Furman Pivo believes he [plus beer] may be the cause of a rash of streetlight outages. This sense of empowerment transforms him into the Beer Mystic. He has a mission and a mandate. Or does he? In any case, 1987 NYC will never be the same and the rest is history or myth or delusion.

Beer Mystic Invitation : Participate in a unique literary adventure that will take you on the longest, rowdiest literary pub crawl ever. Follow the Beer Mystic's story around the world through a global network of host magazines [next excerpt at end of chapter].

<< Beer Mystic Excerpt #9-10: South Jersey Underground

Beer Mystic Excerpt #11

I tramp across the Brooklyn Bridge because when I can ' t sleep I walk even though I know that during construction defective wire was woven into the cables to cut costs. This is how knowing gnaws away at necessity of faith. Tonight the cables [made of 14,000 miles of woven wire] are vibrant, harp-like, trilling with the febrile moir é music of hum and fray, stress and sway. A chill rattles the keys in my pocket. The East River looks brassy and non-negotiable and protects Brooklyn from Manhattan or vice versa. And I detect the tide – nothing more than a biopsy scraping the ulcerated pelvic lining of the harbor – eating away at ancient certitudes in squalid ' hoods. I have no one to be, I have no appointments to keep. I stand halfway between Brooklyn and Manhattan, face sullen Wall Street full of its concrete and mirrored glass and strategies of concealment and speed, now dead, the only evidence their half-eaten burgers like sad slivers of dead moons littering the streets. I sit misremembering the words of O. Henry: “ the silent terrible hills – buildings square as forts, or pills, high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day. ”

I look back, veer, amble, cling – will I or could I throw myself over the railing? It is the same feeling that I have in a glassware or lighting store or on top of the WTC. The idea of my body suddenly rebelling against my sense of survival to go amok. I contemplate Tuli Kupferberg ' s dilemma when in the 1950s he threatened to jump off the bridge. I can see where Hart Crane lived from here. I can see him curled up inside himself under the Brooklyn Bridge either calmed by “ the whispered rush, telepathy of wires ” or by the fact that he had finally caught the bridge in the formaldehyde of words. Crane ' s home is now home to a poetess – what ' s her name? Cruella Seville? No? Something like that – who tries to maintain a certain elegance to her sexual desperation by acting like she is still capable of summing up sexual satisfaction at the drop of an eyelid. A cross between Phoebe Legere and a cast-off slipper. Like her wink is hooked directly into your erectile tissue. This is not true although to allow her this charade is one way we at parties allow her to remain somewhat intact. OK, babe, you ' re still a goddess, now where ' s the beer. The dignity of the unstated. Myth wrapped tightly around skin to maintain freshness. I remember weak light coming through dingy glass, revealing her riding a sort of surrogate, a leather pommel she had sawed off a discarded saddle she ' d found in the street. She reading some Kiki de Montparnasse stuff on this saddle was what she called spoken performance. She can ride all the way back to her childhood for all I care. I do not know where Thomas Wolfe lived. It ' s somewhere over in the cute collapsing red brick in Brooklyn Heights. He laid one million words end to end. but where did it go?

I look down under the bridge. Is that some sort of ice floe...? Or is that jazz saxman Albert Ayler, missing 30 days going on 30 years, I see floating downstream in a white suit? Chained to a jukebox full of wailful tunes? Isn ' t it Eunice Waymon, my new noctivagant mate, with her dark eyes like lagoons full of electric eels, who told me she feels she is also missing and told me Ayler ' s technique had ripped up thresholds so that pain seemed like pleasure and told me he ' d pushed the boundaries of what jazz could be – his highest shrieks could put out light , smash crystal? Eunice has found the identity she can get lost in – her loose, somewhat straightened [ironed?] hair accidentally tickling a local curio, a voodoo doll made of rusty nails and earwax. I watch her plunge her long middle finger into the foamy head of strong golden ale – I can ' t even remember what we ' re drinking, Belgium, maybe DeKonink or Kwak or verboden vrucht – to stop it from overflowing. This seems to work. Is that lost or found? I think and stare and then never get around to asking. Is that any worse than or different from a secretary or biker chick? She is more than girl friend, she is friend and navigator. Although I do wonder about anyone who can actually admire me – love really does leave you blind. Is there a fine broken line between admiration and pity? Is it divine benevolence? I could ask her but then … I don ' t really want to know.

“ Our moon in estrus, ” I sing. Over and over “ Our moon in Estrus, ” which gets me to wondering where Eunice goes when I ' m not around – tent town under the Williamsburgh Bridge, a squat on Avenue C, her dad ' s official residence on Park Avenue [will I have lunch with her up there? Meet her dad?] She believes we are night travelers, witches; the notoriety manufacturing a kind of pride she hadn ' t known prior to meeting me. [Grafitti: UNCLOG MANDATORY PRECISION] She is upper-middle class, half Georgia black, half French and half alien or Senegalese because she is more than one woman. She also has been doing research since she was 12 she says, for her father and his work. And the more we drink, the more the inertia of our inevitability drives us to calling all this love. But I don ' t spell it out. And neither does she. “… And guard you from dread …”

She receives a small stipend, calls it hush money, from a guilty and gone ole man, the former ambassador of somewhere or other. I suppose Senegal. This allows her to float – can you live inside movement; is that a legal or even comprehendible place of residence? She, I suspect, is a frugal squat punk with a bank account who keeps warm in the public library. She leaves notes behind to enamor me [nab me] to her depth of research. “ Noah listed beer as one of the provisions he made sure to have plenty of when stocking the ark. ” She leaves messages on the answering machine, “‘ All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of holy ground to the next. ' That ' s not me, that ' s J.D. Salinger. ” We discussed him. She loves his writing but calls him a pen-carrying wimp. I think he was so directly privy to the dirty soul of mankind that he could no longer be part of it.

But now I ' m up here suspended and swinging mid-breath in a hammock of some peace – “ grasp after deep hapPenis ” [Nietszche meets Brando] – lobbing wads of spit onto U.S. Coast Guard Cutter #721 as it emerges from under the bridge. This expectoration does me some good but certainly has no verifiable effect on present power-dynamics. Power will remain, by its very nature, oblivious to the subtleties of service. But I did manage to get rid of one foul wad of spit and if life were a poem of vengeance this wad of spit would ' ve burnt a hole into the cutter ' s hull. I hold on to the bridge railing because I do not trust certain aspects of myself that I have lost touch with. These aspects seem to have a special predilection for the charm of vertigo and the thrill of auto-jettisoning oneself into the East River. My knuckles are white. My palms leave sweat on the railing to evaporate. We all want to make a spectacle of ourselves. The sweaty prints evaporate in no seconds flat. And when I begin to walk I walk some sizeable feet in from the railing.

On any given day you might find 400 foreign substances swirling around down there. This might explain the color. Its brassy sickly shimmer is psychosis made geographical. Could be the lights off the FDR too. Periodically they drag the river for missing bodies. Where is Burma again! Where ' ve I been? Where ' ve I ever been? I lift my bottled barley ode to the surrounding enveloping tension, an environment defined as busyness driven by boredom with noise as its byproduct.

Cabs weave the bebop through the Mondrian patterns of light and brine and steel. Cars cross the bridge with big cardboard boxes sticking out of their trunks, speeding so that the drivers no longer have faces, while their tires hum in harmony with the bridge. There is never a moment when there are absolutely no cars on the bridge. There is never a moment when everyone is asleep. This dolorous outdoor symphony sounds like G ó recki ' s “ Symphony of Sorrowful Songs ” and laments the forlorn fact that we persevere so close to the sea yet remain so landlocked in own devices that prevent us from ever being opened up by that sea. We are hemmed in, landlocked. We get unhinged by the incongruity of living in a culture of speed, a place so fast that by the time you imagine something, somebody ' s already gone and done it and somebody else has already marketed it. So fast that you ' re always catching up. We can ' t make sense of the primacy of speed in a place where to go 5 miles to the shore takes 90 minutes on the A train that makes so many stops where nobody gets off. This is the conundrum: you are going fast but it still takes a long time to get there. Sometimes you smell a briny, almost prickly scent in the New York air; it is the perfume of a siren, a siren whose crotch is lined with raw herring. When I partake of my flesh, suck on the pulse in my wrist, it is bitter to the taste.

I wander the darkness dear from womb to end, through fear. With brew upon brew, dark and stout [Pelforth and Brooklyn Ale], clutched in fist, I vow to not go in too early, I vow to hum the bridge ' s fey tune, to obliterate all the dreams that harass me. “… And guard you from dread …” I vow to sleep on the job, between the stacks of Hammermill, Robert as lookout. Workers of the world, fall asleep on the job.

And as I piss in the monumental and pungent dark, I make mental the map of New York and make dark inside me the swath of land now mine. I wonder too, holding my glorious and bitter piece of fruit, whether others sometimes imagine this solipsistic intimacy important enough to document on celluloid – a film of people pissing. If you do it right you can feel how your dick is not attached to you. I ' m wondering whether I ' m wondering this because Eunice has already wondered this aloud. You can feel how your nerves are strung to the rest of the bridge like just another cable and you can feel the entire elegant tension between mass and stress, substance and spirit, them and us... The dazzling strands entangle all mind, suspended there between Gothic arch and Gothic arch.

And in all this astonishing magnanimity I imagine what others have come to expect from me. And I try to see the sad lumps of human fecal matter deposited in the dark Gothic bowers of the bridge as offerings detached from any tragic significance. Perhaps me and Eunice [Nice as in “ niece, ” called Nielle by some] were meant to be – she with her P.O. box, me with someone else ' s answering machine, she with her sleep where sleep can be taken, me with my beer where beer can be imbibed, she with her detached generosities, and me with my dependence on them. And since she has no phone except the numbers of those who perhaps will remember to pass my messages on to her [what makes me think that her ex-lovers will do that for me?] and since I do not know which door to which squat to slide my notes scribbled on scraps of six-pak cardboard under, I write my heart out to many cracks under many doors, and since I cannot locate her... She pops up whenever; calls me at work, arranges a rendezvous on my answering machine. She threatens to hit her old man up for a beeper.

I call Elsa out of her fragile sleep from under the Brooklyn shadow of the bridge. [Grafitti: LIGHT UNDERMINES MENTAL PREPAREDNESS] But I say next to nothing. I just listen to her describe the beerwich she will make – “ three slices of rye, three eggs, one beer... arrange the bread in large baking dish... ” – if I ' d just come over right now.

“ Take a cab. I ' ll pay for it. ” And where three months ago her neediness seemed like something to brag about at work, it now sounds so desperate – just say “ love ” even if you don ' t mean it – like she ' s some cat lost in an icy courtyard. Like she ' s a junkie on all fours looking for a needle she ' s dropped in the dark. She doesn ' t know need from desire. I hang up and lose my way.

I sit on a ledge of the War Memorial, right under Justice in Cadman Plaza and stuff the wads of cash from my first Codger paycheck into a baggie, into my sock, into my custom tin-tipped boot – it is a boot that exudes ‘ tude. This I do to prevent muggers from lifting all I have – live and learn. It is a kind of survival method you begin to no longer resent but actually start bragging about. The homeless man sleeping at Justice ' s feet is roused from his “ sleeping bag ” of cardboard and old strips of cloth. He lifts his head and half-sings, “ It ' s a long way from Cad-man Plaza to Kat-man-doo! ”

“ Yea, but Catman Scruthers lives right around the corner. ” I retort under my breath. I stand for a minute and look at him. He is bulky as he sit up, flapping pieces of fabric, shredded coats of gabardine, fake leather and pseudo-suede hanging from his frame. He looks like a philosopher type in a Mad Max remake.

“ I walk across the world ' s broad back and sleep there comrade. ”

“ What is your name? ”

“ Robert Wagner, no relation. ”

“ Where were you born? ”

“ In a gutter on Hoyt, 1942. My old man worked the Navy Yards. I woulda killed him if the Japs hadn ' t. ”

“ Wanna beer? ”

“ Sure. If it makes you feel better. ”

“ Belgian beers are like two sandwiches in one bottle. ”

“ What ' s it say on the label. ”

“ Stille Nacht. Which means …”

“ I know what it means! Silent Night. Heilige nacht …

“ Enjoy. ” He tipped a flap of something that served as hat. And I departed.

Some neighborhoods I wander through are so angry and so dangerous they ' re considered separate nations, terra vigilante with their own laws, their own hand signals, their own brain-frying recipes, their own police forces, and their own misinformed mythologies [they can smell a faggot or a victim or a bitch on wheels a mile away] upon which they mount the hatreds that their own victimization justifies and upon which they feed.

But I am not “ perilized. ” I have thoroughly investigated the logistics of muggers and hooded street Huns; I have observed the tics, the eye-to-baseball-bat coordination of the homebodies in Carroll Gardens who praise mom, wash the car, and then get fucked up so bad on whatever so that they forget who it is they are not and will never be. They have gleamed their snarls and blades into my midst. And they are all just looking for what I have already found – the mechanism that will set them up off their knees, erect and tall. I have invited crimes against me, invented outrages, so that I can know crime like some know satori and others their PIN codes and I am thee.

I must climb up again, back across that huge spanning hum, whirr of sullen piano wires, their strum sad, sadder, saddest, strung like an umbilicus that connects one horror with another more glorious one. I have made it across but there is no welcome unless you include the dead coke stares, their noses stiff like a bar on a prison window, or a quick jabbing hoot from a slit of darkened passing car window. If you stand totally still and inhale and close your eyes you can feel with me how unsteady all of Manhattan is – rocking, swaying, collapsing upon its pylons. Feel it? We must hold tight to what is ours, our beliefs – or does it matter? Anyway, I must make my way “ home ” but as soon as I am “ home ” I am compelled back into the street to find yet another way home.

The streetlights are out again down the street from 316, on the 500-block. I flatter myself to think I may have perpetrated this. Until I notice kids without bedtimes, dragging sad pink bears, oppressed by their absolute aimlessness and the fact that friends and family alike constantly refer to them as mistakes, knock them out with stones [and/or cheap handguns] collected from private caches discovered behind bushes in Tompkins Square Park.

Con Ed has given up [cause or effect?] on this forgotten street of damp discarded mattresses, dusty chicken bones, littered with lumbering lumps of human rag more exhausted than desperate under billboards with new-day-mouthwash-success-smiles. This evening ' s latter-day hipsters comb the set for a video backdrop of adequate mythological menace to make whatever lifestyle it is they are trying to market as heroic this week. Irony threatens to get away from us and live on its own accord, independent of our attitudes and intentions.

I want to ask this homeless woman eating out of trashbins whether she doesn ' t have a son somewhere with a spare room. I see her “ house, ” a giant luxury refrigerator box with rags pinned to it for insulation. I see how she wraps herself in the old blanket I gave her, careful to cover herself from face to toe like she ' s rehearsing to be a mummy – “ My mommy is a mummy, hahaha. ” I know the song but not the singer. I look at her but she does not remember me as the generous one who gave her that blanket.

She sometimes rests on our stoop until the super shoos her off with a broom and a long stream of swear words for emphasis. And I have to think real hard to imagine her as a little girl playing – expressions of glee – on the PS 43 playground or as a Brownie Den Mother or as someone who diligently used to balance her checkbook and collect savings stamps. She crosses her legs. This simple act can take a good 15 minutes even with the help of both hands.

If she suddenly stopped breathing would I give her mouth-to-mouth I wonder as I try to imagine her sitting in front of me in geography class, tracing the coast of Italy with a colored pencil. Her ankles look like turnips in a winter basement. What was the secret of her undoing? A bad grade in physics? Chemistry? Altruism betrayed? Love lost?

This is my neighborhood. Well, it ' s not mine just yet. Were it mine it wouldn ' t be mine, or anyone else ' s. It ' d be dark, though, an aromatic bower of vespertine-faced violets, breeding-ground for fireflies and whispered confessions, a true black market.

But this is also where muggers with missing teeth hide in wait for smiles full of gold. Wrestle it right out of your mouth on the spot. They have the tools right there in the doorway. Professional stuff. Freelance dentistry. Glory is always fraught with a tinge of danger. They are just as keen to finger the piping on your jacket for hidden hash.

This is where they let you buy back your own stereo too. And if you say “ Hey, I think that ' s mine, ” they nonchalantly reassure, “ Well, then you know yer gettin ' a steal at this price. ” And you feel embarrassed knowing it ' s yours and you ' re too damned awed by their audacity and too damn chickenshit to do anything about it. And if you can adequately mask all these contra-indicating qualms you can call yourself hip.

There ' s the guy with eyes twirling like a one-armed bandit full of cherries, bells, and needles, and with a gunbelt [festooned with live ammo!] strung, bandito-style – viva Zapata! – across his torso. A pock-faced gargoyle, weatherworn somewhere between menace and reassurance, Rambo and ex-cop – small time in a big world. But if he gets it up, big time in a small world.

Climbing my steps, I saw a rat strung up hangman-style [as a warning to other rats?] on the chainlink fence that guards the sad rubble-filled park from ourselves. Its wet fur no uglier than our sky or pavement or thoughts. The knot was perfect and reminded me of a Henry Fonda movie.

Things rust, fall apart around here as they do anywhere. Appliances stop working. Become arrogantly silent. Take up space. Get tossed. Make us think they have another, more insidious purpose – to unsettle us. And is it still somehow freedom we ' re talking about when we no longer know what to do with it?

>> Beer Mystic Excerpt #12: Jack