Going Back Again

For years it worked, move on to something exciting – Bangkok, Cuba, a revolution in Africa, girls and art in Port-au Prince, more adventure in Jordan or Taipei or Panama city. It relieved the depression and I did not think of anger – but each time my new state would come to an end whatever was around me. And the anger and something dark and immovable were still there.

So this too was on my mind, this puzzle about my anger that I seemed on the brink of resolving, on my mind as I entered places of the past in 1986 out to get the goods on the family malefactors – with more questions arising at each stage of the hunt.

And I thought of that very recent breakup with Jacqueline when while she was on the phone to me, while she was saying it was over, my white hot anger returned, and click click click, I was shouting angrily back thorough the years at Mary in my recent marriage, at Sheila, whom I had told I would return to Singapore to fetch, at Sunisar in her gold lame gown in Bangkok, and at Bonnie for whom I had left Sunisar, and moving on back through hyper sensual Kentucky Janet to Helga from Zurich, my long time lovely painter girlfriend Valerie, and back into hopeful adolescence with Sandie and especially Ellyse. And to places from which I had been, in the language of those times, eighty-sixed – a bathhouse in Peitou, Bradley’s in New York, a gentile hotel lounge in Nassau, a bar in Hong Kong where when you sat down with a girl they brought you a roll of toilet paper. And then, picking up again, going click, click click all the way back past Ellyse, all the way back to, of all people, my mother.