Dying Breed: The USA Writers' Farewell Tour
110/23, Shim Davies: The green eyes, blue lips of a running relic.
New York, NY
I was only with him for twenty minutes, but I'm pretty sure I know Shim Davies better than I know myself. We met in the basement of a little shanty-town bar called EyLikEwe Village, a one-story brick building with an old, slate-colored roof that had various gradients of rust and dirt leaking down from the old Victorian chimney. On both sides: taller, more modern buildings hosted dirty meat markets on their first floor; rabbits hung inside-out and elderly Chinese men shouted at us to spend our last bit of cash on turnipseed soup and egg rolls, but despite the bloody carcasses dangling from their moldy yarn along the soiled concrete, Kate and I were able to resist. Above the bloody display, a few apartments with tie-dye blankets covering some of the windows popped passive colors of pale yellow and blue and pink down into Mason Street.
As we descended a handicapped-accessible ramp behind a pair of heavy metal doors, I saw into the the low light of EyLikEwe Village's basement. Shim Davies–the writer best known for his poetry collection Born Idle–was sitting at an old, Fifties-style card table admiring the flame of his lighter when we went up and I introduced Kate and myself. The first thing I noticed: he smelled of menthol cigarettes and honey.
“Call my Shimmy” he said and from his blue shirt's chest pocket, he raised a small bottle of brown paste with one of his thin eyebrows, as if to say, “You want some, young man?”
I told him no and held in a laugh.
“Well then,” he said, “how about your friend?”
Kate pulled back without moving her shoulders, saying politely, “No thank you.” She left the dark corner with a bow of the head to browse around the basement or look outside at the meat market.
“She mustn't enjoy the finer things of life,” he laughed, looked down to his business and began carefully pouring the slimy paste into the center of a old, rusty spoon.
“She's a painter; she's on this trip for ‘inspiration',” I said, lighting a cigarette and sitting down beside him.
“A shame.”
The light above, a classic, dangling light with a wide, conical base swayed almost unnoticeably, but with its shine I was able to take a good look at this famous writer.
He was a gaunt fellow, maybe six and a half feet tall. His sunken eyes had the humor and shape of worn, bronze daggers. Smeared above his cheekbones, in such concentric circles, a watered down brown hue was smeared down to the middle of his face. His demanding green eyes shifted from left to right as he lit the paste–each eye an emerald stone sitting cold in the center of a muddy puddle. A few tufts of chesthair poked through the blue shirt like wirey, gray tumbleweed; his arms had long, scabby tracks and open sores that looked like hatched pimples; they gave him a definitive look of wear and tear. I wasn't able to see his lower body, but the clicks of his ticking feet below talked of what sounded to be well-made tap shoes. I jumped around to see if Kate took notice of Davies but she had been sitting, legs crossed, at an old stool admiring the grafitti that had been carved into the woodwork of the basement's support beams.
As the last drops of the syrum slid down the dropper into the little hole he had pinched with a golden safety pin lying open and bloody on the card table, Shim scream in ecstacy. I took note and felt it appropriate that Kate wasn't close enough to experience it, let alone see it well enough for a realistic portrayal in pen or paint. The authorative eyes rolled back in such a carnal, beaten manner, my arms turned to jelly and I began to understand such feelings of hedonistic euphoria. The idea that writing was, and is, dependent on a state of altered existence was personified in Shim. His chin lengthened like that of a banshee and a few lines of skin tucked in near his mouth.
After some time, “Now,” he shouted, as if to bring Kate back into the conversation, “do you want my thoughts on free verse or the Petrachan sonnet?”
I watched him look down and pull a thick leather band–a brown belt slicker than the garder of the Virgin Mary–off his pasty arms and toss it into a cardboard box with the words, “Idiots remain” carved into it. I asked him about the words first, ripping a pen and small black notebook out of my jacket's pockets; he only told me that it was trite bullshit, like a Robert Frost poem or an insurance commercial. “Good drugs make good neighbors,” I said to him and by the raising of his eyes and the gritty, yellow-stained smile, I could tell he instantly liked me.
After a few minutes passed, only the jagged smirk pervaded his face; old Shimmy hadn't responded. I tapped him on the outstretched wrist that had been placed on the card table during his self-surgeory.
He closed his eyes, removed the smile, shook his head slowly and said, “Well then, my young sir, what do you want to know?”
“I know it may sound cliche, but the most important thing I want to know from you is, well, what's it like being a famous writer? I've read so many stories about you growing up so poor and then making it, so to speak, and I just need to know how it feels going from one extreme of society to the other.”
Unbeknownst to me, the idea that Shim Davies was a famous writer excited Shim Davies.
“I'm a famous writer?” he asked, flipping his hands and grabbing my wrist.
“Yes…well, you're Shim Davies.”
“Ah yes, me,” he slumped back in his chair and continued tapping his foot. Another few minutes passed with no answer.
“What is it like writing, then?”
He twitched a bit and rubbed his long, yellow fingernails up and down his chest–the sound of cotton against coarse chesthair scratched the air. He pulled the fingers close to his eyes, studied the nails and looked at them for a minute. He finally looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Writing?”
I said yes.
“It's a real gas,” he said, smiling again.
“A gas?” I asked.
The old man stood up and brought up his left leg close to chest. A few seconds passed and then, a long, dry fart. And seeing that I was confused, Shim excused himself from the card table and walked out of the bar.
My last bits of seeing the lanky, sullen man were that of his sillouette stumbling up the ramp into daylight, into the noisy Mason Street traffic above. Kate had said goodbye, she said, and his only words to her were, “And to you too.”
Even though I hadn't asked him all the questions I had intended, I have a distinct feeling that Shimmy Davies knows that in his terse “statement,” I now know that in meeting the rest of his dying breed, I should be prepared for a real gas. That is, if nothing else.
————
And a poem…
Efficiency
A Poem Concerning My Shitty Apartment
the fruit flies kept watch
hovering in the shower
even after I put a bowl of bleach
in the bathroom and
the air conditioner broke in early
august
but worst of all was
the way the gas
stove kept burning
even after I cut
the knob to the far
right.
that was how I
died.
the stove.
it burst one
night in late
august
after the pilot
light puffed out
and I lit a cigarette.
the efficiency filled with flames,
soaked the bed in
flames pressed
my naked body to
flames
and with no air
conditioner I'll
tell you
I had been feeling pretty
goddamned
warm
already.