HEAVEN HAD A PASS-KEY

8. THIS HEAVEN HAD A PASS-KEY

The metaphysical preacher was holding my hand and he said something like 'he leadeth me to lie down in still waters' but I can't remember and for all I know it could have been 'he leadeth me down to the waters of his still' a country boy backwoods drinking joke if I ever heard one OR he could have just been taking me to Stillwater's - some bar/pub frequented by those fey religious types who haunted the shoddy waterfronts of any city - the Edgar Allen Poe's of overtime so to speak - but I told him instead of that let's read the racing form and settle down together but he laughed and said 'Hoagy Carmichal could make a song of anything you say my boy my boy my lovely lovely boy' (I was fourteen and had just invented jetting) : so anyway I got the fuck out of there and enlisted in the Salvation Army and was never heard from again but the things I learned in that service still hold me in good stead - things like the Empire State Building has 721,000 rivets and only two were done incorrectly and the subway series is really just a line of railroad cars underground the Queen of Sheba was a man the spot where Broadway meets 12th is holy and there are men REALLY REALLY men who survived World War I still living in the off-limits caves of Central Park but this was back in 1968 I was living in a hellhole at 509 e.11th Street stealing military vehicles and putting people up in my safe-house of draft-resisters on their way to Canada three apartments on the second floor where nobody idly played but everyone was nervous and it was right next to Paradise Alley on the corner (I've written about this all before so read backwards if you can) the government cars were sanded and painted across the street and we got 2 hundred bucks a pop from the Puerto Rican body-shop bastards who took the cars uptown (way) for resale to the masses and people died so what - Groovy and his girlfriend and then Billy Jo and Holly somehow ended up together chopped up like meat in my mother's old steamer trunk from 1923 that had crossed the ocean in 1898 with my criminally insane and now long dead grandfather pulling in from Greece and Italy or Albania or somesuch cranky bullshit - I couldn't never care about the past but it somehow always seemed to either show up uninvited or to be gaining on me nonetheless - and this Heaven had a pass-key but one I never could find (and this shit's all true you just can't make it up).