Review by Eric Lyden.
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If you’d like to get copies of the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader, contact briana@0800phantom.co.nz or via our Facebook page to be added to our mailing list. Alternatively, all the issues can be downloaded for a small fee from Amazon.com for our international readers.
Jim Wilson’s Blog, 16 December 2015
Another Xmas is upon us.
At this time of year, we are meant to be with our families (such as they might be) and to be all joyous and giving and everything else that goes around under that dear old mulberry tree where life is confusing at best.
We may look at people on the street at this time of year and they seem to be happy and winging their way home with a Xmas tree under each arm and whistling too. Here in America, I see glowing people wearing four layers of designer clothing as the winter closes in. That’s what they do to keep people at bay.
But, at Xmas I always think of my friends who may be stuck on Methadone or may be in rehab or jail and they may even be dead because they couldn’t hack the pace. The pace quickens in our electrified and digital age. It’s love one day and a landslide the next.
I know everyone is pre-occupied with either American or New Zealand politics right now and the ‘political subjects’ of the day which may include Muslims, Guns, Donald Trump, Social Media and Climate Change.
In America in 2013 almost 25,000 people died of prescription drug overdoses and about 16,000 of the deaths were from prescription opiates. Heroin overdoses are not included in these figures. That makes the data all the more frightening. It’s not terrorism, it’s merely ‘junkies’. Junkies are the scum who come to borrow a glass of milk and sell your refrigerator for ten dollars.
So, that’s mainly what I think about when I’m not turning my mind to beauty. If I want to feel devastated, then I think of the people whose breathing gave out after one too many OxyContin.
Opiate overdose is a very lonely way to die and I’ve had a lot of mates who went way out west from far too many opiates or the ramifications of using those self-same drugs. Maybe it was the liver disease that got them or the heart attacks.
I’ve overdosed on opiates a few times and spent time in ‘Intensive Care’. I’m bound to say they were good drugs. I didn’t wake up thinking about politics, I woke up wanting to get loaded again with my mates.
My mates who died were all lonely people and in the end they didn’t ‘connect’ with anyone. They had no possibilities that excited them.
I also have friends who will pick up their methadone a day or two before Xmas and then consume it all at once. They’ll end up ‘hanging out’ on Xmas day and feeling a cold that goes right through to their very marrow. If they had twenty-five heaters in the house and even though it may be summer, it won’t make a damn bit of difference. They will have Antarctica within them until they get another dose.
I am speaking as someone who once spent a Xmas Day or two in jail whilst hanging out and that taught me a lot about life. No one is going to come and rescue you because no one can save you from yourself. That grip on one’s own throat is the hardest thing to remove in this life.
Drug addiction… Self-inflicted? I really don’t think so. I merely think that a lot of people in the world today do not know what to do with their Emotions and Feelings. Many people are in a very deep and miserable painful place and I feel for them. They might scream about John Key or Donald Trump for a while to alleviate the pressure of being powerless and isolated.
Or they might even drive accidentally into a bridge.
Personal responsibility? I believe in that as well. But I have to say I have met many people in ‘recovery’ who, in my opinion, are way more toxic than they ever were when they were stoned. They might be dry and sober and yet spiritually malicious. They may be borderline personalities. Does praying to God help these people?
Yes, it’s no good trip for a lot of folk at Xmas. You may be around toxic people. Your own family might be a contagious disease.
But, my year went reasonably well. I have learned to keep moving and forge ahead. I have something like 22 completed chapters of my memoir finished and Phantom Billstickers has done well and prevailed over the odds. That’s all very satisfying.
There’s been some great books this year and some very good music. I’ve admired some really gnarly cars and met some people I like a lot. I’ve taken some okay photographs and met some of the coolest doggies (and cats) on God’s Green Earth. I’ve walked in the woods a lot and admired mother nature for doing what she does. I’ve missed my own Mum a lot (1999 R.I.P) but I’m better with all that now.
I feel loved and that’s different for me. I’ve never really felt loved before and I’ve always been so difficult (in many ways) that it was impossible to love me. I regularly said ‘no’ to the ice-cream because I was afraid. But now I sense that I’m letting the veil down. It had to go and it belongs way back there in dear old Russell Street in Dunedin.
My parents were very good people but in our house sunshine wasn’t really allowed and the summer was outlawed. That’s probably why I listened to the Velvet Underground (and countless others) but those days are over now. I enjoy putting up poetry posters around the world like I mean it man. I now like sunshine better than a black jersey and a pair of sunglasses in a dark room.
Thanks to those who stuck to me like glue this year and all the others.
I am a work in progress.
Much Love,
Jim Wilson
Jim Wilson’s Blog, 20 November 2015
It could be I’m just peeved from restless dreams last night. I was dreaming about Levon Helm again. Levon was a truth teller and we all know that. You get them every so often in the music industry and then everyone grows a beard, gets glasses and boots like they were a graphic designer and follows in behind. The ones who follow make all the cash. The guy in the front gets cancer and a weight on his shoulders. Still, who’d want to be Phil Collins?
Yesterday afternoon a young couple checked into this old Victorian-style boarding house where I am staying in New Jersey. I have the very top garret on the third floor and there is a shoebox room next to me and the young couple got it.
The guy bore a close resemblance to Steve McQueen and he looked like he’d fight anything going and lots of things that weren’t going as well. He must have been 28 and he drove a ’78 Corvette Stingray with plenty of rust and deeply sensuous headlights. This young man had dirty blond hair and wore Peter Fonda sunglasses. His co-offender was a Guatemalan woman, about 19, and she was sultry, beautiful and obviously difficult to please. Like all of them she wore red, which is the colour of her temperament. Jet-black hair tumbled across her face and down her back. She also had black eyes. They all do. I’ve met a few.
The man was a New Jersey hillbilly and she was a free spirit. I’ve seen it before. In the end, no one is happy.
In the middle of the night, I was woken by sounds that were like a Panzer division moving into the forests around Stalingrad in 1942. I could hear the tanks screeching and thrusting and then reversing back for cover as the Red Army retaliated in the snow. Or seemingly so. There was a rhythm, a climb and a crescendo to all of this and it went up and down and it was demonic. I began to hear Shostakovich’s “The Leningrad Symphony”, but I also recognised that Levon Helm was driving one of them tanks. He wanted the ultimate fruition and victory as well. It’s not very often you get that in this make-believe and pretend world. The tank commanders were screaming over their radios to each other and laughing deliriously. Leningrad or Petersburg what does it matter, it’s always the same old story. It’s a wolf pack out there and it’s coming to get you if you stand still.
With all these noises coming from the shoebox, I slowly came to realise that there was also a film crew in the hallway. I had a spiritual awakening when I grasped that all this was all about a remaking of “Debbie Does Dallas”. Yes, all of this was synthetic and none of it was real at all. It seems everyone has a role to play and they more comfortable doing that.
But, I felt very disappointed.
Like everyone, when I am pushed too far I can retaliate and I have certain principles which I will fight for. I have a decent sort of fury, but I have learnt the hard way that it is pointless to fight with the ‘eggs’ of this life. My grandmother had red hair, my mother had flecks of it and I have the temperament as well.
Here are some of the things that slut me to the very bottom of my ball bag and some that I love as well:
Lastly, I saw someone using a squeegee on car windows in the mist here in New Jersey the other morning. This guy was cleaning other peoples’ windscreens up and down the street and no one else would have known. I saw this as an act of Love & Faith. Try it, it works.
And, as John Adams said: “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.”
That’s wisdom whereas I am just a fool.
Jim Wilson’s Blog, 22 October 2015
I am living in New Jersey and it is a very pleasant time of year with the leaves changing colours and everything. Shortly it will begin to get cold but as for now the air is merely fresh. The autumn colours of New Jersey are every bit as delightful as those in Central Otago. I love waking up to the sounds of V8 engines outside the window. I love it that it will snow in a month or so.
I’ve just spent five weeks travelling through Europe putting up poetry posters and mine is a privileged position for which I have a lot of gratitude. My life has never been easy but sometimes it has been very sweet.
I began putting up poetry posters wherever I could about six or seven years ago. The act of merely doing this expresses most everything that I believe about this life. When life has handed me a lemon (and it has done this many times) I have always steered towards that which is beautiful.
Some people, places and things exist only to drag other people down. A man does his best in difficult circumstances. There is so much bitterness, violence, sarcasm and irony floating around the world these days that you may have thought we would have changed as a species. And yet, I actually think we’ve all gotten worse. New accusations are leveled every day and seemingly everyone knows how to do things better. A bloke who has never worked in a manager’s position knows how to manage everything better and so on and so forth. A guy screws a chicken, ends up in jail, and is never forgiven. People like to hold on to things like an old-timer at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting who is still talking about that slice of toast and butter he had on that bad night 35 years ago.
I believe people can change.
But, it is a long way easier to carry a burden than it is to let it go and hatred and distemper are major burdens for people everywhere. In New Zealand, we have paradise on earth and yet I see so many unhappy citizens. A lot of them have everything they could possibly need and more.
I’ve had some very touching things happen to me lately.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris and then I flew into the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. It is always stressful for me to face Customs and Immigration in any country, but particularly in the USA.
I have to have a ‘waiver of ineligibility’ to enter here. I tried for more than twenty years (making some bad mistakes along the way) before I was granted one. I am not eligible to live in the USA because of a Heroin conviction dating from 1974 and I have convictions dating up to 1992 that make even coming here for a short period something that can be disputed and it has been.
But there is genuine human kindness at every turn and I just believe that people have a deep fear of being ‘touched’ emotionally. A lot of people would rather go in the direction of the anger. I’ve been there and it was a bad trip. That place is where you lose all your faith.
At Customs and Immigration in Philly the first officer at the desk, looking at my computer profile, asked me what the hell I had done, had I smoked something weird back in the 1970 and listened to some Grateful Dead maybe? Well, that’s weird enough, but I said, “No, worse than that. It was Heroin and Cocaine and I took it the man’s way and I was a chemist burglar.”
He loosened up given my honesty and became a human soul and a kind and caring one at that. It’s remarkable where you can meet these people. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t being either defensive or angry, I was just being me. I am prepared to be vulnerable because I consider that I have nothing to lose. I’ve been kicked by the best in the trade.
On the walk out the back to my ‘second interview’, the officer walked like John Wayne and he was quite a cowboy. He must have been six foot three and he had quite a big mop of tousled, black, Italian hair. He told me that he’d just worked in downtown Philadelphia on security during the Pope’s visit. A good Catholic I would have thought. The new Pope seems like a very kind man and yet you see some people railing against him and suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot.
At “Secondary” there were three officers sitting at an elevated bench slightly above me. They asked why I couldn’t get a Green Card and I said that having a Heroin conviction, even if it is from 1974, makes me completely ineligible. I said, “Not even an 85-year-old big time Jewish lawyer with nose hairs from downtown Philadelphia could fix that” and they howled with laughter and they hooted and gesticulated. That’s a damn good dose of humanity to be carrying on with. Laughter breaks ice.
The woman who interviewed me said that her brother was currently going through a Heroin relapse and this touched me to the very bottom of my soul. That’s what I live for. Poetry, music and writing quite often reach me in this way too and so I really am grateful. But I’m just like anyone else, I have a synthetic layer to be carrying on with and yet underneath am a frightened kid who likes to come out and play when it’s safe.
The second touching episode happened when I was having a burger down at Five Guys in Wayne, Pennsylvania. An old guy pulled into the parking lot in a Volvo Station Wagon. He had to be about 95 years of age and he was accompanied by a fine doggie that must have been heading for 37. I love people who love animals and my doggies have gotten me over some tough hills.
The old man was wearing a sweatshirt from a local high school and Mister Magoo type eyeglasses. The glasses had so much magnification that I am sure they would have highlighted Mars if a person with ordinary sight looked through them. This gentle looking man wasn’t an inch over five feet tall and he was almost completely doubled over.
At this age he was kind, of course he was. Anger cannot usually get people through a long life because it tends to chew up the body. Anger and fear often have people hiding in the corner of damp apartments and all by themselves. I’ve been there in my life and I didn’t like that very much. I put needles into my arms in those apartments and with water running down the wallpaper as well. At the time I thought I was shooting up love but I was really just loathing the world and myself.
At Five Guys, they have sacks of peanuts in their shells that you can eat whilst you wait on your order. I saw the old man hunch all the way out the door in small, kindly and unsure steps and then he slowly fed his dog peanuts. This made me feel really good and I need to see kindness to survive. I need kindness to get myself out of the building and to live my day. I’m sure we all do and I think the best thing to do is to give kindness away wherever you can.
The third touching episode was at a shoe store. I had put the toe out of my sneakers on the European leg of the trip. I went to a shoe store owned by two Italian brothers. The brothers were both in their 60s. I believe the store is called “D’Amicantonio & Sons” and it is also in Wayne, Pa. The two brothers had me try on dozens of pairs of shoes over the course of two hours before I spent less than $85. Their grandfather, an immigrant from Italy, started the store in 1932 and it has existed since then. It is no fad or flight of the imagination, it is real.
Their father was in the USA Army at Anzio beach in 1944, which wasn’t a particularly nice place to be. The brothers (Lou and Bob) showed me two pairs of shoes that their grandfather had made in the 1930s for a woman who died before she got to wear them. Good manners and good service is one thing, but an authentic approach to life is something else again.
The brothers were dismayed that the internet had taken a lot of business, but they weren’t shrill and opinionated and they were philosophical. Sometimes in this life the best things don’t work and you have to let them go. The brothers felt to me to be sad yet true.
The new album by Keith Richards (‘Crosseyed Heart’ is superb and he has become easily the bluesman that his heroes (Robert Johnson and the like) were in their day. It is a tender, warm, sincere, and joyful album and is the best thing I have heard for probably a decade. Every so often one comes down the pike, a person unafraid to express himself in a good way.
In America, I’ve learned that there is a new trend in psychiatry back to ‘talk therapy’ (genuine human contact). In a major study conducted by the government, it has been found that many schizophrenics do better with talk and ‘understanding’ and a reduction in pharmaceutical intervention. Many schizophrenics have fewer hallucinations and are able to work better and have healthier lives by talking out their souls. I have thought this may have been the case all the way through these last two or three Prozac Decades (my term). I think it’s a crazy, crazy thing for any government to deprive a person of that which is real and that which touches us to our souls and that which so obviously sustains us. The tests results are not saying to jump off medication, they are merely saying that people like warmth and understanding as well and that this can improve people.
Anyway, that’s my five cents worth. I’m off to walk a hill by myself.
I hope love and peace live within you,
Jim Wilson
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