What is noticeable about this lengthy letter written on the eve of Independence Day 1989, besides trying to emulate the sound writing of Kerouac's Big Sur in describing the fireworks sounding off all over Washington Heights a day early, is that I actually mention current events: a court ruling upholding Missouri's abortion restrictions (which 25 years later is still trying to limit a woman's choice), a shootout at a Bronx movie theater during a screening of the first Batman movie with Michael Keaton, and the deaths of Andei Gromyko and Jim Backus. The missive concludes with a tribute to the importance of Gilligan's Island in the consciousness of my generation.
Summer 1989
July 3rd, 1989. It's the night before Independence Day here on old Henry Hudson's granite body. Kids are blasting off bottle rockets and have been doing so for the past two weeks (there must have been a local pyrotechnical windfall); the blasts don't make it all the way up to the lofty heights of apartment 22A, but from the vantage point of my easterly window I gather that they make it to around level 18. I'm not talking about an occasional pop or splutter here. I mean a continual series of ear-humming Zeus blasts. I'm talking M-80s. It's great. Takes me back to my Santa Clara County youth and those whole bricks of THUNDERBOMB firecrackers we used to buy and how we used to blow to bits dead walnut trees in the back of deserted San Jose orchards with quarter sticks of dynamite.
-- Ah, the all-powerful, all-magical M-80! I remember lighting off one those for the first time. I was with a group of fellow 4th grade classmates. The excitement was unreal. Shit, at nine years of age we night as well have been detonating the first A-bomb. My buddy Steve did the honors; rather, he was the one with the balls and the experience). He crouched down carefully, like he was trying to sneak up on a sun-bathing lizard, and set the fuze to sparkle. Right then, the rest of us, who were about twelve in number, took off as if hungry wolfs were slobbering on the heels of our adidas. Some guys really hoofed it. I remember seeing three or four of them just cooking -- chin down, arms pumping, never once thinking of breaking stride to look back and catch a peek of burning fuze and purple blast.
I slowed up after about 15 yards and turned around, and sure enough my eyes were treated to an explosion so big that it emptied my head and seemed to make the earth turn and the air moist. Yeah, after that, after that brush with the god M-80, we 4th graders walked tall; we had been to the other side.
Every ten seconds another bottle rocket weeeeeeeee pops, and then a pack of fire crackers poppoppapapa-pops, and then, about every ten minutes, the god M-80 BaaloOOOOoms, and then all the delicate joyful kiddie giggles. And it's only the 3rd of July.
There has been a lot of interesting news today on July 3rd. The Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law which limits the right of a woman to have an abortion. The Missouri law says that no taxpayer money can go to abortion or abortion counseling; it also reduces from 24 weeks (the end of the second trimester) to 20 weeks the legal age at which a fetus can be aborted. While this doesn't overturn Roe v. Wade, because women can still legally have abortions, it spits a poison dart into the heart of why abortion was legalized in the first place -- so that low-income women could have access to the medical care that middle- and upper-class women were getting in their white clean and paper crisp family doctor's office.
All these suited and tied ugly white bigots camera-eager jabbering that life begins with conception and that women have no right to kill the unborn, and you can't help but feel that these little fucking hateful asshole hell-bound small-cocked manikins of the male gender are really truly jealous and scared by the idea, the image, of a woman having an abortion. That's just too much control for her to have, too much control of her own body, too much say so over her own pussy. God damn it! That could be his dick plunging in there making that mucus ball. And what right does a woman have to blow the nose of her uterus and invalidate the seed he gave her? "Hell, we might as well pack it up and go live with Satan in the trees of the hills of Africa."
I can't help but think that what's truly at stake for these Right-To-Lifers is their tiny little peanut-shell virility -- women included. The Right-To-Life women get on camera, and they have a look like they've just been sprayed on by Jesus. So blank and so certain -- like a holiday drunk or well-seasoned liar. You know that these women are covering something up, and it's probably some deep hurt -- which is always a big need to be loved -- of some kind or'ruther.
But I'm not one to get behind the Pro-Choicers either. Molly Yard, the president of the National Organization for Women, got up there on her podium today after the decision was handed down and started flaunting her political weight by telling all the cameras that the fall election candidates were going to rise with a Pro-Choice position or fall with a Pro-Life one. What a bunch of crap. What does this have to do with anything other than NOW machismo? It's sad. Politics is politics, and shit floats to the top.
Get this. Ashley and I are watching the news tonight, and this story comes on about violence at a BATMAN movie in the Bronx. Apparently two guys are standing in line for popcorn when one of them walks up to the counter. The other guy gets pissed off, thinking he should have been first in line. An argument ensues. After a heated exchange, the guy thought he was cheated out of his rightful place in line storms out of the theater, shouting back over his shoulder that he is going to his car to get a gun out of his glove box. Well, sure enough, he returns a few minutes later, and he's waving a pistol, but, and this is the tickler, the guy who made it to the candy counter first is brandishing a revolver of his own. So of course -- and in the true Batman spirit -- they exchange rounds of gunfire in the lobby of the movie house. The performance hastens to a close when one of them takes a slug in the head and dies. Whether it was the guy who made it to the counter first or the guy who thought he was cheated, I don't know; it wasn't made clear in the report. But either way, you got to figure that those guys really must have loved popcorn.
Talking about death, Gromyko died today; or, I should say, news of his death reached the West today. Ever since I was little I remember Gromyko as the Supreme Soviet's second-in-command -- the Foreign Minister, second to Brezhnev. He spent a lot of time in New York City: "Lucky Russian," I remember thinking in high school. He went way back -- to Yalta, with Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt (you know, that famous WWII 1945 picture; well, Gromyko is in the background).
Another great personage died today, Jim Backus. He was far more important in our limited consciousness than Andre Gromyko ever was. He was Mr. Howell on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, and he was the voice of Mr. McGoo. I think I've seen every GILLIGAN'S ISLAND ever televised. Mr. Howell was in the hut closest to the lagoon; he was the one who brought the most stuff along on that three-hour cruise; he was married to Lovey, something I pitied him for, even when I was seven years old and in 2nd grade. He was greed, pure benign greed, which I could fully understand and appreciate as a soul in the throes of elementary school: dreams of gold pieces and pockets full of chocolate and sunbeams telling you that class is done for the day. That was Mr. Howell: saccharine and mischievous and true. Did his name -- Mr. Howell -- have anything to do with Ginsberg's poem? Some young talented Hollywood writer poking fun and making hay back in 1963?
Put a gun to my head, man. -- Look at this shit I'm writing. Flash cube diet, flash cube heart.
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