Читать книгу Alamo Theory - Josh Bell - Страница 9

Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)

Back when my voice box

was a cabinet-full of golden vibrators, and my hair

fell white across the middle of my back

like a child’s wedding dress,

I made love to at least a dozen girls

dressed up to look like me: the hotel bed a sky

filled with the flock

of our south-flying mic scarves,

the back of my head and the front

appearing simultaneously

in hotel mirrors, and the twin crusts of our makeup

sliding off into satin

like bits of California coast. I heard my own lyrics

coming out of the tent

of their beautiful wigs, my lyrics driven back

toward me, poled into me, demanding of me

the willing completion of vague circus acts

I’d scribbled down, once, on the back of a golf card

or a piece of toilet paper. Sometimes I myself

wonder what I was thinking then, but those words

went on to live forever, didn’t they, radioed out

into the giant midwestern backseat

and blasted into kneecaps and tailbones

by that endless tongue of Berber carpeting

blanketing the American suburbs, boys and girls

strung like paper lanterns from here to Syracuse

along my microphone cord. Who rocks you now

rocks you always, I told them all,

and all of them somehow wearing

a homemade version of the same leather pants

I’d chosen to wear onstage that night;

all of them hoping to enter me — to enter anyone —

the way they thought I entered them,

and the way I entered them was wishing

I was somewhere else, or wishing I was

the someone else who’d come along

to enter me, which was the same thing. Love

in battle conditions requires a broad

taxonomy, queerness has its ever-more-visible degrees.

Josh, I know you know what I’m talking about,

you have the build of a stevedore. Which reminds me,

as a child in Nanjing,

I sculled the junks for my bread and I slept

in a hovel along the Chiang Jiang River.

I bred mice in a cage there who built their nests

from the frayed rope I’d taken from the decks, and one spring,

when the babies did not emerge, I lifted

up the rock that hid them, and I found

they’d grown together, fused with each other

and the tendrils of the nest. I held them up, eleven blind tomatoes

wriggling on a blackened vine. And now you come to me

in this Chinese restaurant in Malibu,

asking if you can help me. Please tell Circus Magazine I love them

truly, and please pass Pamela this message:

If you get back to Malibu by springtime, drop by the houseboat,

and I’ll rock your ass as far as Cho-fu-Sa.