Sunday
She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as Buffy Summers
Nineties Night two nights ago: a mess of sweat mixed with music fit to bring memories unwanted, noise. Anyway, we danced and drank just a smidgen of booze, just enough to be able to move and jerk and jump unfettered to music that should have stayed in the nineties, that should have been destroyed at the turn of the century, that should have been taken out behind the old shed and shot. While dancing, amidst the dark room and shifting, bustling, cramming dancers, I felt that old familiar pang, Dan. That pang that is reminiscent of another nearly forgotten passage from my 1990s memoir/haberdashery supply booklet/coloring placemat from Friendly’s (“Magical moments shared by multiple generations of families and friends,” as their credo reads, not without weight here)/atlas of a man’s conscience Adam Solves the Problem of Existence without Using Forceps or Floppy Drives, Thus Freeing Humankind to Indulge in Epicurean Delights and Laugh in Existential Ambivalence.
This short passage (wink) is one from the nineties. I wrote it the early nineties between twelve-hour days rewriting War and Peace for a particular, grunge audience. (After the success of my rewrite of Anna K., my publisher—as well as a number of private financiers—had forced the project on me. Although resistant with fists at first and cusses next, I soon found myself deep in the task of converting “whim” and “fancy” to “radical” and “totally” and full of a pleasure not unlike that of a man deep in act of seduction.) It’s a piece that I excerpted originally for the baptism of Lauren Hill’s baby (although Mrs. Hill, with her obsession for artistic control, rewrote it considerably before she allowed me to read it). A. O. Scott, who had been attending the baptism as my personal guest, coined the passage’s name when he later said: “That’s the most marvelous performance I’ve seen since Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.” Thus, this passage has since been cited regularly as “Adam’s Newman’s Luke’s 1990s macabre Dance of Death.”
It appeared on pages 498-499 of the compilation The Best 500 Pages Adam the Man with Two Hearts Ever Wrote, Edited by Nelson Mandela, and on pages 6,576-6,578 of my original text. Here is a verbatim transcript, vetted for the web by my lawyer/masseuse:
“…Two days after the family dog ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills from the trash, and nearly a month before I was to have knee surgery, I met a man on the street who said (ranted?) two interesting things to (at?) me, which I will attempt to reproduce in total, here: ‘Ain’t no one, no how, in jest, in seriousness, in the character of a million days and a million nights prolonged, going to reject any type of love on account of—you know the toaster don’t care what type of toast goes in and heats it up all the same’ and ‘"God God damn it damn it," I’m a goddam bar of soap foaming away the best doggone years of this life on this rotten street with you rotten people. Ain’t never clean, though.’
“Later, when I found that man dead on the steps of the house on Meredith Street, he was wearing a Daniel Johnston t-shirt with the 'Hi, How Are You' smudged with grime and grit and blood. He was smiling. Smiling like an idiot. Smiling like some dead idiot.”
Thursday
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