The
Whole Shot
by Jack Hirschman |
Author's Links |
ln Memory of Gregory Corso Most, given the death we've all been given before we die, die. Greg didn't, Greg wouldn't, Greg ain't. He burned his being burned and being burned up right in front of you, up front, in your face, he was a fighting little neighborhood, city-wide. I never saw him sing, he never sang, copper, O but he sang. And guzzled and fixed and trashed and mashed Consumed. He was consumed by consuming, competition's fool from Maldoror through every lowdown kind of kinahoor clear down to his own stretch-marks in Dannemora. I went to see him in the hospital once when his head , 3 times its size, some blood he'd dissed in the drunk-tank had kicked in. Which was after he'd once right-crossed me for no good reason, like my best friend the Calabrese kid in my neighborhood in The Bronx. Which was before a bull-dyke once decked him For dissing lesbians, and for being monstrously cute, - humiliating in public to women and men alike, a self-styled "rotten fuck" who never cleaned up, a nice guy who said, "No more nice guy", all brag and loudmouth blow, fame up his ass "I'm Gregory Corso" like at a horseshow, provoking, stirring shit, yelling, "Hey, Ginzy!" up to Shig's place on Grant St. when Allen was visiting, for some dough. Or: "Hey, Jackie, where's Neeli? He took Mix for a walk..." In this bar or that, running with this or that mug, that chick or this, toking in an alley or back in the john, or cross-legged serious in the Caffe Trieste reading the Chronicle or The Times mixing it up with a mouth in a gallop like Billy Hallop with twinkle and charm out of hell, he was one of a kind of a devil character, so you might never have known he could precision an image to its finest fain, turn a phrase and make it sit in with a combo of sounds that unearthed a flagrant poesy from ancient undergrounds, write from a spring without himself in it and make the running diamonds "the whole ball game" or "the stiff arm of Cuba" more than just sport, "the whole shot" in the senses that toppled lying news reports, taking one's breath away and leaving a real agape suddenly sprouting daisies in your empty spaces, the way it is when you're met by a pair of eyes on the street above a mouth that might say anything above a body that might do anything, yet those eyes in a slow, smiling recognition rise and wink: "Hey you, human bean, you Poet, you synechdochal yokel of All, Nothing's concealed, Nothing's hid. Cross my heart and hope to live." The Kid is dead. Long Live the Kid! |
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