(Originally posted Tuesday, October 16, 2007)
Dear Leticia,
The fall burns red in its autumn fugue colors, and yet you still haven’t written to me. But I don’t despair; I have several new writing assignments, and a dewy eyed optimism has borne me up in its sylph-like slender arms. I have been told to write a feature at the sump magazine about the dismal state of America’s pipes, especially those in our Lady Gotham. The original rough text given to me for this article by the hucksters and public relations people who call themselves scientists says that these pipes they want to install are the latest, most technologically advanced type of slip-sock boring technology. But I’m too much the poet to reiterate this in such crass, vulgar scientific terms. Instead, I intend to write it in my own supple, filigreed way, and thus have begun it: “Today in New York, great men are laying great, erect pipes into the gentle furrow of this, our sighing wench of a city, and as they sob their fluids into her, let our lady be better for it.” The editors were not happy with that one, I can tell you pointedly, Leticia, but I like to think that you are somewhere right now noshing a tender croissant in your pretty rouged mouth and having a small titter over it.
Yes, you were right in that letter you wrote me ten years ago to detect the note of sardonic sour cream in my observation of the jazz poetry we heard on the wharves of Monaco. Yes, I am of open mind. But I always try to regard such work with a bit of postmodern dismissive-ness, if only because it enhances my enjoyment of the form. If it gives you any perspective, this is the same attitude with which I approach agitprop theater, miniature golf and sex.
The last you heard from me, I was probably going on and on about my long-ago love for Mavis. Yes, as we all know, it turned out to be a grave mistake, yet once upon a time, however foolish it may sound, I did think of her as the great love of my life. I remember how we’d fight over Nietzsche and I would make her cry, and then we’d go back to her house and I would intensely roger her before we’d go hear Camille Paglia speak at the university center. Ah, the feelings of pain and the loss were intense and had their own taste and shape and smell. Good god, I’ve made myself hungry.
How is it that you and I were not ever lovers ourselves, Leticia? Only friends in the great platonic way men and women of the late Romantic period were? Oh yes, people wondered about us, and sometimes even wondered if, given our abstemiousness, I were a flaming homosexual. For convenience’ sake, I let them think so. We laughed over that too, at least I did until I realized later that your beautiful flatmate Yssa was only kissing me ironically. Meanwhile, you would spend weekends with your boyfriend Brutus at his dacha and do God only knows what in his sweaty arms. I would like to think that our long talks about quantum physics and Wittgenstein only made your sex life with another man that much richer.
But for two such as you and me to be romantic…that was beneath us. Because you and I, we negated our physical instincts. Better yet, as Marx would say, we sublated them until they became something more profound, of a more intense truth. For us it was not sex: It was all watching punk music and the speaking of French poorly and buying dime bags from a guy named Jo-Jo on St. Mark’s in the cold. I think of Jo-Jo often whenever I delude myself that I am being an outlaw. Mostly when I throw away parking tickets. That fucking man, Giuliani.
Think of me often, Leticia, and when you are down, try to recall what we used to say to the kids in the soup kitchens: “Every time you vote for a Republican, children, an angel gets syphilis.”
The country will give us no peace,
Salo
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