Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Birthday Party or My New Friend
I'm not much for the old blame game. If I wipe the vaseline off the mirror with a flanneled elbow and stare, I see who's usually behind my latest SNAFU. My one and only love. C'est moi.
October is always nice in Ghent, the handsome wellfed sons of the bourgeoisie doing cartwheels and playing frisbee with their designer dogs in Stockley Gardens, the first crisp nights of cruising Mowbray Arch as the deadly mist rises off the Elizabeth, the jellyfish coating August's surface gone, God knows where.
I was strolling past the little Universalist church, venue for Vito Russo promoting his infamous and wonderful book. The tiring shallow queens said, in their bad Bette Davis voices, " I don't see why anyone would listen to, let alone pay three dollars for the dubious privilege of hearing this person orate ow-on gaize in the ..."
"Hey fucker."
"Well, gosh, Mark, fancy meeting you here."
"Got any money?"
"Sure, it's Saturday night. What's up?"
" My ttooth aches like a motherfucker and these stupid fuckin pills I got from Levy just make me wanna throw up."
"Mark, what do you need? Whisky?"
"If I can find Rowboat, he can score a bottle for me from some illegal nigger nip joint."
"Okay. You have no cash, I take it."
"Spent it on blow and these ... here, take the fuckin' pills, man. He gave me twenty of 'em and there's eighteen left."
"Let's go."
If you're meeting Mark Belek for the first time, you should know a few things. For an ignorant Virginia Beach waste case, he has a natural elegance and civility all his own. If Mark decides to befriend you, he doesn't care if you're a crossdressing graverobber or a lunatic wino. He wants to know all about alternative life styles and has investigated a few himself. He's a slight but wiry blonde with a big heart and a mouth to match. He also became a very good, idiosyncratic singer songwriter during the twenty odd years we didn't communicate. I'm loathe to praise the social ntework but that, and later youtube are where I found him.
The pills? Vicodin, the beginning of a long friendship. " A semisynthetic opioid with the properties of morphine and methadone." That's my old PDR's description of hydrocodone or Hy, as I call it now. I was so wasted in religions class one Thursday that when Sobule spoke of Jesse Jackson's rhetorical grandeur, without irony and referred to the Hymie town incident as "a case of the sort of thing we all say amongst our own group, whoever they may be and not worth all this silly punditry." I mistook it for a cryptic allusion to hydrocodone/APAP 5/500. Jesus gawd. Steve Sobule was a rotund honorary rebbe all over Tidewater whose actual work - he was oddly secretive about it - involved city social services, which, as expected, needed all the help they could get.
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