We buried a clown yesterday, a comedian, a poet, an annoying thumb-in-your-eye egotistical truthteller. It's a strange way to begin a journey, a clumsy gallop into what was supposed to be a fun blog about me crossing the great American West for the first time in my life. But death doesn't wait for convenient moments to intrude itself into life. It slides at any hour, like a cockroach scampering across your bedroom ceiling right before bedtime. It pops up unannounced like a pothole on a rolling highway while you're singing Radar Love with the radio at 80 miles an hour. Death is a popped tire, blown gasket, a drunk driver lurching into opposing traffic. You dodge it or you don't, but you don't control when it arrives and you don't control how much tonnage its head-on collision brings down on you.
So, I began my vacation with a funeral. I'm supposed to go to Seattle and back with this blog, but I began yesterday morning with a side-trip to a funeral in LaPorte, Texas.
LaPorte is a chemical community on the outskirts of Houston. If Houston, with its Halliburtons and Bechtels and ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oils is a great vehicle of economic power and growth in America, LaPorte is the vehicle's engine block—a hot churning grease pit of petroleum refineries and chemical plants. Fat white spheres of crude oil and phallic gray cylinders of chemical treatment plants jut into the sky and punctuate the marsh and concrete countryside along the wide freeway that connects the head in Houston's inner loop to the grinding bowels of the Ship Channel.
Mortal air conditioners are insufficient to disguise the swelter of the July summer heat in LaPorte. You step out of the car but ten seconds and your body heats up and your forehead beads up with sweat. Humans, in their hubris, built LaPorte on a swamp and thought Mother Nature wouldn't notice. But mother brings the heat sopping down with humidity. By 11:10 in the morning, arriving at the Southern Baptist Church where we would lay our poet's flesh to rest, it was already 100 degrees—lose-the-tie hot.
Mississippi marsh hot.
Armpit hot.
Already ten minutes late, my party of four artist-types and an 11 year old destined for a life on the Rive Gauche himself—scampered for the door. It was the wrong entrance. We poets not being the church-cognizant types, we wended our way past classrooms and kitchens till we found a promising door, but this was a miscalculation. We'd found our way to an entrance to the wrong side of the sanctuary, the side the preacher commands.
A smiling Baptist gentleman in a navy blue suit—and they all wore navy blue suits—gave us a stern smile and escorted us out of the building, back out into oven, and around to the proper front entrance.
More smiling Baptist men manned the doors to the services. They were all forty or fifty in age, navy suited, and standing erect with hands folded before their crotches. They were not dressed like bouncers—I believe the Baptists call them ushers and the best of them eventually graduate to being elders. But that said, their mission in LaPorte was crystalline. God's House demands an honor guard and these guards wore navy blue.
Beckoned in, we scattered to seats in the pews like mice. Church mice: the church has the power to render even poets into meek rodents. Us wordsmithers know the value of a superior metaphor and cower before its might.
The sermon saying good-bye to our fellow poet was already in progress. In contrast to the perpetually late and scattered poets, a Baptist funeral starts on time. There are rules and precisions in their services that mock the chaos of a poetry reading. The batch of art-farters I associate with prefer their poetry in bars, often performing and audiencing well lubricated in form and functionality.
A smiling white-maned preacher was invoking God and the Lord Jesus Christ in calling down peace for the mourning parents of our dead poet. On stage, he had adopted the handle of "the Plastic Clown." He was a fat lush and frequent drug user and jolly groper of unwilling cabooses. But his father was a music minister for many years at this church and the preacher called him "Brother Al" and his dead son, "Gene" or "Al-Gene." The Houston poets, sitting in the back and to the sides of the church, shifted in their pews and giggled at things the LaPorte Baptists in the front of the church didn't find amusing. Amens and affirmations popped in-between the lines of the sermon from the front half of the Sanctuary while the poets stared off awkwardly at the certainty that Jesus—no, that the Lord Jesus Christ—had prepared a place in heaven for Al-Gene Junior.
Not a few of the poets and musicians who showed up to say good bye to our clown have deep spiritual beliefs; many talk of Jesus as a cool guy, and a beautiful teacher. But we fidget at proclamations of certainty. We traffic in doubt and ambiguity, metaphor and mystery, booze and the smoke of words left unsaid. The Baptists truck in absolutes and literal certainties. There are no mysteries where faith fills in the gaps.
We were visitors in this country, welcomed guests. His certainty gave the preacher the power of generosity to us. He gave us nods in his words before returning to the anecdotes about how much Al-Gene's family loved Jesus.
"Brother Al-Gene was a poet. And every poet is a philosopher," his mellifluous voice assured his congregants about these unshaven freaks in the back of their church.
"Now, Brother Al-Gene has a whole plethora of poems expressing his life and hope and dreams. So I'm going to say some poetry—not by Al, but from Psalms..."
The poets, being good guests, all stifled their laughter. The preacher's discretion was a good call. Al wrote poems of sex and control, dominance and abuse. When he wasn't writing about sex, he was using sex as a metaphor for drugs or angels as metaphors for orgasms. But he carved his poems of drugs and debauchery with as much loving precision as this Baptist preacher used to tap dance around the truth that Al-Gene drinked and drugged himself into such a stupor one week ago today that he tumpled over a fourth floor balcony and splattered his beautiful poetic mind all over the sidewalk.
As a tribe of poets, we've spent a week agonizing over the freakish details of the Clown's demise. Some of us obsess; some of us drink into stupors ourselves, though we're more alert this week about the need for designated drivers. Our Baptist fellow-countrymen seem more comfortable not delving into the ambiguities of Al's final journey to be with his Lord. Al-Gene, by all accounts, was a true Christian. He may have drunk and shot up and fucked around, but he believed with Baptist certainty that Heaven holds a seat for his needle-pocked caboose. The preacher reaffirmed that certainty.
There wasn't much talk of Al-Gene as a troubled man. He was a mess, as crack aficionados tend to be. There were as many anecdotes about the preacher's life and his faith in God as there were about Al-Gene growing up. This was a service not about the man we lost but about the comfort that his fellow Baptists, particularly his parents, could find knowing the soul of our Plastic Clown was up in Heaven.
It was splendidly dissonant, this Sanctuary of a stern forgiving God celebrating the Christianity and redemption of a drug addled groper of bar asses. Al-Gene, with his all-but-volitional suicide and incessant sexualization of all conversations and joyful cross dressing and self-mutilating birthday parties, was a pure poet. He wore his pain out on his skin for everyone to see and then screamed, "Fuck you, it doesn't exist. I'm nothing but strong and perfect." It was the perfect pastiche of the Baptist certainty and the dirty secret sins of God's chosen souls.
He reveled in every vice but illiteracy—he was a brilliant wordsmith—and poked every eye that looked at him askance. He spat out obscenities because, like all cussers, he wanted shout down his utter lack of control in his world. He buried his pain under whisky instead of sanctimonious Bible quotes.
And I don't speak here about the incredible generosity and benevolence of the man. If he saw a friend was hurting he'd bury him or her in his supernatural hug, almost a squeeze, as if he could strangle the hurt out. But Al-Gene hid his big loving heart behind the plastic clown's mask and I don't want to betray all his secrets here.
I'm writing because I miss him and because he lived the difference between Houston and LaPorte. We thought he was one of us, but he was bigger than us. There was a lot of LaPorte in him—not just in the toxic chemicals churning away in the shadow of Houston's capital hubris.
This is what made him different from the rest of the poets. We are scatter-brained Houston, while Brother Al-Gene was concretely LaPorte. We're always out there scratching our heads and wondering what to make of life's ambiguities. There was no ambiguity in the Clown. Al-Gene embodied that shut-your-eyes ethos of the perpetually certain. He trumpeted the lie that he loved life even as he slowly killed his health with excesses of booze and street chemicals. His gums were rotten, his hypertension astronomical, his teeth slipping away like army deserters. He drunkenly ranted at how brilliant—but inevitably expressed as how "fucking brilliant"—his poetry was, even as he stoned himself numb to kill the nagging doubts about his own worth as a human being. For all his gifts of words, his cursing was remarkably pedestrian. For all his wit of invention, his selection of vices was painful predictable. He held himself up as a big ugly mirror, but that too was a lie for the angelic soul and mountainous compassion he contained.
I miss him greatly. Well said, Bucky.
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