On The Joys of Re-Reading My Own Writing
Contrary to popular demand, I do a considerable amount of reading. These days, I comb the internet for witty and scathing examples of blame-based writing. This kind of deviant word-wacking is rampant in blogs from TUMBLER to stupidFACEBOOK. On occasion I read something that I approve and must then re-read anything I’ve written in the last month to assure myself that I’m doing a better job than that dummy. Tis thankfully the case every time. I imagine Frank Sinatra felt the same way whenever Dean Dummy Martin recorded the same song, or Sammy Davis Junior got a laugh from an all-white audience. Frank and I go way back to the days when there was no internet. The days when I didn’t have to worry about every other person’s crying and boy-friend beating weekend adventures.
I remember when this country was quieter. When you could walk down the street and buy and ice cream cone and not worry about running a mile on a treadmill. In those days the closest thing to a treadmill was an escalator and even then I took the damn stairs. Otis was a fat man who deserved to die. But don’t get me right: You’re all pretty people in your own minds and you all have nice ideas as far as you’re concerned. You’re all photographers now with your eye for the surreal and $3000 cameras to go with it. I had a camera folks. I had a camera that captured LIGHT, not pixels. I developed my own film and my own prints and some schmuck at the Guggenheimlich wanted to put my prints up and I told him that I’d be happy to have a showing if he’d be happy to let me borrow his wife for the weekend. He wasn’t sure if that was a joke, so I told him another joke: Say you start running now and when I count to ten I’m gonna pull the trigger of this here little friend of mine (I had a Smith&Wesson in my sock) and if I miss you, we’ll call it even. Okay?
Mississippi John Hurt said to me once, “Jonny,” he said, “Just remember, not everyone has had the advantages that you’ve had.” And he was right. That old mother of bitch was dead on: I grew up in the oil fields of Texas and I studied at the Sorbonne somewhere in a country they called Europe. Maybe they still do, I couldn’t tell you. I came home and made a career for myself singing songs to a bunch of hippies. I made pictures too and had a casino in Las Vegas named after me and one named after my Uncle Vinny. In Uncle Vinny’s Casino everyone had to take off their shoes and fancy clothes and go barefoot and wear coveralls. And if you hit the jackpot you got to drive the tractor in the summer on his Hay Farm in upstate New York. He’d fly you out to Greenwich, NY and tell you stories about the women from the Dominican Republic. But that was a long time ago, see?
Nowadays there’s Mexican food and it’s no joke. People pay money for this stuff! If I could say one thing to the youth of today it would be “keep smoking.”
That reminds me of a woman I loved: Sonia Emily. She was the only woman whose named ended in a vowel other than “a” that I had relations with through and through. She was a poet and liked to read books as thick as the fog some mornings in London. We lived on a flat in the theatre district near the Globe. I was appearing in a play by some Russian lunatic and couldn’t get my lines straight to save a dime. They all sounded the same to me so I figured I could just say the same line over and over, with different inflection. I gave up the stage after that because of having to watch other people and act with other people and bow with other people. Get me a mirror and I’ll pay a good ticket price to see me sweat for two hours. Which reminds me of Emily. That girl sweat like there was no climatise as the French might say. I wouldn’t have that. I put her on the first high-speed train and told the conductor to let her off near Germany and tell her she’s back in America.
If there’s one thing I can’t complain about though, it’s my own thoughts and ideas, which are sound. And I find it to be healthy to go over them after a long day of having to breath in everybody else’s ugly sighs. And I find it to be healthy to go over them after a long day of having to breath in everybody else’s ugly sighs. Go ahead, sigh. It’s the least you could do. Wait: the least you could do is get me another whiskey.
Waiter! One for my baby, and one for the … yeah…? you know the lyric? Well, ain’t you a class-act.
PHOTO: Jonny Cigar’s flat in Paris. Ile de la Cite. 1949.
