Vacation Vicarious

I'm reading the collected Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, a Colombian poet whose alter-ego is the narrator. Generally I like to read 'cold' books (Jack London, the Scandinavians) in this slice of peak-summer, but Maqroll's tales are jungle-rivery and steaming. Hallucinatory.  I discovered this book by accident in a thrift shop where I also discovered I was lacking even the $1 cost of a priceless literary journey.  The counterman-- an African who seems to broadcast on his phone-mic one side of a perpetual conversation to some fictional recipient-- insisted by gesture I take the book-- way too many in the store, what's $1 to him?  I have thanked him many times over.

In the claustrophobia of air-condition-less nights, to the hum of my neighbor's machines, I remain awake, empathically quasi-feverish, relishing the luxury of a free sauna experience to the book-track of tropical indulgences and terrors.  Mutis has obviously read Dickens and maybe even Proust... I trust him; I believe him.  He is escaping the predatory hauntings of too much education.  Bookery.  I can remember my Fifth-grade teacher, an ancient fragile-skinned hairnetted woman reading us a daily installment of The River Ran East... a perilous Peruvian journey that kept me from missing school even when I was genuinely sick.  As an adult, processing the internet, I was finally able to locate a used copy.  Unfortunately my own son did not enjoy the readings as much as we elementary schoolers of the early 1960's.

Still, there is nothing like a great story in the summer months.  The heft of a book in your bag, the tug of words on a cooled subway car, the hangover of someone else's exotic itinerary in your urban head. Walking across town in the evening, watching the local street population manage their opportunities... the garbage pickers, the lucrative can and bottle industry-- these people work hard for their survival.  In the heat they blend into my imaginary fictions, become characters and heroes... the man in the wool hat and down parka with his cart and bag, face worthy of a Van Gogh portrait... he is woven into the tapestry of today's narrative somehow.  He is a hero.. an actor... Hollywood or 112th Street... no matter.

There is little dialogue interference in my dog-days; I do not use a cell phone-- the street noise and fragments of conversation seep into one of the layers of perception but not as deeply as what I read or dream.  Sometimes I speak silently to my friends who have recently passed-- Alan, Jane... as though they are within some palpable frequency I can still access.  They are 'present'... Alan, when I play guitar at night-- his scent still in my living room, his stage-sweat embedded in my instruments.  And Jane-- last night I watched a film made in Minneapolis... if only you'd stayed in the Midwest, passed up the Studio 54 nights, the limos to Regine's... you might have avoided the animal tragedies, the schizophrenic boy outside your window becoming a man-- calling, keeping you awake... then the cancer, the sentence of suffering.  The loose ending.

Some days I think I should have been a photographer.  I see things-- I frame things.  I'd have been good-- maybe even successful, although the current Maqroll inside of me asks-- 'What the fuck is success?' 

There's a woman who sits on a bench inside the park, uptown, reading Dickens.  This month it's Martin Chuzzlewit.  She edits a very prestigious review; I gifted her a copy of my new book and now I suspect she is terrified of me.  I'm sure she has long-nurtured disdain for local poets and writers... and conversation.  I'm not sure why I am obsessed with knowing what people read-- not too much else interests me lately.  Sometimes in the hot nights I troll my own shelves for undiscovered treasure.  There is enough there for several lifetimes and I will sadly never know all of them.  I watch television-- documentaries and films... with the demon of guilt on my shoulder; I have so much work to do, so much to read...  any scene anywhere with bookshelves both comforts and provokes anxiety.  I squint my eyes at all the home-sets of newscasters and interviewees to see what they've read, how they arrange the volumes behind them.  A few of them are literally 'sets'... like they offer Zoom backdrops somewhere on the internet.  Will it never stop-- the make-up, the plastic surgery, the fakery?

Álvaro, who has probably been the target of assassins, been shot at and jailed... has been dead now for eight years.  I cannot tell him how my first post-pandemic summer has been stamped with his character, how his adventures and philosophy have permeated the hot soup of my malleable July brain syndrome,  how somehow his Gaviero guided me through another itinerant heat-spell and imbedded in the imagery of my dream-scrapbook.  Such is the leap-frogging nature of literature... why we poor writers are compelled to diary and serialize, to chronicle and complain, celebrate and invent... relentlessly, like this heat, which soon enough will disappear... God willing, to return next year, for those among us fortunate enough to be given another 'revolution' of planetary adventure.