CHICKS LIKE THE CAR
Batman said, “Chicks like the car, right?”
Right. Well, I was ready to find out. My first stop when I cruised into the DC area was to see the fascist water man. He was out for the afternoon so I parked in the back of his warehouse, garage and office complex to hide the North Carolina license plates and waited. Passivity was not one of my strong points but I knew that a little bit of a wait and a lot of dancing might get me to Philadelphia for the annual meeting for the National Foundation. Craig had told me that if I registered as a consumer it would only cost me a hundred dollars to gain access to the conferences and festivities. The money from the initial seed money for R&D was long gone to pay car rentals, lawyer fees, phone bills, stationery and mailings—necessary expenditures because of the size of the project we had proposed. Brent was smart—he saw the crunch coming and jumped ship. From the number of contacts I had been gaining, it had also been a good move for the project which was continuing to evolve in focus and scope.
The fascist water man finally arrived back at the warehouse accompanied by the father of the boy who had died. The man had been the German’s most trusted employee. I smiled my jagged edged smile and said, “Here’s Sullivan.” Mister J was startled when he saw me. So I danced for him. I explained why I needed the money that was two weeks late. I reminded him that this was the last of it, and that I had let him off the hook for the next year. I talked to him about his four kids, especially his young daughter, and how lucky he was to have them healthy. Nothing that I said really mattered. What mattered to me was that I never lost my temper, never threatened and resisted the temptation to stuff him into one of those five gallon glass bottles and roll him down the hill into a nearby stream like a message in a bottle. The way I had been spending the money, to learn about the bleeding disorder community, was my egotistical self-righteous ticket to justification. And if he didn’t cut me a few checks, the project was dead. No trip to Philadelphia, no rented car or gas or phones or anything, because no one else was buying in yet. Dozens of phone calls and proposals had been unanswered and delivered. It seemed totally hopeless.
The fascist water man cut me a few checks spread out over the next six weeks. That was my income. That’s how long I had to make any headway. I planned to use every dime toward moving the project forward, the documentary about the history of hemophilia. It was only a Drop of Blood to him. It was my life, do it or die.
The fascist water man was losing the boy’s father, the only delivery man he really trusted. His loss would only be sleep. The boy’s father, an ex-marine, was crushed by the loss of a son. I wondered how the people had felt who had lost sons, infected by the blood supply and the stupidity and ineptness and greed of others. We die. That’s it. This is it. Do the acts we perform in this life make any difference in how or when we die? This is what went through my mind. Should I feel any less for the loss of the man’s son, who had wronged me, than for the lives of people I didn’t know? I had wished the boy harm because he had done me wrong, and I felt no remorse over his death, but I was affected by the pain that his father had to live with. Who was harmed more, the boy or his father? I looked at death as a part of life and even the deaths of those I was close to never affected me anymore once father and mother were gone. Mom and Dad would visit the cemetery plot and stone they had picked out for themselves. They taught me something great. I saw those deaths as the end of their allotment of time which after my grief allowed my life to move forward. Life is precious. I cherished their memory as all memories and all that happens every day in my own allotment of time, only despairing in the mundane and commonplace thought and action at a time when there are no horizons, only lack of money. “The Kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth and yet you do not see it,” said Joseph Campbell quoting Christ and the Gnostic Bible.
I visited my younger brother and sister and their children and my friends in Baltimore. None of them understood what I was doing or why I was going to a hemophilia meeting in Philadelphia. We had fun anyway. At my younger brother’s patent redneck bar I found out the chicks liked the car. The next day I would be in Philadelphia but the night gave me a young blonde, published poet barmaid and a six-pack of beer into the wee small hours of a warm clear October morning with the top down and the seats pulled back while she read her poetry and I revved my engine to flamenco music and life. You get what you need.
Rupert says, “You can rhyme if you want to.
But you better beware, ‘cause I really don’t care
If your spelling’s all that great—Babe.