"Barry N. Malzberg - Those Wonderful Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

Those Wonderful Years

BARRY N. MALZBERG

I

LISTENING TO THE great sounds of '63, pouring like fruit from the
transistors, the engine on high, pulling me irresistibly toward that simpler
and more reasonable time of my life. All is love/stars above/know the
tune/I lost so soon, Cosmo and the Pearls, got it together in '61, got the
sounds right the following year, hit it to the top with MOONSONG in that
golden year of the assassination and then it all fell apart as so many lives
have fallen apart during the 60's: drugs, divorce, abandonment, flight,
hatred and Cosmo himself died in a fountain in Las Vegas or was it a pool
in '69, must have been around that time, maybe a year later. Does not
matter. Old Cosmo was finished by the mid-sixties, the whole sound that
he exemplified, the tender lyric which he probed overtaken by harsher
jolts but ramming the Buick at high speed down the expressway it is '63
again and Cosmo is young, all of us are younger and I let the apples and
oranges of that music bounce over me, humming only a little at the
rhythm parts. On the expressway I whir past other aspects of the past:
cars from the early sixties assault me from oncoming lanes, yield to me on
the right and in the chrome, the strange, bent archaic shapes of the 60's I
know my history again and again revealed. MOONSONG ends on a
diminished seventh or maybe it is merely a hanging chord (I know
absolutely nothing about music other than how it affects me) and the
radio is still, then there is a commercial for the Wonder Wheel chain of
superior foodstuffs in the metropolitan area and without transition from
'66 comes the sound of the TROOPERS singing Darkness of Love. '66 was
a good year too although not as critical in many aspects as '63, still it is a
period worth remembering. The TROOPERS help me remember. Locked
to the sound, a little pivot wheel of memory I soar through all the spaces of
the Expressway and into the impenetrable but to-be-known future. The
vaginal canal of the future, parting its thick lips for me gently as I snaffle
along in pursuit of my destiny.

II

Outside the building containing Elvira's single-girl's apartment I wedge
the car into a space, remove the key (cutting off Tom and the Four Gees in
SWEET DELIGHT, a pure pear plucked from the tree of '54, a little before
my time but no matter) and sit behind the wheel for a moment,
meditating. I am a little early for our date which happens quite often but
then too I am in no hurry to see Elvira, preferring always to cherish the
memories gathered through our times together than to go into the
difficult business of creating new ones. (The past is fixed, the present
incomprehensible, the future without control; I must remember this.)
Already Elvira is an artifact to me; her breasts already seem to have the
glaze of embalming fluid, her mouth tastes like mucilage, it is not Elvira
which I am kissing so much as the Elvira which I will remember. It is