THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Despite their official status ghosts do not retire or sign up for medicare The bigger than life ones  quiver with vivacity  in the cemeteries of novels and the tombs of movie palaces where at this very moment  Jean Harlow is slinking like a panther in a dangerous negligee and Jimmy Stewart is stammering his way into the heart of a woman who has pulverized his bashful vocabulary. The city ones still ride trolley cars dunk sinkers in cups of Automat joe and hawk The Sun on  bustling corners. Those closest to me,  the conga line of relatives  who were picked off one by one by not so Lucky cigarettes, the sandlot boys  with their swat and swagger  the bikini girls who lost their tops to a bottomless sea and after dark became women  in fan cooled bedrooms Lit by mason jars full of fireflies are all still here like lightly dozing rose petals  in keylocked diaries. As for the ghosts who continue to populate the civilization of my nightmare...

                       Time is the quotidian commute of the sun   The striptease phases of the waning moon The  hammock sway of indecision The memorandum of embers that refuse to die. Time is the only thing that we can’t get enough of when we’re in love And it's the one thing we cannot bear when our beds are haunted and we've calculated the number of sparrows flying across the vinyl-coated landscape of muted wallpaper.        Time, as we  age  becomes the conservator of our desecrated hearts whose still-life memories  in the hummingbird second of say, a Sinatra song can exhume our grief or resurrect a  moment of lust like the summer of 1970 when the doe-eyed girl with late August skin answered the door wearing nothing but a powder blue barely snapped  work shirt and a nonchalant  towel  turban and smiled  like a daylily in the sun which sent me reeling backwa...

I arrive at this age  gray as an   Amagansett  late December sky peering through the loupe of a crinkly eye  which allows me to  magnify my flaws and appraise my life. While the pinky-ringed experts of The Antiques Roadshow would say that at auction  I wouldn’t fetch much the truth is I have become  a family heirloom  like the flint glass replicas that Parisian high society once coveted as did our daughters  when they loved to play dress up in nana’s night-out fascinator uncertain heels and  mahogany velvet gown that was topped off  by the extravagant flourish of her Victorian Amethyst Paste Rivière necklace  with its Cadbury purple hue which, now,  all these years later,  lie in the tomb of a pale yellow dowry box on a runner of rose-embroidered lace  alongside the remains of a Silver Paste bird brooch and a pair of Art Deco earrings which soon enough will be us, sleeping diamonds  wrapped in a duvet of dus...

Think of the sun as the warmth you are aching for when everything feels like  the ruins of the rain Think of the moon as the maestro  of the tides conducting the rise and fall  of your shipwrecked heart Think of the stars as the Knights Templar of infinite possibilities  ready to ride into battle to defeat your doubts and uncertainty  Think of the air as the replenishment of memories Think of the passing clouds as a cargo full of dreams Think of the winter storms as a flurry of dispatches handwritten in the script of snow angels which in any language reads I understand. And think of tomorrow For what it always is: A ready to be delivered  tenderly whispered answered prayer.    

  It begins with the forecast of our disposition. which we depend on like the bedtime reading of Goodnight Moon. Then without warning the world betrays you like your friends did when they disappeared without explanation. Time reverses its course and you are suddenly hell-bent for the asylum of childhood. The Stargazer Lilies become unforgivable. Che gelida manina intolerable and your heart begins to suffocate like Desdemona at the hands of the one who loved her most Despite your cries of anguish and the last-ditch effort of Hail Mary prayers it starts to rain bricks like a biblical curse which like the early stages of Jenga seems manageable  until The Unforgiving decide to accelerate this  game of the Gods and entomb you beneath the stacks Like tomorrow when we will watch her fade away with no assurance from the moon as  the  snowflakes  fall like a flurry of epilogues which covers every name that are etched in stone.

I suppose I can succumb to defeat like a gazelle on the Serengeti and allow my fears to sink their razor-sharp teeth into the nape of my neck as I lie there motionless  and wait to slowly die just like my country is about to. I suppose I can watch my joy sail away like the incinerating corpse of a Viking pyre I suppose I can release my faith And cut off all contact to anyone who lives beyond the manifest heavens I suppose I can abandon all hope and wait for the floods to arrive I suppose I can erase my dreams and live with the torment of a blank canvas. I suppose I can divorce my soul and pretend that we’ve never met. I suppose we can cover our mirrors, recite the Kaddish and Howl like Ginsberg. hold an Irish wake perform a Buddhist sky burial march and lament  in a Jazz procession celebrate Dia de los Muertes and watch the ashes of our beloved dissolve in the wide open deep Or we can take a few days  to wobble back up onto our unsteady feet  shake off the deluge the...

The last leaf rides the curlicue current wickedly defying gravity like an unsupervised what the hell kid as zig-zagging squirrels and merry prankster dogs  hold their breath like the crowd at an airshow as the leaf refusing to pull the parachute cord dares to die like Kerouac  in his hellbound ‘49 Hudson. For the grand finale the leaf plummets tumbling and  somersaulting like Monk notes played in a seedy swan dive until    it makes touchdown landing  on the lunar surface of old friends who found  their final resting place amongst the reckless litter  and deadbeat acorns of this heaven on earth.

On An Autumn Day Like This Written by  David Steven Simon On an autumn day like this when the leaves  shed their modesty and change like flirty high school girls in a doors wide open pastoral dressing room emerging as scarlet women only to retreat and return as bare anorexic  branches who think they look fat I sit  on this pine-slatted Central Park bench autographed by lovers  painted by pigeons and long for the days when everyone was still here until they began to disappear And I was left an orphan of this late November darkness waiting for the light to return which makes  what lies ahead as heartbreaking as goodbye and as fragile as forever