Being Kind

I had a humorous conversation recently with a good pal. He has a fiberglass boat in his yard left there by an acquaintance of his for a paint job. The friend is going to try an artistic paint job that I look forward to seeing in the near future. Our conversation was brief but I have become a bit obsessed with it and I’ll share it with you.

I asked my good pal what the boat was doing there in his yard. He replied that his friend was attempting to paint it to look like a traditional wooden boat. Well I’ve had a lot of experience painting both wood and fiberglass boats. I have painted both to look smooth and glossy. That is normally what well maintained boats look like; smooth and glossy.
I looked confused I’m sure. I asked him to explain and he did. In fact there was a small area on the bow where his friend had made a few test patches. I looked closely and told my pal that those would make the boat look like it had a really shitty paint job. I added that I never had painted a fiberglass boat to look like a wooden boat but i had painted many wooden boats to look as smooth and shiny as a fiberglass boat.

It takes a real talent to put a smooth coat on a wooden boat or even a fiberglass boat. The method that best does this is called “roll and tip”. A skilled person can mix the paint and during the best time of day with not too much heat and not too much wind apply the paint with a combination of paint roller and paint brush to leave the surface beautifully coated with no drizzles, curtains, or drools. So I wondered what the heck is the advantage or attraction to painting a boat surface so it looks like the wood grain is standing out.

More will be revealed. I hope I get to see the final product of the man’s efforts to paint his fiberglass boat so it looks like a wooden boat.

I am including a short story I finished today. It is something I have been trying (maybe not unlike painting a boat to look different than it is) to write poetry and prose that combines artistic or famous characters in situations that display their salient features or personas. An example is one I did about Oscar Wilde and Rickie Lee Jones. i was listening to Rickie one day as I was reading a story by Oscar. I experienced a marvelous sensory rush of complete joy. I wrote a poem about that experience that turned out pretty well I thought.

Afterward I heard a poet at a reading whose work reminded me of Oscar and Rickie which gave me an idea of repeating with other talented or famous people. I had been reading Charles Bukowski and I thought that pairing him with a person of a more aesthetic nature would be a challenge. After much research and watching youtube videos I started to combine the two men, Bukowski and Mozart. Here is that effort. I’ve appended the poem “Bluebird” by Bukowski.

CHARLES AND WOLFGANG

Charles was sitting on the divan leaning forward toward the coffee table. He held a lighted cigarette between his lips and a glass of wine in his right hand. His left hand was gesticulating slowly as if to smooth the air between him and the gentleman standing across the room. The gentleman was Wolfgang, a cultured and beautiful human being who at the moment was holding a violin and bow in a relaxed manner close to his side. The violin was a Stradivarius for which he had paid several hundred thousand dollars at a garage sale in Salzburg several years ago. Presently both men were in the music room of Wolfgang’s home. They had been acquaintances for a couple of months having been introduced earlier at a combination salon and pool party in the Hollywood Hills of California. Since then the two had found time in their busy schedules to meet a few times per week to share their thoughts and interests and often to celebrate their common love for a good time.

Wolfgang had immediately been attracted to Charles. Charles was reading several pieces of his poetry at the event. Wolfgang heard the natural, lowborn quality of Charles’ life experiences in the fabric of the passages. The heartfelt tone of his voice endeared him to Wolfgang. However, Wolfgang’s aesthetic senses were repulsed by Charles. What disgusted him about Charles was the coarse language and lack of grace. Additionally, Charles’ posture and bearing reminded Wolfgang of a bear or maybe a sloth. His movements were clumsy and unsure. Plus, the man drank heavily or never stopped. Wolfgang didn’t know which. Charles also smoked those horrible little cigarettes non-stop. He called them Bidis. They were made in India, mass produced by Indian women. Like a chain of wicked, foul incense one after the other Charles placed the little ugly sticks between his lips while speaking and fumbled for his little gas lighter. While reciting he would pause long enough to fire up the lighter and hold it to the cigarette. His eyes narrowed and pulled together to sight the flame to the tip and his lips pulled on the unholy object enough to suck smoke into his face and exhale through the corner of his mouth. The whole process disgusted Wolfgang but Wolfgang was unable to look away. Charles, Wolfgang thought, may have been the ugliest man he’d ever met. In fact both men had suffered small pox as children and their faces bore the scars from that disease. This condition had caused both of them mental suffering as they passed through the middle years of their youth.

In turn Charles was not particularly fond of Wolfgang. He was primarily interested in Wolfgang’s ability to write and play classical music and throw fantastic parties. Charles loved classical music. He himself had no skills with musical instruments nor did he really understand the construction of classical works. He only knew the music relaxed him; flowed through his mind into another part of him. The notes and strands behaved like a woman’s fingers coolly and softly stroking the genitals of his soul. This is what drew him to Wolfgang’s life and Wolfgang’s friends many of whom were beautifully dressed and coiffed women. Basically Charles’ libido gave him a reason to live and helped him to survive the terrors of his past. Writing was the way that Charles related to the world. Writing was the only way he could express what built up inside, what needed release. Those times he could not express clearly that which raged within, Charles needed to consume in order to cool the flame or fill the gaping abyss that pleaded for gratification. Throughout his life Charles had found that three things eased the agony of his existence; women, cigarettes, and alcohol, preferably beer and wine. These three things had long since become more than the cure. Women, cigarettes, and alcohol now were the mainstays of Charles’ painful enjoyment and women and cigarettes and alcohol had become addictions. Wolfgang’s impression was that Charles was a miserable but gifted oaf. Truth be told, Charles’ poetry spoke to Wolfgang’s fear filled and equally miserable life.

Both men had issues with their respective fathers from childhood days. In Charles’ case he was beaten severely multiple times per week for minor infractions of impossible rules. His father would beat him with a leather belt for less than perfect performance with his chores. Charles remembered very clearly the numbers of times he was ordered into the bathroom and told to drop his pants. From the age of 6 years old until about 13 he was beaten regularly and each time he was beaten until he began to weep and sob and cry out in pain. Charles was beaten in this manner until one day he did not weep, sob, or cry. He was beaten and then the beatings stopped after that incident. His father never beat him again but the damage to their relationship was complete. The beatings as well as the skin problem destroyed Charles’ ego functioning and development in his youth. He was never comfortable around his classmates or his family afterward. This made him a loner and threw him into a tight and lonely circle of his own making. Charles led a quiet and lonesome existence from then on until his writing became noticed by several publishers of small newsletters and underground magazines. His loneliness extended to all people and particularly hurtful were the encounters with women. He had no lovers.

Wolfgang’s experiences with his father were much more nurturing. However, when he reached the age of 21 his efforts to find his way in the world were stymied by his father’s reach and control of his life. Wolfgang was attempting to establish his place both as a young man and as a professional musician. His father’s experience was invaluable during those earlier years when Wolfgang was a child and adolescent. Often and always his father could negotiate the political and professional landscape of the courts in Austria, Germany and Italy. His skills dealing with the official and unofficial hierarchies lifted the Mozart family into a lifestyle that was comfortable. The father was however a tyrant in ways that interfered with the budding love life of Wolfgang. Wolfgang left his first real love interest in Mannheim to satisfy his father’s demands that he travel to Paris in order to find the proper audience for his talents. This left Wolfgang empty and dark. Hereafter he would only play at being a young man with great skills. Wolfgang left his heart in Mannheim never to have that opportunity again. This incident forever placed a barrier between his heart and his father. Thereafter Wolfgang kept a check on any joie de vivre.

Both suffered from a common loss that most men try to recover throughout their lives. Both were afflicted with the sense of missing something taken from them in their youth. Despite their later successes and accomplishments they both were plagued with an emptiness that was to continue ’til death. This thing was what caused them both to seek and find temporary relief in each others personalities, defects, and life styles. Wolfgang found relief and pleasure in Charles’ earthy, bawdy, and crude life. He thoroughly enjoyed the scatological jokes and unhealthy pursuits that Charles could provide regularly. The crowd that Charles dragged along with him was in love with the forbidden, the wildly foul language and behavior in the beer halls and streets of Los Angeles. A few of those people continued to hang on and travel with Charles. They were groupies who could not identify their own character defects but rather trailed the reckless path after Charles waiting for the train wreck that was inevitable. Charles was aware of his influence on the population that adored him. He played them like the fools they were all the while corrupting his own health. What was left was a unique style of writing and expression that revolted and attracted an audience of fawning fans. Charles’ mind was vaguely aware of the missing thing but he continued to hide in his womanizing, drinking, and other unhealthy pursuits. In return Wolfgang provided a new source of entertainment for Charles.

Unknown to both men what was missing was what the mother had given and the father had taken away when they were very young or when they first tried to assert their maleness into manhood. There is a jewel bestowed by the mother into the treasure chest of the son that is the key to a source of self love and respect that is available forever. This jewel is kept protected within the male child to be used as a guide in relationship with the self and others throughout life. In the case of Wolfgang and Charles their fathers had deftly picked their pocket of the jewel so that later they had no skills, no measure, no idea what to do in social situations. Both were doomed to failure and doomed to the discomfort of life.

Charles looked at Wolfgang standing across the room. He waved his left hand as if to clear a space between him and his new friend and said, “Hey, Wolfgang, play that Serenade in G for me will you? Your ‘Eine Klein Nachtmusik’ “

Wolfgang smiled and regarded Charles for a moment. “How can I?”, Wolfgang answered. “I wrote that just before I died. Ask me to play something else.”

Charles grinned his terrible grin and thought for just a brief moment. He was proud of his knowledge of Germany and it’s culture. “O.K. Play for me the solo from the Rondeau, Allegro of your concerto number 3”

Wolfgang was pleased. This was his first masterpiece written when he was 19 years old. “I’ll make you a deal, Charles. I’ll play your request and then you must recite ‘Bluebird’ for me after.”

Charles stopped all motion and his face reddened. He stared at Wolfgang, the cigarette and the glass of wine forgotten for the time being. He’d never recited ‘Bluebird’. The images were personal and revealing. “Bluebird” was Charles’ secret. “Bluebird” was a pact with that part of himself that was true and genuine when he was alone at night in bed in the dark. Charles came to the realization that this little man in front of him with the blond hair and soft voice was larger and more capable than he’d imagined. He put down the wine glass and removed the cigarette from between his lips. His left hand smoothed the eyebrow above his left eye. Charles looked down as if to find a response in the floor between his feet and when he raised his gaze again he smiled gently and said, “Sure, why the fuck not”.

Wolfgang grinned and placed the Stradivarius under his chin and raised the bow.

G. M. Goodwin

August 14, 2014

Bluebird by Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?