Little big genius man

It was fun being a genius.

At the North York Mirror, where my novel was reviewed, and later at the college, people would say,"There goes Ivan the genius.
Anybody at the staff lounge could glance at me and Newman Wallis, dean of arts, and immediately deduce who the important person was.

My wife couldn't stand it all.

"Okay genius, here's a mop. The kitchen floor has a superhighway on it, full of cigarette ash from where you do your nightly pace after class, drinking cheap beer and all alone on top of that."

"But I am an artist, Martha."

"Artist isn't too far off from another word that starts with an a."

Sigh. Back to the "artists" we really are.

It all came from a slim novel that gained a large cult following. It dealt with survival and had a catchy title which somehow, years later, interfaced with the computer world: THE BLACK ICON.

The success was almost immediate. CBC interviews, offers from the Sunday Sun, an editorial stint with the late Martin Lynch, poet of typography and legend at The Globe and Mail, my own newspaper column in TOPIC (Bradford ON), a call from the college and I was on my way.

But then genius is something a family develops over many generations. I seemed to have had few antecedents.

Dropped in a potato field in Ukraine many moons back, I knew my first cousin was a potato and sensed for sure that my family crest could have contained two crossed hoes rampant on a potato field. What I was receiving was the fruit of Mr. Trudeau's idea of muliticulturalism, a kind of affirmative action fostered by a generous society. I knew I wouldn't last. And I didn't.

I picked up a whiskey habit and a pin-sized hooker who told me things I liked to hear.

"We have IQ's of 140," said Lana the Hooker, whose day job was systems analyst."We can create things, make them sing and dance. People hate us."

The future, as always, was the dead past and all its wise men. I was caught up in biblical wisdom. Suffice to say there was a snake in the garden with a punk haircut and if the garden was the marriage bed that's all you need to know.

It took a long time to fall, to meet kindly Wanda the Welfare Lady who said it takes a lot of detail to make up a life story, life being long and one slim book doesn't do it all. "There's more," she said.

She knew of what she spoke. The life story soon included me in somebody else's novel, a Damon-Runyon world of pimps, priests and police. How the hell did I get into THAT novel?

Someone was now writing me.

Never mind Margaret Atwood (with whom I sometimes communicate). I was now involved the THE HOOKER'S TALE and I wanted out.

I am finally clean and straight.

But like another seeker in the vintage movie Deliverance, I wake up in my home in the middle of a subdivision and wonder what being a seeker (Genius?) was all about.

I had all the perks of being a genius long before the genius came. Because of good families on both sides and the healthy society we had in the Seventies, the money and the fame came, it seems, before I even put serious pen to paper. I had been the new Superhero: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION MAN...MULTICULTURAL MAN.

It takes a family, and I had tampered with commandments, become a spoiled brat, satisfying all appetites, while the family waited for accomplishments.

They finally came, thirty years later, but in dribbles and in bits.

In today's world, you can almost put Humpty-Dumpty together again, but it will still be a patchwork.

Po' egghead.

In The Crook of Her Arm

IN THE CROOK OF HER ARM
(or, An Exploration into the nature of eschatology)

No one saw him leave home. No one saw him on the train where he had reconsidered the wife of the bright yellow day to whom he had just said goodbye. No one saw him leave for Mexico City on the early morning plane. No one saw him land at Mexico City Airport. No one saw him getting on the bus for San Miguel de Allende. Only God saw him.

He had felt for the first time in his eye yesterday's tear, and it was still only yesteday to him as he moved ahead into time, and he wondered how this could be. He knew he was racing so far ahead of himself as to reach the point where a soul could not ever catch up with the body if the body ever stopped moving, towards that new flat land of a Dali, perhaps, a surreal field of shot horses and fallen women. But he had to move, to escape the dreams he had been having, the apartments of horror where there were staring Medusa faces. And and white hotels with burning women standing outside, though the burning women were never consumed.

No one saw him going upstairs up a curving ballustrade to rent his apartment, no one saw him in his room with the wood fireplace for heat, sitting at his typewriter, no one saw him there in San Miguel de Allende, where the grass was dream grass and his clay house an old Grandee's house of pale smoke and history.

Then he saw her, or, rather, she saw him. There, where southwest was another part of the world. There, where the girls were tall and slightly knockneed, a touch of Cherokee, perhaps, certainly Tarascan, local Indian... And like a lonesome woman she came to him, felt his loneliness and they had found each other.

Yet on the train, he had considered himself a still-married man, who had so recently said goodbye to a wife of the bright yellow day, to soon rent a monk's cell, to sigh in a kind of relief at having left it all, to immediately be plunged into a precipice of silence, for there was a vacuum here, and a vacuum is either death or great power.

And soon there was an entaglement with the Cherokee woman. There were sparks among the bougainvillea and the flowers, and fights, and love again. But very quickly, they fused together.
It was then that he decided to write his beautiful novel in two parts.

This began to do.

Then he and the Cherokee woman separated again.

And when he got home there was no one there as he walked past the dog, past the bird, past the blighted tree around which the lilacs had all died, but the phlox and the daisies were out, where his wife appeared to him, now an ochre stranger and her dark-eyed lover a worse shade.

And he knew not what to do, save go insane, and he was not ready for that and he sent for his Cherokee love out of Mexico by way of Montana and California, for that was where she had lived, and she came to him carrying to great wicker baskets and an enormous quilt.

And so they now settled in Toronto and every five days he would see his heartbreakingly beautiful children, take them to theatres and sunny hills and dells and the Cherokee woman would come with them and she would look after them, fuss after them and bring her gifts and read them stories and check out the advertisements for the best children's plays, for she appeared to love him, and so, them.

And it soon became apparent to him that he had made a dreadful mistake, that she was not the one, that he should never have gone off to Mexico to write his beautiful novel in two parts, for he had done nothing more than to fall into a strange bed, though the Cherokee womand did love him, he knew. For they had separated, he'd left her there in Mexico as he ran back home and he had felt a deep loss, there had been a fusion and both of them had felt the tear.

And yet on the road, in his car, on the way to his old teaching spot, he would be seized with longing, regret, pain for want of the wife of his youth, calling her name, going mad behind the wheel of the car he had retrieved as part bargain in the failed marriage, yet it had not been his car but hers, as it had not been his own life but hers.

And he felt, as two rook-like birds along the road seemed to pick at him, his liver, spleen, brains that he was in some Hieronymous Bosch fantasy, the birds were eating him and he was near to exploding.

"You are going crazy, said the Cherokee woman. You need an analyst."

And soon there was the analyst, who merely shook his head and recommended a stronger doctor and the stronger doctor recommened an insane asylum where the grass was again dream grass, there where the mind turned to oceans of pepper and the Cherokee woman was on another side of the world, and all the songs were about the Hotel California.

And while in the Hotel California, he felt entire pieces of himself being ripped away, entire chunks of Laura, her body, her breasts, her vagina, old sepia-toned family portraits of their trips to the Barbados, their bearded elders, their children, all ripped away by an adultery that screamed to God even though it had been all so easy, for it had no conscience, this sex thing, though this experience somehow led to the terrible triangle of God.

And here, he crossed himself.

And presently, they appeared to make a vegetable of him, "this is how we make an asshole", filling him with doubt,guilt and religion and so mutated, he was soon thrust out into the world as a good tailor or taxi driver before he had hardly learned how to cut cloth or read a map.
And all the while, the Cherokee woman had been writing and telephoning him, "Doofus, wake up," but he had already gone into the nearly fatal confusion that is madness, and it had been too late. And the Cherokee woman was forced to go to Idaho City, Idaho, there with the potatoes, his cousins now, out there where West was another side of the world.

And then, in a parallel universe of strange books like Solaris, there appeared a third woman who somehow promised to repair all, to answer his every wish, including the need to go home again.
And this third woman had something of the man in her and she seized him by the woman inside and gave him a harrowing and a shaking, though he yet came inside her mouth and so enslaved her.

And presently, he met another woman. He was impoverished now, because he had gone off the scale, one woman after another and not women to marry; he was on a rollercoaster, a series of rollercoasters on which beside him had sat differeint women, the last of which had robbed him of everything he had, all fifty thousand of it.

And this woman saw that he was poor while she took him into her mouth and tasted him and did not like it, did not like him, did not like to see his ears down there between which was death on two legs and the song in his head may well have been Queen. And she left him to marry a dealer in real estate and lived happily ever after.

While he again became a teacher.

Teacher? Adulterer. What is left after a man reaches the stench of the tomb? Down among the criminal elements, down among the losers, alcoholics, thieves. The garden of Eden is the marriage bed and the fiery angel will punish.

And he took up with a lounge dancer whose mouth had had again violated, causing her too to leave in disgust, but not before he say his own dirty pants hanging on the wall, which he soon picked up, dressing himself in the messy trousers.

And as he put on his drousers, he realized that the typewriter had been gathering dust and grime for a long time now and he realized that it was at this time that he had to complete his novel in two parts.

And barely before had completed his novel, he was again hired by the local university to teach, for he needed an income, and it was here that he met the She, even before he finished his novel in two parts.

She was as beautiful as a star, as fine as a mother's body, a star of 1930's films, the IT Girl, Clara Bow, blonde as Greta Garbo, sexy as a girl standing against a wall in the sun, her head back, inviting a lover.

She would not let him get too close. She would only respond to him part way and he had to content himsel with sleeping in the crook of her arm. He was harboring a love. In the crook of her arm.

But in the crook of her arm had been a pinprick, a deep one.

It was the cocaine she loved first, and then him.

And she tried to make him come along, and he spat it out and was soon off to another trip to Mexico.

Where he would write his beautiful novel in two parts.

My computer is wonky. I have become schizoid...And so Am I :)

 For the first time in years, I have had no answer at all from my friend the local editor-in-chief of the local newspaper.

 

Maybe she thinks I have finally fallen out of my tree.

 

This is what I sent her: 

 

 

Hi Debora Kelly, Ma'am.

 

 

Just doodling a bit here...But it could be edited into a guest column. But watch out.  :)

 

, March 09, 2013

My computer is wonky. I have become schizoid...And so Am I :)

My old computer is wonky.

 

I am wonky.

 

He/she/it/ is wonky.

 

My semi-girlfiend wants to bandy words with me, even if she can't find the words to bandy.

Ain't been the same since that hospital addiction to Vicodin, and I'm sure she hasn't shaken it yet. Generic heroin?

 

"When dat horse kick, you you do the hucklebuck."

 

(From old Chubby Checker):

 

Wiggle like a stick wobble like a duck
That's what you do when you do the Hucklebuck.

 

 

Now she just wanders from room to room, looking for wine.

 

None of us have any money. Addictive relationship. Could have been defined as a dope ring, but lately, we're just a couple of dopes.

 

Joe Cocker on the FM station:

 

"You can leave your hat on

You can leave your hat on

You can leave you hat on."

 

Friend come to visit, "Ivan, you've become quite a whoremaster since I saw you last."

 

Little does he know that I haven't had any action since last year.

It's all pose. Miss Viv and I are well over sixty, and wonky, like our computer. He wants to leave his hat on too.
.

"Wiggle like a stick wobble like a duck
That's what you do when you do the Hucklebuck."

 

I am in front of the mirror, doing the hucklebuck (I been in hospital too...cross addicted).

 

Miss Viv is trying to feed her 18--year-old cat. Nothing doing. Cat can't eat without being fooled with a coating of cat treat.

We agree it's time for last rites, administered by "Elvis Priestly", who when not conducting service, will give you a pretty good Elvis imitation.

Father Priestley comes to bless the cat.

The cat seems to have recovered today,

but we are still doing the hucklebuck. Durn cross addiction.

 

There was a time when I was married, with young children, I would wander around the cottage dazed. This was no way to live, with responsibilities and children.

Had to take a job. Try to hide the fact that daddy is a freak, a writer.

People are saying "See that farmhouse, with the smoke rising from the brick chimney? Looks peaceful, idyllic there.

But a madman lives inside."

 

So I took a writing job.

Wrote about my dog, Ulysses, "When My Ulysses comes home, woof-woof, wag-wag." Gonna shoot the sonafabich.

 

This gives me an Ontario Weekly Newspaper Guild award and I get my fifteen minutes.

 It was fun being famous, at least in York Region, here in Central Ontario.

 

But fifteen minutes soon over, wife gets disgusted, "Out, damn spot. Yes, you!"

 

Loose dog in the boonies. More like the old movie, Fritz the Cat.

 Jesus, you meet characters who make you say, "You do weird shit, man."

 

You end up with Miz Viv.

Wandering from room to room, wonky, like your old computer,doing the hucklebuck.

 

A teacher whom I once deeme a bad teacher, told me once, "All talent and no judgment."

 

I can't trade on my craziness forever."

 

We're all getting long in the tooth, and what was once cute, has become pathetic.

 

Miz Viv seems to have straightened out her medication.

 

I gotta get myself straightened out.

 

After breakfast every day
She throws the want ads right my way
And never fails to say
Get a job

Sha na na na - sha na na na na

But my computer is busted. I am busted.

 

Good time Charlie's got the blues.

 

 

(I have been told that all my novels are on three levels. 1). A man's job dissatisfaction.

                                                                               2). His madness.

                                                                               3). A real source of evil.

 

,,,Could I have added the author's drinking)?