Buggin’ Out/two: American Plague Transducer

The house at 218 Glasgow speaks to me. It is one of Portsmouth’s many famously haunted houses. I lay upon her all day and she whispers the sickness to me. Sickness is a strange effect. Last night, as I pulled the Ford into Kitty Hawk again and made for the beer aisle that strange, effective teacher began to tighten my low back and needle my gut, like any old friend would. Her story is a fine one and I will tell you about it, but today is a little more pressing on my foreword memory. Naples and I had spent the last hour or so swapping stories of shitting one’s pants as we cleaned up the lead chips and spattered grey drop cloths. I don’t remember what got us on the subject, not as much as I remember that it is always a funny swap; good old fashioned stories of temporary incontinence. We have all had them. If you haven’t then you will; and if you don’t someday have the balls to tell them with friends you have known for life then you are living in a pretty sick nothing world. I stood next to the van, admiring the autographed picture of Dick Dale as I smoked some marijuana from a small metal pipe and felt what I thought might be a fart coming on, but stopped short, grabbing my stomach as I felt the pressure that was not the wind. I thought about heading up the block, to Portside to hit the crapper before heading home…standing there; momentarily silent and then decided against it. I hit the road, no problems. On the way down the coastal plain my stomach started in on me, and again with the low back pressure. It wasn’t like good gas pressure; it was like chewing gum stuck in your eye pressure. It was like something you would only remember from childhood; most likely something you would remember being of your own doing, something dumb. It felt pesky and inevitable. It was familiar and innocent. It was looming as frequency, and building behind stilled thoughts; hushed visions. Cold and hot, blinding and wet, an annoyance, but one for the examiners. It just felt like the start of something. It was the heat, the no food and the ladders. It was the ghosts of Yellow Fever and a widower sea captain and sick daughter. Once down again I walked into the grocer. I made my selection and my electronic self purchase. I was fighting with all that I had the feverish humidity that was enveloping my neck and mine alone. I squeezed hard at every below waist muscle and nevertheless found myself with mustard in my ass. Even straining, no release I felt a leak burst forth. I asked the attendant at the electronic self checkout if I might leave my purchase there a moment while I used their facilities. He agreed and I began the slow walk of a man trying to hold a glass of water between two hams; no glass for the water and the hams, well, the hams. It is that certain walk; the one you resort to when you have nothing left, and anyone who happens to be paying attention will notice. It looks like the walk of a cripple; slow and plodding-areas of the lower torso and legs contorted as if holding something. It is funny as hell to anyone but you, well, maybe even you if you are me and you just had this talk an hour and a half before. There was an ironic and justified understanding of this slight suffrage. I went into the grocer’s bathroom and made for the cleanest safety net in there, but standards drop in my position. I found a nice seat and the bottom of me fell out. There was a spraying, yellow, saline, jaundiced purpose about the explosion. I checked my shorts while seated there for any moist damage and lucky I was that I had not soiled them. I just cleaned up and walked out again, with the confident walk of a sane and sound man. I picked up my beer and made it back to the Ford. I popped one of the beers and knocked back about a third of it as I was driving back north on 12 for the last curl of that familiar track. When I got home I needed to rinse my brush and strip from the lead contaminated clothes I was in. My oldest daughter had been vomiting for the last few hours and the youngest had gone through about eighteen hours of it the day before. I began to unload my tools from the front floor board and a quick, short cough caught me unaware, and I puked up the beer I’d just taken. A cold cloud came over me like on a hot oceanfront day when a temperature inversion brings some otherworldly fog out of the deep and sprinkles salt tears all slowly over the pricking heat exhausted skin which lay spread upon the sand. I rushed to clean and spin my brush and then stripped down and made for the decontamination tank. After having been unleaded I threw on some clean shorts and a tee shirt. The wife and babes were lying on the couch under a thick, soft blanket and I wanted to lie down too! There was nowhere but the bed really, so I slid under the sheets and started my sweating. In just the past fifteen minutes I had become a shaking hell. My teeth chattered. My vertebrae felt fused. Every muscle convulsed as I lay still, eyes closed beneath the sheets in my cool, dank dungeon. That’s when the visuals hit me. That’s when I realized a whole new definition of illness, or rather, a different way to observe it; perceive it. It was not unlike a very strong mushroom trip. I just began the laying down and waiting for it to be over. I was convinced now that the sickness had burrowed inside of me too. I saw pictures but like holograms while unclear as well of the character of the virus, there were spirals and bright yellow colonial hatchings against the tarot card black rag woven scarf; like chess pieces posed and unmoving; bright, negative and supine on a borderless velvet battlefield…the watching of parading imagery was all that there was; it taught me in five minutes or five hours something that is revolutionary to me. I have been taught a new way to see. I thought of my daughters and I thought of that eighteenth century seaman with his. Closing my eyes I scrape the windows outside of the attic where his daughter drew last breath, and I tell him to myself, go away to light again, your daughter is waiting and well, again. You need to be with her, the sea is endless and entirely empty for you now. Only gales and whitecaps roll in the grey and the warm sunshine will never come back for you. Go, and be with her at home. I lie in bed and shake and my daughter brings me a penny; “Daddy, I found you this penny…were you looking all over for it?” Yes baby…thank you, I was looking all over for it. I love you. I would walk those steps I thought. I was now convicted; daydreams covered in toil get the best and I felt at that moment like a bona fide American Plague Transducer. 218 Glasgow Street was a known infirmary during the breakout of Yellow Fever in Portsmouth in 1855. It was owned by a doctor and he converted the house into a hospital during the epidemic. Damn, I thought, I have lain upon her for too long. Never mind the lead poisoning, the painter’s colic. While all of this headway strikes me as completely unbelievable it also reminds me that I have known in my life of things which I could have no knowledge of. I am no master; I have no practice, study nor plan. I watch and sometimes in the watching I mix worlds. I smash panes, folding the spaces and times and I talk to the no voice. It’s about the scraping known lead based substances from an historical and sick building while holding thin cotton to your breathing and navigation and all the while having a proper respirator in the front seat maybe seventeen steps away round trip. It’s about that forced knowing that there is danger when there is and that there is not danger when there is not. It’s the sitting on the not perfect toilet seat in the grocery store, the gas station when you really have one other public choice; a fool’s choice and so you make the move, you pick your seat and you suck on your sick. It is how I define poetry as it has revealed itself to me in eyes, wind, dead beach animals, wild flowers and burns; in structure, practice, form and rule: i force a clean soul against the filth and the dirty edges, the inevitability of a human world and record what it feels like. That, there about adds me up; Portsmouth, Virginia again. I know that I couldn’t possibly have the lead poisoning, not the Yellow Fever, but being next to that and the feeling there bred inside my sick mind leaves the beard feeling on fire –just slightly, and the lips, the taste in the mouth and the cold drink…I tend to get overly concerned for no good reason. There is enough sickness, poverty, spare change beggars, sign holders, old men walking dogs, city workers, perfumed walking women and bankers holding Thursday money until Friday and plenty of malignant and benign repute to fill our sand wagons for a hundred lifetimes; for some reason though, a crooked toilet seat, where was I? Damn these sick, sick dreams of mine.