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Well, fuck it, originally I was going to leave this piece unpublished, but have now decided against it. You might ask why I didn’t want it floating around, or why I decided to put it up here now all of a sudden – but most of the answers to these questions are inconsequential: it is enough to say that I’m deep into the editing of my novel and also have felt mostly uninspired in the last week or so to write anything new of value. This is a good vignette and should be read, so why keep it out of Tumult’s canon.  This piece was written almost exclusively during the first week of Hurricane Sandy’s impact on NYC.

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With Sandy in the Rockaways

            I guess I have to concede that God does actually look down on pornography – the judgmental bastard! – because as soon as I got ready to masturbate to a particularly filthy video online in the grandiose spectacle of Hurricane Sandy surrounding me: there’s an eager tempest and the water surges with the wind like the forethought of an air raid; it’s almost in color, I could hear a crackle and it’s gone, the electricity is out. Outside, the ocean has overcome the barrier of the boardwalk and has flooded the streets with about five feet of salt water mixed in with trash and septic refuse. There’s an ambulance truck floating along the road. A symphony plays from the alarms of parked cars befuddled by the tenacity of nature. I guess I’ve always wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov by candlelight, while my dick is still covered in hand moisturizer.

            I wish I hadn’t smoked all my weed on Sunday. It would abet the cold salmon from the fridge; to be eaten less out of hunger but more as a preventative measure against the tartar sauce spoiling.

            I hear that in order to kill a man and sleep, you need to hate mankind coldly or love mankind absolutely:

            My love was an act of war. Against myself. Against reason. I had too much of it like a Belle & Sebastian song.

            The weather was finally calming; it smelt like pussy and whiskey and I liked the taste it left in my mouth. Enjoyed the sting. Enjoyed the story. The spine, the spree of this existence.

            Don’t forget that there’s four hundred years in this hallway and too much time to spend.

            And I still dreamed even in pitch black.

            I made it to my uncle’s place in Harlem the next morning, having left at six as soon as I figured that the Cross Bay Bridge was finally pushing traffic through. I wanted to take my first shower in nearly three days there and drop the car off so that nothing would happen to it while I deliberated on where I could stay for the time being. I figured I’d go back early for some clothes and books that didn’t fit in the car (there was no backseat, and the trunk was holding my large brown suitcase that I called Nabokov, that I had already prepared for a literary trip to the vaunted west coast two weeks from now).

            Before enduring another necessary long journey though, I decided to hop the 1 train and see Robbie who was staying at his cousins’ chop shop on 230^th and Kingsbridge in the Bronx to rustle up a couple of hurricane nuggets of hash to help the nausea that’s developed from my pulsating anxiety, and to force me to read election day dystopian editorial fiction published in some men’s magazine – who’s name needn’t be further promoted here because they do quite well without me – it was the only bit of reading material I had available to me on the long subway ride towards the Rockaways, now stuck in the dead zone of the MTA circle jerk: all the trains, buses rerouted at will with the urgency of KY jelly and bad news. I got there at 5:37PM. It was dark. I was informed by a troubled pedestrian that resembled a shadow in a fog that the Q52 and Q22 stopped running at 6 o’clock on the let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here dot.

            So now I find myself stuck here again like a squatter with two spliffs, no electricity, no heat, no food except for the box of Kebbler Elf cheese crackers and a container of [no longer] freeze dried coffee. I have 6% power left on my little laptop and I’m playing the Minutemen, looking for some Peter Tosh to cue up next.

            Maybe there’s a bottle of white wine that Tristan left somewhere here, but I can’t find it. Only corks. I’m sure to look for it again in a few hours.

            I start to miss her, but I have music, and I light the first joint from the tip of a candle burning, writing:

            Like an elegiac Sid and Nancy

            he grew stiff when she played fancy

            like a junkie in the dance

            he purloined her morning robe in slow advance

            and when the breath of her did fall

            she moaned victoriously like a squall

            And I was happy enough for now.

            But I had spent such an unrecoupable longing craving her that now having her here made me feel ashamed. I had to look but I discovered that that there was some goodness left and laughter and it was all I needed.

            All storms eventually pass and we end up feeling like we lost this, our new shelter. Love, reckless, is much the same – except there’s no FEMA check to expect in your mailbox once the devastation is finally qualified and settled.

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