Scene
One: Grand Avenue. Outside a bar.
HOMELESS
MAN (SALVADOR):
Traditional gender roles dictate that
men are supposed to be masculine and that women are supposed to be feminine.
There was no conspiracy underlying this. It was simply a cosmic trend. Women
received feminine energy and men received masculine energy. The balance was
maintained, albeit precariously, through the observation of traditional roles.
As time progressed the balance eroded.
The masculine became overvalued and the feminine was repressed. However there
was a balancing tendency manifest in the fact that a minority of the male
population adopted feminine roles. These men were estranged from both their
male brethren and the majority of females who felt no need to have men in their
lives who would simply mirror their own submissive tendencies. Yet a minority
of unconventionally masculine women loved these men, for these masculine women
saw value in the femininity that they themselves lacked. These same women all
so modeled their own masculinity after adult father figures, observing the
masculine tradition with humility and respect.
The contemporary crisis mirrors a
cosmic crisis. Women are now receiving masculine energy and men are receiving
feminine energy. Women are becoming men, and they are doing so collectively,
not individually as before. They have severed ties with the masculine
tradition, and so they are behaving like adolescent boys: in short, patriarchal
bastards.
Patriarchy is not to be confused with
the masculine tradition. Patriarchy is simply an unintegrated and immature form
of masculine energy. In Spanish the term is "machismo".
The concept of Equality is a
masculine concept. Its antithesis is Inequality. The former is Ordered and
Leveling; the latter is Chaotic and Subtle. Only by balancing equality with
inequality can the genders coexist harmoniously. To presume entirely upon
either Equality OR Inequality can only produce disaster.
Inequality, once vilified a priori
and with cruelty, becomes by avenue of repression the very Devil that it was
accused of being to begin with. This proves nothing except for the raw power of
ignorant repression.
When women behave like patriarchal
bastards, their demands for equality are most easily met by patriarchal
bastards. The male of macho persuasion need only to compromise his machismo a
tiny bit in order to level with a modern woman. He can then treat her with all
the roughness with which he wants himself to be treated, and thereby an
unstable but nonetheless mutual confluence is established.
Equality becomes most difficult to
the sensitive man. It is insufficient to treat women the way that they wish to
be treated; they expect you to KNOW what they want, only because you are a man.
The presupposition is that all men want the same things. It would thus follow
in theory that if a man is sufficiently egalitarian to meet social standards
then he will automatically accommodate the desires of any woman by simply
treating her how he himself wishes to be treated. Underlying this is the final
conceit that how any man wishes to be treated is in fact how any woman would
want to be treated. This is Equality.
But not all people wish to be treated
the same way. Not all of them even want to be Equals! The sensitive man wants
to be seen as a nurturing, compassionate, and yielding being. He wants to
reward women for their own sensitivities by offering them the opportunity to be
nurturing, compassionate, and yielding. Yet modern woman hates to be regarded
as possessing such feminine virtues, which she regards (falsely) as a demeaning
regression.
[Enter
DRAKE.]
DRAKE:
Hey, I remember you. We met last time.
SAL:
Yep. Did you have the chance to read the passage on display in the Christian
Science Reading Room?
DRAKE:
In passing. I know I’ve read it before.
SAL:
They changed it. You will want to check again.
DRAKE:
That I might. Wasn’t your name Salvador?
SAL:
Yes. Saviour.
DRAKE:
Like Xavier.
SAL:
Yes. But in an other language.
DRAKE:
That makes perfect sense. I dreamt about you.
SAL:
Oh, really? How was the dream?
DRAKE:
Terrifying. But not because of you. You actually made some sense in it.
SAL:
Well that I do tend to do. And yes: I frequent the dreams of many of my fellow
travelers.
[An
other homeless man passes. Sal waves in camaraderie.]
SAL:
How’s it going?
OTHER:
Can’t complain boss.
SAL:
All right well if you can’t then don’t.
[they
share a laugh. This piques our hero’s curiosity.]
DRAKE:
You know: I’ve all ways wondered about that. That saying: Can’t complain.
SAL:
Yes, Sir.
DRAKE:
Does it mean that he WOULD complain if he COULD, but he thinks he can’t? Or
that he has nothing to complain about?
SAL:
Probably some combination of the two, differing in relation to the speaker.
DRAKE:
Do you mind? Since you do not seem all too skeptical to entertain this
superstition: I want to guess your astrological sign.
SAL:
Go right ahead.
DRAKE:
Aries.
SAL:
No.
DRAKE:
Leo??
SAL:
No.
DRAKE:
Okay tell me.
SAL:
You get one more guess. The law of threes.
DRAKE:
You are a Cancer.
SAL:
Yep.
DRAKE:
I saw it. I knew it was probably some thing Cardinal. And young. But water came
to mind all of a sudden after Fire.
SAL:
Funny how that happens. What about you?
DRAKE:
I am not a Cancer.
SAL:
But you ARE a water-sign, I’m guessing.
DRAKE:
I’m a Pisces.
SAL:
Oh, well good for you.
DRAKE:
I guess. Only since it is the age of Pisces still.
SAL:
Until the age of Aquarius comes in.
DRAKE:
Yes.
SAL:
Which all ready happened.
DRAKE:
Really?
SAL:
Yeah. Last… month, I think?
DRAKE:
I thought it was not supposed to happen for an other hundred and some years.
SAL:
Nope. Last Christmas it happened.
DRAKE:
During Capricorn season?
SAL:
I believe so.
DRAKE:
Funny. [pause.] You know Kreg was a Cancer?
SAL:
That I do.
DRAKE:
How is he? I’ve been by his spot a few times and I never see him.
SAL:
Well Kreg had to go to rehab. We’ve not seen him for a long while. He should be
out soon though. Then he might try to get into the school here.
DRAKE:
It’s a big deal, right? The Catholic University. People from all over the
country come to study here. And yet few of the locals seem to know just what a
big deal it is.
SAL:
Kreg could get in if he finds his focus.
DRAKE:
Yeah. This guy’s a trip though. Ever since he met Satan out on a camping trip.
SAL:
Kreg will recover. He has a thick skin.
DRAKE:
He is a Cancer, after all.
SAL:
Exactly. [laughs.]
DRAKE:
So Kreg’s still drinking?
SAL:
OH yeah.
DRAKE:
I’m so sorry. He once told me that you left a cup of beer beside him and he got
caught with it.
SAL:
That was him. I wouldn’t carry beer around with me.
DRAKE:
I know. It makes sense now. He has a drinking problem.
SAL:
Course: I wouldn’t want you to presume.
DRAKE:
It matters not. Kreg’s karma is his karma. That’s all there is to it.
SAL:
Yep.
DRAKE:
You know: I once got kicked out of this place here. They thought that I was
Kreg. With my long hair and all.
SAL:
Oh, really? [laughs.]
DRAKE:
I figured out what happened. Having seen how homeless people here get treated.
SAL:
Well it certainly leaves room for improvement.
DRAKE:
Yep. A total overhaul. But you know: I remember that night I last saw you with
him. When it rained. You seemed so outspoken. And yet he was curled up at the
foot of the building. Fighting his daemons.
SAL:
I had a lot of anger back then. There were plenty of those frequencies all
throughout Escondido.
DRAKE:
I know. I just remember how much he then would have resembled a crab. Though I
did not know yet that he was a Cancer.
SAL:
Funny.
DRAKE:
It still serves as evidence, I think. For the Sun-sign’s validity. Even after
the fact, observing how crablike he was, though I’d not noticed it in words
before then. But any way: I wouldn’t doubt it nowadays at either rate.
SAL:
Some things require faith in reason. Others only require faith.
DRAKE:
True that. Some say that Scorpio is the most powerful of the twelve signs.
SAL:
Do you believe that?
DRAKE:
No. I saw a video once of two hoodlums. It was called “Urban Astrology”. This
dark fellow – I know it’s politically incorrect but I don’t care – was talking
about how Cancer is the most powerful sign. And how our nation is a Cancer. And
he said that with this weird insinuating tone. And went on to point out the
Fourth of July. Our birthday, ostensibly.
SAL:
At least when we celebrate it.
DRAKE:
Yeah. Just symbolically. Like Jesus being a Capricorn.
SAL:
Well Christ was an Aries.
DRAKE:
Probably. Any way: that guy made his statement all right. I mean the black guy.
Not Jesus. Though him too. He kept looking in the camera with this morbid gaze
that they so often have who grew up on the streets. And he’s like: “IF you
celebrate it. I don’t.”
[Sal
laughs. Drake chuckles and grins.]
DRAKE:
So Kreg will be fine. He’s on the path. He found it so damned funny when I
found him and I told him about how this owner here kicked me out. Just like
this one time that there were these Marines at that other bar down the way. One
of them had P.T.S.D. He kept staring at me. So I stared back. You know, Rupert
Sheldrake – all so incidentally a Cancer – said that you could prove the sense
of being-stared-at scientifically. He wrote a book on it.
SAL:
Good man.
DRAKE:
GREAT man. He showed up Krishnamurti too. He was the only one I saw to do it.
Every one else must have either been too lit. Or not lit enough.
SAL:
Drugs are a gamble. Certainly.
DRAKE:
They make one impressionable. [Pause.] I only hope that Kreg recovers. You
know: alcoholism is a strange disease. Alan Watts distinguished it from
“problem drinking”. I agree with him. It seems like some people are problem
drinkers that would not be problems were they alcoholics. Yeah. My father was
that way. He’d drink just little enough as to keep his pride intact. So you
could never get him to admit to all the stupid awful things he did after he’d
downed a few.
SAL:
I’m sorry to hear that.
DRAKE:
It’s fine. I’m a Russian. Our whole cultural history is either one big attempt
to either rationalize alcoholism, to combat it, or to atone for it.
Reductionistic as it might be to suggest that.
SAL:
Alcohol really IS a killer. Though when there is little else to live for.
DRAKE:
Yeah.
SAL:
Then God has to step in.
DRAKE:
Like Jung said. When he founded Alcoholics Anonymous. I still think of Jung
each time I hear them meeting in Grape Day Park.
SAL:
Grape Day Park has a problem with police harassing homeless.
DRAKE:
For illegal camping?
SAL:
They are not supposed to do that. It’s against the law. But the police are
ordered to remove us any way. Until I come in and I ask them if it’s legal. And
they must confess that they don’t know.
DRAKE:
“No one has access to the Law.” Kafka. An other Cancer.
SAL:
Yep.
DRAKE:
That reminds me: I was telling you a story. I hope that you did not drop that
topic on purpose.
SAL:
No. I love to listen to people tell their stories. It’s the only way one
learns.
DRAKE:
Well: I kept looking back at that drunk with the morbid eyes. At the bar. Not
the Urban thing. And his buddy sitting right next to me – muscular, macho
fellow – told me to quit staring at his friend like I was about to rape him or
some thing.
SAL:
That’s ridiculous.
DRAKE:
An earlier, less jaded version of me would have walked away, my innocence
intact, but still concerned about what I had done. This present incarnation
though knew better than to take them seriously. I’d been at enough bars. I
understand bar logic. It’s random flux and nothing more. The only shame is in
living that style of life perpetually. Never sober. All ways irresponsible.
[Pause.] But even being innocent was not so bad. Because I never questioned the
sheer power of intention.
SAL:
It is all that matters.
DRAKE:
Truly. When I found Kreg and I told him that story he told me that that macho
guy had a small penis.
[Sal
laughs.]
DRAKE:
He said it quite professionally. Like he was explaining cause and effect. “You
see: when some one says some thing like that it is because he has a small
penis.” I have to say: I applaud Kreg. Though I can’t vouch for his musical
taste. His taste in literature was splendid. He read Nietzsche and Camus. A lot
of homeless do. And whilst inebriated Kreg was a pure poet and a loyal friend.
[Appears
a young man, homeless and paranoid, with gang tattoos.]
SAL:
How’s it going?
YOUTH:
Good boss. [He looks to be the antithesis of this.]
SAL:
Have a seat.
YOUTH:
All right. I’ve got to take a piss first.
SAL:
Well why don’t you use the restroom in there?
YOUTH:
You think they’ll let me?
SAL:
Can’t hurt to try.
YOUTH:
I don’t know man.
DRAKE:
Hey. There’s one next to the European Deli right across the way.
YOUTH:
Oh, yeah?
DRAKE:
Yeah. You can all ways use that one. TECHNICALLY it is only for customers. But
you can sneak in unnoticed usually.
YOUTH:
I’ma use this one. THANKS though.
[He
exits.]
SAL:
He’s a good kid.
DRAKE:
He looked like an example of that anxiety you were talking about.
SAL:
Well: being homeless will do that to you.
DRAKE:
He seemed rather frazzled.
SAL:
He used to run around with gangs. Bad company corrupts character.
DRAKE:
Definitely.
I
can’t help him?
SAL:
No. He has to help himself.
DRAKE:
It gets overwhelming you know. Being a Pisces.
SAL:
Well of course it does. You are experiencing presently the undoing of two
thousand years of Pineal insulation.
DRAKE:
So my Third Eye is taking time to adjust?
SAL:
Exactly.
DRAKE:
It’s just hard. With so much pain everywhere. I once met a girl here who told
me if I wanted to then I could feel across the country.
SAL:
Empathy is a mistake. It won’t help you.
DRAKE:
I beg your pardon?
SAL:
It won’t. You have to be compassionate, yes. But empathy will only drag you
down to the lower frequencies. You really do not need that in your psyche right
now. Not when you’re adjusting to the new paradigm.
DRAKE:
I suppose that it makes sense. [Pause.] But I hope you do not mind: I have to
say something. That you reminded me of some one that I knew. And she seemed at
first to view empathy as some sort of weakness. She would speak about it like
she had some switch. Like she could turn it off.
SAL:
She was a woman, wasn’t she? [grins knowingly.]
DRAKE:
Why would that matter?
SAL:
It’s the cosmos. It mixed up all the frequencies. All of the women are
receiving all the masculine frequencies and all the men are getting all the
feminine ones.
DRAKE:
That… explains a lot in fact.
SAL:
You see it everywhere. It’s what men get for thousands of years of patriarchy.
DRAKE:
As poetically just as that sounds, it sucks. I mean: I probably was not even a
man all of those other lifetimes.
SAL:
No. It’s possible you were a woman. At least several times. That’s supposing
that you have an old soul. Unless you have a new soul and you’ve only seen the
male side.
DRAKE:
[Pause.] I believe I have an Old Soul.
SAL:
[Stares smilingly at Drake.] Yes. I think so, too.
DRAKE:
So I am here to heal people.
SAL:
Heal them, yes. But empathy won’t do you any good.
DRAKE:
That reminds me. Ultimately we did empathise. I saw her at the hospital. And we
had a heart-to-heart.
SAL:
This hospital here?
DRAKE:
No. A safer one.
SAL:
Oh. Good.
DRAKE:
And she no longer treated sensitivity like it was weakness.
SAL:
It can be. Depending upon how one uses it.
DRAKE:
It is not so in my case. Though she told me long ago, on a good day, what you
told me, basically: that as an introvert I should protect my self. That my
internal world should be a paradise, and not a battlefield.
SAL:
She is wise then.
DRAKE:
Yes. That she is. Though I must say she wasn’t all ways so. She never took
advice, I noticed.
SAL:
Well. There you have those masculine vibrations. Women don’t know how to handle
them. They’re all a mess.
DRAKE:
All amiss. All the misses are amiss.
SAL:
Indeed. Women have to learn to take advice from men. We have millennia of
experience in this role.
DRAKE:
I would suppose that we have much to learn as well. As nurturers. May be I can
teach my brethren how to care.
SAL:
Just don’t care too much. Leading by example has its limits.
DRAKE:
Yes. And caring too much gets me into trouble.
SAL:
Stay out of trouble, man. This too shall pass.
DRAKE:
That makes me think of Kreg. And you. First time I saw you without Kreg, after
we met: you said you’d found a job. You wanted to renounce the homeless way of
life. You’d found too much selfishness.
SAL:
Well you find selfishness every where nowadays. It is the Age of Black Time.
DRAKE:
The Kali Yuga, yes. But the people who hired and fed you. Clothed you. You said
they were good.
SAL:
They were. But I could not abandon my homeless brethren. Their cause is my
cause. The city all but tries to kill us off.
DRAKE:
That’s terrible.
SAL:
We shall survive. We all ways do.
DRAKE:
[Pause.] I found a job.
SAL:
Good for you.
DRAKE:
It’s a step. Up a staircase that I know not where it leads.
SAL:
So long as you are moving forward. That’s what matters. And so long as you are
moving upward.
DRAKE:
That’s the only way that stairs go.
SAL:
Unless you take the wrong one.
DRAKE:
Or you turn around.
SAL:
Or unless it’s an escalator going down.
DRAKE:
But you can beat that.
I
appreciate what you are doing. Trying to reform the system, one man at a time.
SAL:
“Army of One”.
DRAKE:
Yes. When you told me about that it stuck with me. Most people talk about
changing the system from the outside or the inside. To me, there’s no
difference. We’re all inside it. And we’re all outside it. It is every where
and nowhere. Simultaneously. There is no system. But there is nothing BUT the system.
All that matters: what I do.
SAL:
That’s all you have to answer for. At the end of the day.
DRAKE:
And from the moment that the day begins. Yes.
[The
young man returns.]
YOUTH:
You got a cigarette, boss?
[Sal
presents a cigarette ritualistically.]
YOUTH:
THANKS.
[to
Drake:] Is it cool if I sit down here?
DRAKE:
Absolutely.
SAL:
Drake’s a friend. Don’t worry.
DRAKE:
What’s your name?
YOUTH:
No offense but: I don’t usually give out my name.
DRAKE:
Understandable and understood.
SAL:
It’s okay: Drake is a friend.
YOUTH:
[Pause.] My name’s Elijah.
DRAKE:
Mucho gusto Elijah.
[Enter
owner of bar.]
OWNER:
Hey. Did you piss all over my floors?
ELIJAH:
No, boss. That wasn’t me.
OWNER:
Well you were the last one in there. And I came in to find an enormous puddle
of urine right around the toilet bowl.
ELIJAH:
Sorry to hear that.
OWNER:
Here: you go inside and you clean that up.
[Hands
towel. Elijah and owner exit.]
DRAKE:
It probably wasn’t him.
SAL:
I agree. But people want to find some one to blame.
DRAKE:
I guess it really is easiest that way.
SAL:
You can’t blame THEM either. Man’s got a business to run.
DRAKE:
Still: that puddle was probably there hitherto. We will never know. All that we
know is that the manager decided, if he doesn’t do so after every visit some
one pays to the restroom, to check PECULIARLY at that VERY instant. Like he was
expecting it. Or just waiting for an excuse to blame the homeless and make our
friend here clean it up. Like he knew about the mess all along, all most.
[Elijah
returns.]
ELIJAH:
That was fucked up. I didn’t even do nothin.
SAL:
Turn the other cheek, brother. You handled that well. Pride goes before the
fall.
[Pause.]
SAL:
Well. I’m all out of smokes. Time to get some more.
ELIJAH:
All right boss. Hurry back.
[Sal
exits.]
DRAKE:
You play music, Elijah?
ELIJAH:
Yeah. I play.
DRAKE:
What do you play?
ELIJAH:
Just whatever you know.
DRAKE:
I see. [Pause.] Well. Let’s see what the Oracle has to say about today.
DRAKE: We have to consider this possibility: that sexuality and
love are not conspiracies made by the Other. That rather it is we that, in our
lack of love, obscure the world in a haze of paranoia and formalize our hatred
via the revision of a bureaucratic and oppressive system.
ELIJAH: PREACH!
DRAKE: That women and men need not await the day that they are
equal. That that day is here and now. That one has only to walk through the
mirage of statistical abstraction. And that then every thing we do together is
spontaneously an act of Equality.
ELIJAH: CHURCH, boss.
DRAKE: And that while it might seem presumptuous to say as
merely one individual belonging to but one of the groups, one must, in order to
find equality, make such a presumption that these truths are available to all.
And whilst such egalitarianism might appear to be a foregone conclusion, it is
necessarily so, for only by finding the confidence to believe in it a priori
can one render its reality a posteriori.
ELIJAH: Uhh, yeah. Words.
DRAKE: But this leap of faith is divine. For once performed one
looks upon the unenlightened world, and what had hitherto been
"sexism" is seen to have been none other than neo-liberalism. A
circular road to hell paved with well-meaning intentions.
ELIJAH: Church...
DRAKE: And far from being-cyclical, one has broken out of a
common circle. While the world continues to spin in the loop.
[Sal
returns.]
ELIJAH:
That was quick.
DRAKE:
Oh, yeah. He’s good at that. [Pause.] And so am I.
Dm.A.A.
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