Burroughs Autographs (2)

The second Burroughs autograph, kindly supplied by Catfish McDaris. If anybody has any more Burroughs ephemera they'd like to share for Centennial Week, please send it to me at bruce.hodder@hotmail.co.uk.

Burroughs Autographs (1)

"Suffolk Punch" friend Catfish McDaris has kindly sent copies of two Burroughs autographs. Here's the first, inscribed on a book I'd personally never heard of. Cheers Catfish.

Guest Post: "Diablo and Jimi" by Catfish McDaris

Diablo And Jimi


by Catfish McDaris


Uncle Bob called me from just north of Detroit, Michigan where he was stationed in the Air Force. He said he needed my help for three weeks, packing up his furniture and cleaning his house. He was getting a new assignment in Lubbock, Texas. I told him to mail me a plane ticket and I’d help drive his Chevy Impala to Buddy Holly country for him.

The Air Force base had a huge lake; my uncle said I could fish if I wanted. I went down to docks and there were motor boats and fishing gear for rent. The man that ran the office thought he was big stuff. I was seventeen and had long hair, I guess he thought that would make me into some kind of sissy boy. There was another young guy there watching how I handled this man. I laid some cash on the counter and told him to fix me up. The other guy asked if he could join me and I agreed. I noticed his eyes seemed strange like a cross between a goat and a Siamese cat. The motor cranked right up, we had poles, and bait and a small ice chest with sodas, sandwiches and chips.

David told me his name and he was twenty-one and his dad was an officer. He asked if I got high, I pulled out a joint and fired it up. He pulled out some orange barrel tablets and said it was Sunshine. I ate one and we started pulling in sheepshead fish and perch. We started throwing bread crumbs to the circling seagulls. Before we knew it, it looked like The Birds from Alfred Hitchcock. I cranked up the boat and hauled ass for the bait shop. We jumped out of the boat and took off running. The manager started yelling at us for not cleaning out the boat. We were so freaked out, nothing could’ve stopped us from running. I started hanging out with David, we’d get stoned and drunk. My uncle was none too pleased with this friendship. He told me this kid was bad news and nothing but trouble. He noticed his eyes and said he looked like the devil.

We decided to give fishing another try. The manager told us the boats were off limits to us. David had some sugar cube LSD-25. He told me he was going to dose the dude’s coffee. I pleaded with him not to, it was just too cold blooded. The man could flip out and never come back. David dropped two hits on the man. I heard the ambulance sirens and took off. I told David to stay the hell away from me.

Luckily I was going back to New Mexico a few days later. My uncle said good riddance to David. On the trip southwest, we talked about Kafka, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Karl Jaspers, the bible, and Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan. Then we got into great guitar players, I told him I loved Jimi Hendrix, but he’d just died. I also liked Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, and B.B. King. He liked Django Reinhart and Chet Atkins.

I helped my uncle, aunt, and three cousins get settled on the base in Lubbock and went back home, to Clovis, New Mexico. Almost a year later, an amigo invited me to a concert with our girlfriends in El Paso, Texas. Santana and Ten Years After were playing, so we drove south across the desert listening to Wolfman Jack broadcasting from Mexico. He was howling like a werewolf on peyote and playing some damn good rock.

The Civic Center in El Paso was full of marijuana clouds. We ate some magic mushrooms dipped in honey. Santana opened for Ten Years After, Carlos was tearing his guitar a new ass. His percussion section was on fire. Nobody wanted to let them leave the stage. After two encores, Alvin Lee and Ten Years After started cooking up a feast. Alvin was so damn fast, his hands were invisible. He made Carlos look kind of slow. He kept playing faster and better and faster, finally he jumped up on an organ and screamed, “If there is anybody out there that can play this guitar better than me, they can have it.” Everybody looked around and the first person I saw was Diablo David from Michigan. I could not believe this evil cruel person was standing next to me. He smiled like a thirsty vampire. A guy with a large sombrero and a long coat walked up the steps onto the stage and reached out his hands for the free guitar. He took off his coat and hat with his back to the audience. Alvin Lee gave him his guitar, Jimi Hendrix turned around started playing Purple Haze. Jimi played with his teeth and behind his back. Everyone seemed hypnotized; the walls were shaking and the floor trembling like an earthquake tornado hurricane all were happening simultaneously. Jimi slowed a bit and a thick fog of sparks blinded everyone momentarily. The roof opened and a magnificent red glowing Pegasus flew down from the trillion stars. Smoke billowed forth, engulfing Jimi and Diablo, they floated into the air. I could hear music hammering then whispering, as Jimi played Voodoo Chile, until the winged horse with its riders disappeared.



About Catfish McDaris

http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/poet-and-author-catfish-mcdaris-says-stories-from-his-experiences

http://www.horrorsleazetrash.com/poetry/catfish-mcdaris-jupiter-orgasma/

Bukowski’s Indian pal Dave Reeve, editor of Zen Tattoo gave Catfish McDaris his name when he spoke of wanting to quit the post office & start a catfish farm. He spent a summer shark fishing in the Sea of Cortez, built adobe houses, tamed wild horses around the Grand Canyon, worked in a zinc smelter in the panhandle of Texas, & painted flag poles in the wind. He ended at the post office in Milwaukee. Now he rehabs furniture, makes knives, & waits on nothing.

Blowing Up America: The Passing Of The Good Bad Laureate Of Nation

When Amiri Baraka died last week, American letters lost the only poet who had stirred up as much controversy in his life as Ezra Pound. Most agreed he’d been a great writer—although poet Bryn Fortey isn’t alone when he says, “I prefer what he wrote as Leroi Jones”—but few had any patience for his homophobia, his anti-semitism or what seemed to be a colossal arrogance. Listen to Catfish McDaris:

In 2001 I heard Amiri Baraka was giving a day workshop and an evening reading at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I paid my money for the workshop. He kept the crowd waiting for 2 hours and finally cancelled with no refunds and no explanation. 4 hours later, he struts in. Before he has finished his first poem, he’s called me a white nigger, my gay friend’s fags and my Jewish friend’s kikes. Amiri is really on a roll of spewing hate. I had hoped to introduce myself after his reading and show him some photos of Ray (Bremser) and me and few poems Ray had given me. That nigger word was like being stabbed in the eye with a butcher knife, even from a black dude. Before I knew it, I lost my temper, I was on my feet screaming at this motherfucker and headed in his direction. 4 security guards grabbed me and escorted me from the campus.

That sounds like really stupid, immature behaviour for a guy of –what—66? (Baraka’s, not Catfish.) But then, who says anyone has to grow up, least of all poets? Baraka had been obnoxious in some ways for a long time, and in the racially-polarised America of the mid-Sixties (Trayvon suggests it still is), the former Leroi Jones—he shed his slave name like Muhammad Ali—probably had a good reason not to like white people. Or as good a reason as you can have. I’m white and I started out middle-class, although I’ve worked my way down. I don’t know what it’s like belonging to a minority the law allows to be hung from trees.

But having said that, and recognising the seed of truth embedded deep inside the following words, I still think he was a prick for writing:

Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank.The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.

Baraka questioned the 9/11 attacks too. suggesting in the poem that leads off this piece that Israelis had advanced warning and kept their own people home. This caused such outrage the Governor of New Jersey, where Baraka lived and had been appointed Poet Laureate, attempted to have him removed from his post. When this was deemed unconstitutional, the post itself was abolished.

But here’s a funny thing, and maybe one key to Baraka’s reputation as a troublemaker. Willie Nelson, the benign, infamous tea-head country singer, stated on The Larry King Show that he believed the twin towers had been blown up rather than destroyed by planes. And like Wild Bill Blackolive and thousands of others he said, or strongly implied, that America’s own government agencies, were involved in the explosions. What happened to Willie? What terrible controversies followed? Absolutely none. Couldn’t have anything to do with the colour of his skin, could it?

Like all of us, Baraka was a man of contradictions—although in his case, perhaps, they were starker than most. In the 1950s, as Bryn says, he even had a Jewish wife:

When Hettie Cohen married LeRoi Jones on October 11, 1958, it was against her families wishes. Even in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, there were only half-a-dozen interracial couples. She was the practical force behind their magazine YUGEN., which attracted contributions from Bremser, Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, O'Hara, Olsen, Oppenheimer, Snyder, Whalen and Wieners after Jones had written to Ginsberg on toilet paper, asking for help. He wrote a poem 'For Hettie' in 1958 in which he praised her fierce determination, her bohemian lifestyle and her refusal to take orders. […].They parted in the early 60's and divorced in 1965, leaving Hettie to bring up their two daughters. 

(Toilet paper, by the way? Another curiously sophomoric gesture; the sort of thing you’d do if you came from a small town and you wanted to be serious and you’d just finished a book about Cocteau.)

And Baraka the homophobe had had some homosexual experiences in the decadent hothouse of the 1950s American demi-monde. Contemporary histories are so rife with accounts of genital love between—well, everyone—he would have been unusual if he didn’t. But I’m not sure I buy the idea that his later denunciations of homosexuality were just an attempt to reinforce his reputation as a spokesman for black militants. Baraka was many things, but I don’t think he was a conman. What I see is a man who was making mental war with his own history; someone who had come from an ideological position he could no longer believe in, one that the radical black consensus, to some degree, had moved far beyond. Whether it seems right now to us as black or white readers and thinkers, Baraka’s life as Leroi Jones had been—as far as his militant brothers and sisters were concerned, and, I’m convinced, Amiri himself—a life of collusion with the white oppressor. Homophobia was a revolting by-product of, among other things, the movement of black activists towards radical Islam.

But radicalism is utopian, at least at the beginning; until it turns into dogma and zealotry. Like everyone who got into politics Baraka wanted to improve the world, and in his case right the wrongs done to his people over hundreds of years by—speaking just for myself now—my people. That’s generosity of heart on a global, historical scale. And even late on in life, despite his reputation (which,as we saw with the Willie Nelson-9/11 paragraph, may have something to do, still, with our wanting black men to keep their mouths shut) sometimes Baraka was capable of showing that generosity in surprising ways. Catfish McDaris again:

Ray Bremser told me and Dave Church lots of Beatnik tales and said Baraka let him crash with him after he got out of prison for awhile.

After Catfish had his scene with Baraka, being maybe in some ways the bigger man, he attempted a reconciliation:

I cooled down for a month and wrote Amiri Baraka at his Trenton, New Jersey home. I apologized and sent him the material from Ray Bremser. I stuck my play called Maria Takes A Powder and a $20 in the envelope with a fan letter. Amiri said he might want to do the play. He included 2 rare chapbooks of his, one was: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.

In 2013 Marquette University, here in Milwaukee started a Special Collection section for me. Amiri Baraka’s books will live on there and be available. Baraka’s words will always live on. I think a man can be good and bad at the same time.

Those last words, for me, say it all: good and bad at the same time. That was Amiri Baraka, and it’s me, and it’s you too, whoever you are reading this. Any attempt to reduce ourselves or our heroes to one or the other of those conditions infantilises us; and that, as Charles Bukowski would say, “is when the whole thing becomes sickening.”

(Big thanks to Catfish and to Bryn--as ever--for their invaluable contributions to this piece.)