No New York

When we really think about it, when we trace the genealogy back back back, then we must come to terms with the fact that old great grandma Persimmon from the old country had a grand who was a fish with legs. That had to be an awkward family reunion with the scaly relations at one end of the table perhaps in a tray of cool mud while the more recent ancestors eyed them warily, certain that they were different but unable to articulate how it might matter. There are many ways to think about this, one of the many subjects that might possibly cross one’s mind on a train trip downtown. Here are some poems and stories to push you toward the middle of that reunion table. 

"The Things that Joey Thinks About" -- with "whathathgodwrought" by John Mayrose

"Breakup GPS" "Behind Your Paisley Curtain" "Atlas of Regret" -- with "When Galaxies Collide" by Ed Martin

"She Believes She Believes She Believes" "She Held Me Like Dawn Behind Manhattan Skyline" -- with "Talking to Myself" by Offsite

"No New York" "6 Train Rising" -- with Shadow Dance" by Ed Martin

"On My Reptilian Origin"  -- a song by Bill Gillard

"Five Strings and a Purpose" "Sparse Talent Squandered" Send Not to Know for Whom"  -- with "Slipstream" by John Mayrose

"Dragons in Subway Tunnels"  -- with "Organ Flagpole" by Tad Neuhaus, Joanna Dane, and Loren Dempster

"How to Pray to a Spider"  -- with "War on Locks" by Offsite

 "Visions of Half Sleep" is a dreamlike soundscape, a collaboration among artists in northeast Wisconsin. It is Bill Gillard's words and voice along with music by many.

More from Bill Gillard

Website: www.billgillard.com

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Transcript

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This episode is titled No New York. It features music by John Mayrose, Ed Martin, Offsite, Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, and Bill Gillard. Hypnagogia, Presomnal, Anthipnic sensations, Phantasmata, Praedormitium, the half-dream state, dreamlits, the wakefulness, sleep, transition. These all describe the land between wide awake and deep sleep. The borderland realm where we are neither alert nor unconscious, awake nor asleep, where we are neither our daytime selves nor the free roaming spirits of the dream realm. We are there right now in this pre-dream condition. Welcome to Visions of Half-Sleep, a radio show by Bill Gillard that features music by artists from all over Northeast Wisconsin. The idea is that the show takes place in the middle ground between wakefulness and deep sleep, the time between when your head hits the pillow and when you've completely vanished from this world. The words and music ease you into this other world, the place we live for one-third of our lives. Poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Agbeli, Greg Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad New House, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, Drew Whiting. Find out more about the show, about the musicians, the writing, all of it's at billgillard.com. Dreams have a species of coherence. Fragments of one vision rest on another and careen off still another until something new is birthed. But we do not enter the dream world in a mad rush, no. The journey from wakefulness passes through the middle realm of half-sleep, a rocky highland, where we spy deep dreams as they build scenery and fill their casts. We are aware, and yet not. We shudder as the dream realm flashes into bright life. Watch the doors. Levi's real Jewish rye bread shouts in the placard above the window. WCBS News 88 makes promises too. The flying lizards buzz in Joey's Walkman with drums that sound like toasters. The vocals of a bored kindergarten teacher. Joey taps his foot to the rhythm of the song and the train in anapestic syncopation as Joey in nurses downtown this day on his own solo, like most days, downtown to the village. After a day at Pignatelli, his high school in the Upper East Side, after six hours with the Pignotelli Jesuits, down to the small numbers where you can plot his emergence among t-shirt posters and West 8th Street LP shops. These are the things that Joey thinks about. His number four stops dead on the tracks at the 42nd Street platform doors that gape. Board commuters stand in passive. Joey wishes he was being held in the station. Smiles. Minute goes by, then two. Across a platform comes the first hint of a breeze, then a gale, then the roar of every number six local. Across the platform, on parallel tracks, as they agglutinate mists and all adjacent universes, Joey thinks. These are the things that Joey thinks about. He wants to take the four to Union Square change there, but the six is right in front of him. It's a good bet that his express will catch a local in front of this one that's grinding along to 33rd, 28th, 23rd, before 14th, or maybe the sixth across a platform will beat his number four. There are seats over there, and it's only five stops down to Ast. Joey looks at the graffiti-covered subway map, looks across the platform, the six train with its doors open wide, the four-train with its doors open wide, and the platform between them. These are the things that Joey thinks about the waveforms of many Joeys. Jump out of the four and hop onto the six. But in other universes, a few unlucky Joeys jump off the four just as those doors close. But before they can get to the six, those doors close too. And that infinite number of Joeys is left at 42nd Street contemplating ontology. A different infinite number of Joeys, including this particular one, don't run across the platform. The six closes up, but then his four shakes the wakefulness and rolls down the track like drums, drone tones. Joey presses his forehead into the door glass. Had he enough courage, he might be on that six. Instead, his four creeps inch by inch to the dark tunnel. He remembers five-year-old Joey carrying a glass bottle of milk up the stairs to their apartment. His sleeve gets caught on the railing, and the bottle slips from his hands. It shatters on the sharp edge of the concrete steps, sending milk and glass shards everywhere. His mother explodes in anger at him, and Joey's terrified look on her face, one of murderous horror to a little kid. He squeezes his eyes shut as adrenaline courses through his veins. And in an instant, the bottle, whole and unshattered, is back in his hands. He feels the tug of the railing on his sleeve and grips the wet glass tighter. His mother smiles sweetly, holds the apartment door open for him. He finally understands. Infinite universes ramify from each point in space and time. The universe where the bottle broke was still close enough to the whole bottle universe. By the force of his will, he changed tracks, jumped from one universe to another, adjacent and diverging one. By the force of his will. The tunnel lights that are flashes on good days stretch out into eons between 28th and 23rd. These are the things that Joey thinks about. He edges past a seated woman reading a paperback and opens the door between cars. He recognizes the cover of her book. Mockingbird. He read that a few weeks back. Yeah, Walter Tevis, the story of a lonely and immortal robot who wants to end his life. Sometimes the world you want is sitting right there in front of you, reading a book you love. And sometimes that world is still right there in front of you, but you might as well be a million parsecs distant. Joey steps out between the cars into the deep heart of the subway night and inhales. He can see only her legs through the door, jeans and leather boots. The subway wind tossles his hair, and the four begins its screeching twist into Union Square. The woman stands up and moves to the door, along with every other person in New York City. Joey follows. Five people behind her. Please stand clear of the moving doors as trains enter and leave the station. The reading woman disappears into the throng. A guy plays saxophone with his case open. He sounds like Mirror in the bathroom to Joey's Brittuned ears. While people above hurry and make connections, a more courageous Joey, a better Joey would find her and tell her she's gonna love the end of Mockingbird. These are the things that Joey thinks about. A universe where he's courageous, diverging from this one again and again and again and again. When there's a chance to be bold, Joey's path fears timid. These are the things Joey thinks about as Union Square Station bends and distorts. The platform's moving to meet the trains. And also about the infinite times the train rushes to meet the platform, like a consequential love thundering down steel rails. These are the things that Joey thinks about. These are the things Joey thinks about the people big people. It was predictable that way. If it was asked to speed up, gas flowed like a fire hose into the four cylinders. The state of the brakes, or the lack of them, meant that the wheels were either rolling unimpeded or were locked in place by the handbrake. There was no in-between state, never a reason outside a certain death to consider touching that handbrake. It had been a week since he screwed up. A week since she'd answered the text, to answer his calls. On this late night, as he was getting ready for bed, he had to work early. His phone flashed the familiar name. I'm ready to talk, the text said. That's it. He was out in his car in under a minute and screaming up by 95. Ten minutes after that. She wanted to talk. On the Jersey side, he was in the whole field. That came with expectations for both of them. The Georgia Washington Bridge let him see things from her point of view. She wanted to be in charge of the reunion. He got that. He understood that. And so maybe just showing up was a shaky idea. The cross bronze sharpened his thinking. Her message was quite vague, intentionally so, no emojis. You know, a more careful, less invested reader might have sat with it for a bit. Might have even replied. Jake considered, was this going to be a disaster? What if she wanted to talk about, you know, ending things? He let the car roll over the crest of the driver bridge. Roll down the other side toward the Queens. Sweet, sweet destiny. A hundred yards ahead, brake lights flashed on, and so Jake eased into third gear. Slowly lit up on the clutch to let the engine catch. Felt between the seats for the handbrake. It was still there. Like a virtuoso. He parked at the little diner on Northern Boulevard that always closed early. He walked and then ran the final two blocks to the first floor of the house she rented with three other women. He silently lifted the latch on the gate and walked down the driveway. In the first floor window, her light was on. At a distance, he stopped. He held his breath. He imagined the curve of her shoulder, her eyebrows, the way she smiled a bit crooked. Every image deeply etched into his memory. She had to take him back. He'd tell her how very, very, very sorry he was for being so stupid and selfish. He'd stand there, head bowed, and beg for forgiveness. Going to the door would put the meeting on his terms. But Queen's rules are fun here. It's only fair. So he took out his phone and texted. Then he waited expectantly. Shadow. Familiar face. A gentleman's just tree times a few seconds away from the warning and touchdown. So we played repeated dance music. You thought about the two pedals in a soldier, the clutch and the gas. Wondered if relationships had pedals like that. One to speed up. One to engage oneself differently. Maybe a handbrake to lock everything up tight in mostly unhelpful ways. Once a relationship was rolling down the road, she pulled the handbrake. He pulled the handbrake. Handbrake was pulled. He checked his phone. The message was sent, but not yet read. He can wait. He had no brakes. Four feet long. Wrapped once, twice around her waist. One string. A simple knot. Layers of oranges and reds with one opening. A simple knot, cloth on cloth, that spirals in and in until cloth meets skin. And my thoughts like an updraft, an itchy tag. A simple knot. I'll sing love songs forever beside your Paisley curtain. In the pages of the Atlas of Regret, we ride side by side across that vast western desert. Night after night until the ice on the road and the mountain pass. In the pages of the Atlas of Regret, I press my palms against the glove box and say, You see the curve coming, don't you? It's right here on this map. My unwanted advice, and then the ice. In the pages of the Atlas of Regrets, I'm there with you to feel before knowing the gentle release of the tires from the road. Like slipping inside someplace warm and wet in the fire when your car and the ice meet. In the pages of the Atlas of Regret, I press my palms against the glove box and say, We've been here before, we've rehearsed this. Filled the pages of this Atlas of Regret, where you are my only country. An iron frame that remains a rounded smooth mistake from which everything superfluous has been burned away. Old tree. She's grown in this place. Seal roots push up gray linoleum, her body, a trunk, bark and flowant. Her hair branches with summer leaves. Purple vines curl up her calves. The same old question from the boy in the back, where he's always sat. If there are ten seeds in each apple, he says, How many apples are there in each seed? She's young, but there's a sadness in that pretty face. She lights a candle too. And then cries, holds a picture of her lover who has died. She believes in witches and a candle burns. She believes in wishes. She wishes hard. She holds her hand above the flame and feels what she felt. Tears like a crazy girl. I still love you, girl. She breaks the tears. She believes, she believes, she believes, she burns. I play my guitar and there's a picture of my lover who's died. She's young. It's always a sad task and then that pretty face. The candle burns. Calls to me. My hands are too cold to play. She wants that. You're too sensible. It was a bad thing. The candle burns. It calls to me. My hands are too cold to play. I don't believe. I don't believe. I don't believe. She held me like Dawn behind Manhattan skyline. Her dress waves in blue. She rounds the corner, disappears. I just watched my whole purpose walk away on this dirty street. And then I wandered those same streets, looking all over for her. Side of her blue dress coming out of a doorway. Night follows day and morning comes to hobo. Melted into me a daily persuasion, a knowledge of other and identical nature. Passing together of time, like endless presence, ripped apart like a tomb. The swirling of hormones, a cyclone proportion. Sometimes I wonder why it is I wake up each day when a sight of myself is repulsive to me. She held me like dawn behind Manhattan skyline. Kissed me. She says, Trapped by the lies. I say that love is the answer. You may feel pain now, she said. There's bliss over your shoulder. Yeah, back there. Because I know you will love again. She said it like a curse. I know you will love again. A radio experience that's one hour long. It's poems, music, and stories, the illusions that flash in your mind in the moments before sleep. Stories and poems by Bill Gillard, music by Bill Gillard, and others. All details are available at BillGillard.com. This episode is titled No New York. It features music by John Mayrose, Ed Martin, Offsite, Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, and Bill Gillard. Impossible looks, the lure of easy money. More poppers than oxygen in the air behind those velvet ropes. Out here, we'll never be good enough, never be hot enough, never be whole enough. Danceteria breaks through for kids with no pedigrees from Elaines. But the music, the sanded down offspring of funk, blares from every speaker in that downtown world. Lydia Lunch, Brian Eno, they check their DNA at the door, and shoot disco to Mars. Was it music? That's the wrong question. Like cardiac arrest needs a big needle through the ribcage. New York needed this album, No New York. These shows No New York. To flip your face to wake up. They pressed into vinyl life, the thing nobody bought, but everybody hungered for a lot of people. They're only shot all day to talk before caroming to their schools. In Joey's mind, he's the king of time and space, the high school hymn alone. His head's a helium balloon, a small dot lost to the sky. When she upstairs, alone, up from the double R. Joey's time just stops. She's alone. There she is, alone. Blue skirt, white collar, short black hair, red lips. She walks up from the double R that day. Her face is pale in this underground light. He tries, but he can't help himself. She flashes a smile, not at him. She blends into the gaggle. Rowena, merciful Rowena, sees Joey watching this new girl and with her friends conspires. Hey Joe. She slyly whispers. Shays her name. She wants to meet you. She's kind of shy, new at school. She loves weird music. Rowena thinks they'll hit it off. She says they'd make a match. He'd never seen her face before out here on the number six platform. Sometimes all a boy needs is for a girl to take him by the elbow and shame him into doing what scares him. And he is scared. To the souls of his converts, trains come and go. Shay will find out what they all know. He doesn't talk to girls. But in his mind, he labors through time and all the diverging lines, but then they just talk like they share the same universe. She leans forward to look in her bag, and Joey smells caramel. Her hair smells like caramel. It strikes him. That's just not fair. He's got no chance. He's in free fall now. Terminal velocity. She stands back up and smiles. I thought I forgot something. Joey might have been drooling. But I've got it. Joey thinks, you got it. Whatever it is, you got it. Shay and Jay make plans for after school. They'll have the chance to sing a song of life by bright day and blue sky. They'll give it voice and harmonies alive in Central Park. That's the plan. The two of them had one secret. Plaid skirts and ties dance in the hot breeze of the number six while Joey studies Kepler's laws of emotion, measuring the ellipses she makes as she stands among the others. Chatter stops for Delessandro. All eyes are on him now. His hair conductive copper blonde, the Teslas radiant like star stuff. He's a quasar on this platform with gold rimmed glasses, dark lenses, silk shirt, open chest to collar. D'Asandro chats up some Merrimount freshman. Her blue plaid skirt billows up as the number six Lexington Avenue local train momentums the platform. The density of Dalessandro's hair draws her to him, decays her orbit. They crowd onto the train. Her eyes flash and singe in his hairspray corona. At a 77th Street station, her friends tug at her elbow. She hits escape velocity. Just outside of D'Alessandro's event horizon. The doors close, the train rolls uptown. Joey says, Dee Man, she would follow you anywhere. In the glass, Joey's face reflects pensive but keen. He thinks of Shay that afternoon, how he started polymorphed, shattered, but no more. The train decelerates into the 86th Street Station light. And D's reflection fades. The doors open to Joey's new day. And from that table, that's not in the brain. I still test the brain. Gibson acoustic in the closet that has five strings. When she dust it off, he says he never learned to play it, but he wanted to. Says he used to listen to Woody Guthrie and New Christie minstrels and Simon and Garfunkel, and he used to dig out his old records, and he just nods. And then finally, can I try it? She says. And he says, sure. He shows her how to tune it, but she doesn't really understand, and shows her how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the highest string. The next day she stops at a bookstore near the ferry terminal in Manhattan and buys the beginner's guide to playing guitar. It's a picture book with a bunch of chords and simple songs. I've been working on the railroad. Happy birthday. She studies it for the whole ferry ride. By the time she's home, she goes to her room, shuts the door. Even without that D string, she finds her way to the E major chord. And then and then and then and then the A major and then and then and then and then the D major. And for a week that's all she plays. Surprised at how the blues feel inside her fleshy body more than it sounds from the wooden body she holds. How it feels deep down. And the moment comes when she plays the E, then D, then A, then A, then D, then E, and night moves as born wriggling into the bedroom air. She plays that for about two weeks straight. She picks up G and C in the endless realm of bar chords. She drops a needle on Rocket to Russia and plays along with Creighton Hop till her fingers rub raw. She lies in bed in her mind, jumps a turnstile for the eight train rolling past East New York, adrenaline, then up into the night. Through the lights, under the sky, across broad channel, and out to rock, rock, rockaway beach, where the waves kiss the sand like a tropical island, all for the price of a single token. In her mind, she's chewing out the rhythm on her bubblegum. Sand between her toes, five strings, and a purpose. Certainly not written better, although few of any age can say they have. Spent not nearly enough time in a canoe in Maine. I've lived longer than Poe and happier, but the horrors of the blood spring a page just as sure as spring days do loved ones eager for more than my company. I've lived longer than Fitzgerald, his boat long since surrendered to the current, while mine marooned in rushes, born neither to the past nor the future, one paddle erect in mud. I've almost caught up to Richard Wright and Emily Dickinson, whose mirrors would have envied mine, white and male and free, and who made great art despite the slings of outrageous fortune. These words too lounge on an easy couch while I do other things with what little time I have remaining until I end up on the poster, sparse, talent, squandered. And that's it, my big idea. A biography series about people not listed among the great, but people like me, for whom a single life never got started, for whom the main channel of the river diverged along the way in all of this tall grass, when the water table dropped, a drought of a life human, a broken poetic form. The numbers don't match what the chart tells him. A nurse's life is about having things slide into well-worn grooves. The ghost of the hospital supervisor, a young woman he has seen in meetings, stands behind him with a clipboard. While the nurse wriggles wires behind the misbehaving monitor. She finds his professionalism wanting. So that a night nurse might understand. He whose favorite teacher of all time was a guy named Bell in high school, where they learned life secrets that shocked him like defibrillation. The monitor flashes a chaos of conflicting vital signs. He puts a hand on the patient's chest to confirm the rise and fall and rise and fall of life. He thinks of the poem Mr. Bell used to recite at the end of bio class on Fridays. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. His mind wanders to the bulb-dappled tiles that shine, the night cleaning crew moving beds and scrubbing it all down, moving beds and moving beds, and there. The blood pressure cuff inflates as it should. The patient stirs and asks, is that for me? And just like in the poem, the nurse says, It's for you and for me. Go back to sleep. Everything's okay. And it is. He wrote in a note he said to Mr. Bell the next day. Thank you for inspiring me to be involved in mankind, the note said. The nurse did not see it, but days later, the torn white envelope in hand, his old bioteacher, Mr. Bell, cried mailroom tears. People lean and watch in the soft summer afternoon heat below them. Saint Mark's place across town. I am a warrior bound to take back CBGB's from the unbelievers. I am a warrior bound. And there's a bar called Mojo's, the scene five years later of our last fight ever. When I bought you a cactus for your birthday, and it only got worse from there. A grate in the street cuts loose a roar, a fiery blast from the Bleaker Street Six that burns off my sweat. The future comes on like that. Dragons' white eyes and acid roar down those dark tunnels below the city streets beyond human sight. But tonight's the night. Tony promised when you and I will begin. Teenage fan club at CB's with some girl he thinks I might like. Beware, you dragons of light. Beware, you dragons of light. We are coming in. Her life of web weaving and eating. The toughest kid on the block, eight-eyed monster with mandibles from here to next week, and she stops too. She's curious. She might be feeling she's being watched from above. Maybe that she's not alone. Should I give her a sign from the heavens? That I am here. And that I built all of this for her. Well, not exactly I, and not exactly for her, but that her safe passage across the floor is my doing. I could end it all with a flick of my toe. A sign, like maybe waving my arm in front of the sun. Shadow passes. In the coming blackness. We meet our nightly death, surrender our will, our purpose, ourselves, to visions of half sleep that flow from that midnight realm, our fragile lives, these tired lights, they make soft shadows. We float silently toward sleep's moonlit gate. Gossamer life in this black blankness, this nightly death summoned. We surrender now to haunt the land beyond the moonlit gate of dreams. In visions of half sleep, visions of half sleep. Visions of half sleep. Visions of half-sleep is a radio show by Bill Gillard that features music by artists from all over northeast Wisconsin. The poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Agbeli, Greg Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad Newhouse, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, and Drew Whiting. All details are available at BillGillard.com. We'll be back next week at this time for more visions of half sleep. Until then, pleasant dreams. This episode is titled No New York. It features music by John Mayrose, Ed Martin, Offsite, Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, and Bill Gillard.