Read Online My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) by Clarence Major - Free Book Online

be whole, she too was lost. So Mason fumbled on, hearing the buzz of C's and the drip of Z's deep within. A chiseler well-oiled by guilt and grief, Mason carried the weight of symbols: fish and bird ones. Walking with his “friend” Jesus, he now found himself on the filthy, desperate streets of the Lower East Side again, carrying a gun, a victim of many trick mirrors. Here no shade as under that jazzed up tree. No sir. This was jalopy, jellybean poverty—as background, and in the foreground, in himself: sluttish rage and self-doubt. No mandrake here. Grim, grim, grim. And it was precisely this contrast he needed now and hated: it blazed in him with its discoloration of his so-called lyric nature. Lyric, uh, nature? So be it. No one escapes romanticism: not even tough guys. In fact, I swear, especially not tough guys. He surely needed a formula for clarity of direction: perhaps this: in a mixture of bay leaves, rosemary tops, two and a half pounds of pig fat, dump eight baby swallows (fresh out of nest with tails and longest feathers removed) then place in blender. Add salt and pepper to desire. Switch on. While at Attica, Mason read the Book of Knowledge (1687) and now seriously tried to remember some of the ancient formulas for “clear sight.” Who was to swear the 1654 Pharmacopoeia entirely out to lunch? Moral guy, this. Morality applied only to the content of one's attitude. Hem was right: it was what made you feel good. Don Quixote had good intentions but his attitude was without reliance. Clarity? Did Mason really want it, reach out decisively for it? I smelled a rat. Remember Nietzsche (not a friend of mine!) said, “Aren't books written precisely to hide what is in us?” And another dead man, also puzzling over the relation between “ clear reality” and confessional writing, Jack Kerouac, in Vanity of Dulouz —go to it Jack: “I'll . . . get to believe . . . I'm not . . . Jack . . . at all and that my birth records . . . published books, are not real . . . that my own dreams . . . are not dreams . . . that I am not ‘I am’ but just a spy in somebody's body pretending . . . ”
    Being an electrician was not the world's truest vocation and although inkslinging was closer, you bet, it too was not. Old Jed Oxford out yonder in the sluggish Amesville air, standing ankle deep in the rich soil was in his work closer to the ultimate one. Mason'd learned Jed's deepest commitment was old as humanity itself: to nature. Jed'd believed human beings were bound to and shared nature like all living things. Yet Mason, crazed with his notion of being somebody he wasn't, hadn't found in himself any willingness to follow Jed's calling. Danny Kreutzer was the electrician and he was expensive. But this way was better: no direct confrontation with nobs. Just walk in and take the pretty jewels, crisp money, silent ready stuff. Pronto: find a fence. Next the big guns. Then the driver's license; the passport. Like clockwork. Kreutzer himself was a picaro, so said pal Rodriguez. Mason and Jesus went up in a taxi. Kreutzer's was in the Bronx. They rang the door in a massive uglybuilding at Waterloo Place near Crotona Park. A happy Mephistopheles, he agreed to go to work for them on a ten percent commission. Usually got twenty. On the subway back down they idly read the grafitti and the names of kids trying to make their presence felt in this barking dog show. This far uptown Mason missed the vegetable carts of First. God, did he need clarity now—and where the hell was that eater of Irish cherries and grapes, Celt? Painted Turtle was acting funny. Melville couldn't be quoted (“I hope I know myself . . . ”) out of context. Well, rats, nothing was easy. In a voice happy-as-ducks-in-Arizona! Kreutzer said on the phone to Mason: “Come on over. I got the roundup. Bring a hundred—fresh lettuce.” An hour later, Mason and Jesus stepped into the apartment of one Danny K., for the second