In the beginning…

Was Brooklyn.   Call me Howie…if this book was a Rap Album it would be called ‘Straight Outta Flatbush!’ But this is a series of stories so it is not straight out of anything at all really, other than my fat head. I actually have a big head physically (as well) so that finding a hat can be difficult at times.

But I found a red baseball cap at the last Army/Navy store left on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint. The gypsy woman told me I needed a red hat after my eye surgery. Yeah, if this was a blues album by a blues band it would be titled ‘The Gypsy Woman Told Me’ – what kind of eye surgery?

Preamble: I was born with very extreme myopia. I cheated on the eye exam when I was in Kindergarten at PS 269 on Nostrand Avenue. By the middle of first grade, I was known as Professor due to my unusually thick glasses. These would define my character for many years to come.

An entire other book could be written called ‘Myopic and Happy’ or perhaps an Electronica compilation album about what happens to you after you have been up all night at a Rave called “Morning Myopia’’ you can just hear Joni Mitchell singing the title song now “…wish I was in Paris on this Brooklyn morn.”

On and on streams of talk I have always been a talker, I have always known that the hypertalkative condition was part of being so severely nearsighted. So when I got this ‘life changing’ surgery where my myopia was removed, would I start to quiet down. Not quite, too late in life (mid fifties) and all of that.

But boy things changed. And people said, this is amazing Howie, you should write a book so what the fuck this is that book. (Cue music) Of course, seeing is believing and what did I see, I saw women. There were women and more women and of course there were girls too but it was always really women.

Black women, white women, so many yellow women this part was just thrown in for the film montage you know lots of quick cuts of women walking down the streets of Midtown Manhattan lots of covers of Vogue Magazine and fashion shoots. Let’s take this out in the edit who needs this shit?

This is a series of site specific short stories about women. Each chapter is titled and dedicated to that woman. However, this is not any kind of erotic novel the women are simply a vehicle to represent a time period and the relationship between that time period and all other time periods through memory.

The whole exercise is to focus on memory. Something that is a mystery. We use visualization to memorize to remember recall. What do you recall? Let me see…so I get the new eyesight and suddenly my memories have been wiped. They have been subtly but seriously altered. What can I do?

Try to recreate the past that is gone anyway? No, work real hard real fast to create an entirely new set of memories. The present is going to be exciting immediately because, Eureka, I can see. I never saw butts like this before. Never saw a bar like this before. Never liked blue eyes until a few weeks ago.

Yeah sure the red hat but it was shades of blue: Why? Well, the painter friends and the fucking colorist queens tell me that blue has the widest range of emotions and the widest range of shades really the same thing said twice right? But the scientists, what do they say about the leading color blue?

Well, have you dear reader even seen an actual cataract? It is a thick yellow film like a filter on an SLR Camera Lens like a hangnail that you sever off with a good set of clippers and that pathetic yellow is the specific block to the wide array of blues that are out there in this world to be seen to be loved.

So here I am, fifty seven fucking years old. Red baseball hat. Blue jeans. I do not have the skinny jeans yet, that is going to come up in the Alexis story. And the blue scarf that I lose and find again a bunch of times in the Lisa period. And then the plaid red thing that Jess is wearing. These objects of pure lust.

And what of this place Flatbush this place of myth and of amplified reputations and tall tales. Flatbush today is a black hood more or less with the reputation for producing great graffiti artists but it also did manage to turn out Streisand and Konigsberg and Wallach you probably don’t know what I’m saying.

So let’s start out with the prequel then the women I met while I still had glasses on who I thought were fucking going to blow my head off and merely turned out to be friends who I could talk to when I met the next set of women after the eye change the sea change the endless after image.

This story has a beginning but it has no end. As I write this, new sequels are taking place. When I started it, I had the usual mixed mania grandiose designs, a two record set, a concept album with liner notes the whole nine but this particular book is simply a single with a strong B side, that’s it no more.

For those of you not familiar with Brooklyn, I advise you to get a good map and look out of Bushwick.   The entire story centers around the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway but we’ll go west a bit to Kent and east northeast up to Wyckoff but ultimately there is a five block radius that can be mapped.

The incidents are all true and the names have not been changed, every one pretty much has read their chapter and given me their permission. The men have been modified to protect the innocent and the professional reputations but those of you ‘on the scene’ will know exactly who I am talking about.

A few incongruous portions have been included that may seem out of sequence and this is true, given the recording project analogy these are outtakes, pieces that will be used again remixed and included on a later release. People featured may be tempted to jump ahead to their own appearance, so go ahead.

Make my day! Another disclaimer is that the use of certain terminology, for example, the word ‘bitch’ is truly done in jest and in humor and with great amounts of serious affection. If you could see what I see, none of these women are dogs they are all splendid they have brought light into my life and much love!

Those of you who are acquainted with me are already excessively familiar with my voice and my style. The rest of you will probably receive this book from an opinion leader who knows where it is coming from and where it is going. If you take it too seriously, you will miss the point: Joie de vivre SVP!

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