Beer Mystic: A Novel of Inebriation & Light
By bart plantenga

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.

The following is an excerpt of Beer Mystic, a novel by Bart Plantenga spread out over a global network of host magazines. A full list of Beer Mystic Exerpt URLS is available here .

Beer Mystic Excerpts #37-38: Obsolete

Beer Mystic Excerpt #39

After work, I head up to Central Park for a change. My old messenger stomping grounds. But Ben has finked out again. Fuck him. For a card-carrying slacker he sure is a busy guy. Just as well. In the park I see the man I have seen for years covered in pigeons holding his breath and standing there like a human crucifix. No one thinks him strange. He entertains children and tourists.
One never knows whether to acknowledge these crusty characters who feed pigeons in the park by the military hero statues – applaud, give loose change, take a photo, kiss feet, blame schizophrenia, roll them into a dale or just ignore them.
This guy had certainly managed to find his niche [was that so bad?] – as a kind of ornithological landing strip for loose change. He strings stale crusts of bread into the odd webbing of his cable-knit sweater. With a nose fit for a butcher shop he stood like some Moses atop the park trashcan and implored pigeons, as “Messengers from God,” to eat of his body and “enlighten” him. One pigeon ate crusts right from the crucible of his mouth. This was communion whether the tourist Christians [in town for a convention] thought so or not.
And then I swooped down Strawberry Fields and chased the tyranny of birds off him. But does the guy thank me? No! He bitches me down to size instead because he’s the “Vigilante Messiah” on assignment receiving “tele-magnetic messages” he decodes for the White House. He’s going to get an authority, a guard he knows in the Gulf & Western building who will take care of me.
Apparently when the pigeons grab the bread they peck out small Morse code links on his skin usually about John Lennon. One such message: FBI encourage John to leave Yoko in 1973… he 33 and she 41… to have affair with 22-yr-old because FBI wanted to gather information on depraved behavior of enemies of the State and peace activists against US involvement in Vietnam thereby causing targeted individual(s) to self-destruct…. John’s indiscreet lapse in morality was win-win situation for FBI.
“Damn tootin’ you better run, ruin my livelihood!”
I retreated to Tin Pan Alley where you can argue baseball from a psycho-political angle and find a 45 of Bertolt Brecht singing on the juke, “So divide up those in darkness / From those who walk in light / Light ’em up boys / There’s your picture / drop the shadows out of sight.” A bar is a safe warren where engaged disputation prevents words from collapsing all around us.
On the small chalkboard above the register, the daily quotation – today from Dylan Thomas: “born not out of the womb, but out of the soul and the spinning head. And he who had borne her out of darkness loved his creation, and she loved him… And with him dwelt a dog… and a dark woman. The woman went away, and the dog died.” I’m looking at this and I am wondering if this isn’t meant for me. The cumulative effects of synchronicity between mind and the everyday resonates with transcendental implications. This is – the song on the juke, Mark Stewart’s “Hypnotised”: “Distracted by desire / 7% of the population, 94% of the wealth”.
I had a beer and a mug of quiet. I was beholden to this face-to-face intimacy of beer and mind. Synchronicity’s introductions: Pivo, this is Bass, Bass Pivo. Beer, meet mind. Maybe Dylan Thomas is right – maybe my days with Nice are numbered. I gave a quick call to yet another phone number that Nice had given me; leave a message unsure whether the guy voice on the answering machine would pass the message along: “I have the sugar packets that I will sprinkle on your pussy. In Senegal, fishermen sing as they draw in their nets.” And then I went speechless, nothing more to say, like I don’t know how to turn the corner of flirtation into something bigger. I stood for a second, stared into the mouthpiece, and then hung up.
I held my beer glass in the prayer of my hands up to the light to see if it matched Kelly’s pilsner-tinted shades. If you’re going to be really mental you might as well be detri-mental. That is something I may have thought or may have hijacked from Nice or Kelly or a TV cartoon or lyrics… “My inner-circle’s Helter-Skelter… / Totally addicted under detrimental spell / If I had a shotgun, I’d blow myself to hell…”
I leafed through a New York Post left on the bar. I read a story with a mixture of delight and annoyance: “‘Human pit bull’ Bites Cop Who Shot Pooch” where a man could not sufficiently protect his home and canines with a garden hose. A cop in Queens supposedly attacked by the owner’s two monster Dobermans, kicked one and shot the other dead. The enraged owner flew off the handle, lunged at the cop and bit him. The man was charged with assault, harassment, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The cops were responding to dozens of complaints that the dogs were attacking neighborhood children. There was a related sidebar about a grandmother who claimed “dog’s ran off with my granddaughter.” I thought that dogs had maybe become part of the human armor, part of man’s weapons of self-destruction in the name of self-preservation.
In the toilet, grafitti:

MY PEOPLE MUST DRINK BEER
• Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 1777

Your best thoughts come when your pissing and far from a pen: Must think about propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely linking psychosis to creativity… Unrelated thought: It’s no coincidence that fine Belgian beers, brewed by monks and meant to enchant us, are served in stemmed goblets that suspiciously enough resemble the chalice.
I thought maybe my enjoyment of beer had become something more, a necessity [less like alcoholism, more like breathing]. This necessity, in turn, would fold into a need to document this enjoyment. And soon this need to enjoy would be replaced by the need to render in words this enjoyment. One totally eclipsing the other. Like some compulsive disorder which converts compulsions into something deeper and more dignified and justified. As the weeks pass, the words surpass the beer, wedge themselves between myself and the beer’s head and the ability to drink of its pleasure. At beer six you go back to beer one.
I wrote a fleeting haiku on a Grolsch coaster:

Nice2
I am the leader
Of hoaxest vodka hew
Or do I know no bleeder like you

An old black man, gazes over into the small slit of eye remaining open and says: “I got 50 years o’ jazz up here.” Pointing to his temple. “I danced with Josephine Baker, and went out with Miles Davis’s girl friend. That’d be dangerous and it was back then in Paris and when I was stationed in Germany in the late 40s I decided I would use the Army as my ticket to pleasure. I extended my tour of duty for 25 years where all I did was document jazz gigs. I also got enlightened: Why did I feel safer in 1949 Paris and Berlin than I did in my own Tallahassee neighborhood? Why did my government hire people to destroy the careers of people like Josephine Baker, branding her a traitor and a commie? The first 5 words I learned in German were “Ein bier, meine kleine schatz.” Synchronicity: Me too, Oktoberfest, Germantown. And just as this guy’s memories were about to render him fully human, I looked up and he was gone.
“Ein bier, meine kleine schatz.” I ordered.
The most beautiful bartender in the world swept the hair out of her face and pulled me another.
I stared at the self that dodged my gaze in and around the bar mirror, framed by bottles with labels from countries I’d never been to. I waited for the head of my brew to give me a clue of how to stop the invasion of worry into dream. And I can still cry! Not Hollywood tears, but ones that run down my insides into my gut. And the Alley bartenders don’t bother you with concern because what is wrong with me is wrong with you is wrong with them.
And then I wandered home, 50-some blocks down to the Meat District, where dogs and butchers meet. Walk a certain way down a certain block, though, and memory becomes the mugger. The memories tail you like a shadow about to pass you and make a grab for your personal effects.
Along my route I pull back the foreskin of the paper sack and drink deep the Pilsner Urquell to dig up, out of memory’s backyard, the warm intimacy that I once had with Djuna. And suddenly I’m wandering far afield. It was supposed to be forever. Forever in the devaluation of concept and words is about 4.5 years nowadays. And as I am prone to the torture of recall and actually writing it down I can see immediately the utter futility of my endeavors. To write it down is to leave evidence, to write your own prison sentence. I have seen the micro-mites [Djuna used to spill crumbs – I swear – to plant the seeds of this kind of insidious destruction] boldly eating the page, beginning with the spine – the same way multiple sclerosis works! They’re gnawing so voraciously that they’re obliterating my hard-fought memories before I even make it to the end of my scrap of paper.
I wonder if knowing another person too well should be declared a victory or a failure. I remember the sweat on Djuna’s upper lip. The twitch in her grip with my face in her nape. The way she pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose with her pinky. The faster I walk, the deeper I drink, the more I remember.
Djuna and me have definitely sort of split. It’s been six weeks and something in the Meat District. Djuna’s way too much into sun and the look of success for me to ever try to lure her back. With what, you ask. You’re right. Djuna will continue to do her “heliosis,” that ancient Greek regimen for body development in the sun, up on her tar beach regardless of what I or anyone else says. There will be some half-digested memories of me on the roof, scarf flailing in a brisk wind with her laying behind a reflective tan-enhancing wind screen. Nearly naked, shine of olive oil and aloe butter, she would prepare for her afternoon shift back at Girl World, four hours $500. She was that good. The lack of tan lines, she knew, had increased her revenues by 12%. I remember her observing that her kind was particularly attractive to fundamentalists: Muslims, Hasidim, the Christian Right, Communists. She had yet to figure out exactly why. I was no help.
Djuna will continue to claim that the sun increases production of testosterone, which is essential for muscle development and a proactive attitude and is good for business.
Our last summit ended the way picking at a scab usually does – blood. I had coaxed her off her tar roof and into a cafÈ where she quickly exploded indignantly like a dropped box of roofing nails. We cannot leave well enough alone as the saying goes.
“I’m wasting my time indoors with you. I could be up in the sun right now.”
“You could also be saving the poor of India.”
“Luckily I don’t understand anything you are trying to say. ‘People who hate the light usually hate the truth,’ Burt Lancaster once said.” She comes well prepared.
“‘It’s obvious that sexual life flourishes better in a dim murky light: It is at home in the chiaroscuro and not in the glare of neon light.’ Tha’s Henry Miller.” I think New York’s the wrong town for sun but I say nothing. Well, not nothing.
“How come a day in the sun leaves you so drained? You don’t feel like doin’ nothin’.”
“You’re sooo out of it. Just look at light-deprivation experiments, studies done in Alaska, Norway, Sweden, and dear, you’ll see that an absence of sunlight in this Land of the Midnight Sun reveals an increase in alcoholism, depression, suicide. I mean, what’s so fuckin’ sexy about lookin’ like a mushroom?!” Hmm, I think quickly of Rum Seer.
“Yea, but maybe it’s light for 22 hours a day during the summer that’s drivin’ people loony. I mean tanning’s just the sun stimulating the release of melanin; same stuff that makes worms brown.”
“Sunlight kills bacteria.”
“Yea, it wreaks havoc on beer. It kills beer’s what’s wrong with sun. And if it kills beer it must kill other things we value, like our youthful faces for instance! It also slows sperm production, and brings out the latent herpes on your lip!”
“Light symbolizes knowledge.”
“Scholars don’t do their research on beaches, honey. And what about melanoma!?” the response is just the exhausted sigh of exasperation. I still sometimes entertained absurdly romantically unrealistic notions of winning her back from the sun who had [among others] stolen my baby from me. Blues riff. Never mind that I didn’t want her back. I thought that if I could just show how the sun ravaged … anyway, this was how our last moments together were squandered. The vision was not a vision but just another wacko idea wanting to be taken for a vision, another inhabitant who had become nothing and was now hoping to become something.
But back to Djuna’s time I was wasting. Nothing was OK because she had not totally and absolutely disappeared from my life. A clean slate was never to be, just like intestinal parasites don’t ever totally leave your plumbing. Every critical word I offered was countered by claims that I was just jealous, jealous, jealous, jealous even of the leeches clinging to the underbellies of yuppie scum.
Anyway, rent’s cheap here in this illegal subsublet garret [rumors are it had once been a morgue, a meat processing room, a mafia killing floor, a film set]. It’s cheap because of the smell but also because I am dependent upon the benevolence of Mr. Times Square Ticker and because I think this guy figures it’ll impress Djuna if he’s benevolent to an adversary.
If I do it right, I can place my radio in the windowsill, antenna against the glass and pick up WFMU across the river in East Orange. With a little aluminum foil on the end of the antenna and finesse tuning it in. Life, Life, is the only thing worth living for / Life, Life, is the only thing worth living for…aaaaeH! I think the checkerboard linoleum is curling up because the glue doesn’t stick to the floor because of the abattoir years of pig grease. Or the roaches eat the glue. I invited Djuna up once because she was curious how and whether I was even capable of surviving – especially aesthetically – without her. She inspected the place like a drill sergeant inspects a recruit’s fresh-made bed. I showed her my map of Manhattan, full of big colored pushpins marking my black-eyes. I mentally counted 30-some [some multiple outages]. And then she began to feel nauseous. The smell of meat from the 1950s? I guess she won’t be back any time soon.
Nice, on the other hand, is resourceful as ever; just wears lots of scent and lights lots incense around my place. And there on the phone pad next to the phone she had jotted down a phone number.
From my window to the right you can see carcasses splayed wide open, swaying in the breeze from hooks.
If I stand on my roof you can see it, the mutable herding patterns of nightlifers. Some stray off the fixed paths to vagrant watering holes. Some head down bricked and barb-wired dead ends in tight pants or they might stare out across fields of broken pavement, kids standing with their toes curled around the curbs. They might, out of boredom, begin imitating ambulance and police sirens – AA-OOO-AA-OOO … WEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeEEEEE… with frightening precision.
A year or two later these youths might begin imitating – some say mocking – the drinking of beer or the “snortation” of coke. Some will prefer to turn to dogs for guidance. Seeing eye. They believe dogs are tuned into a plane of intuition not available to ordinary human souls. That may be why dogs walking their slaves sometimes have a divining/diviner relationship. Others will make criminals their mentors. The ones “going to the dogs” will learn the barks and howls so well that even dogs will run around confused as to their source. Yes, one lady around here has taken to “running with the dogs,” which has enabled her to learn an intricate vocabulary of growls and howls. Paganism is the hot therapy right now.
Some might even make something of this expertise and get jobs as extras in the film studios in Astoria. Some, however, will go the other way with their canine lessons. They will eventually graduate from all twos to all fours. But I must tell you that they comprise an exception, their numbers counting perhaps at most a few dozen. The night will be their domain and they will set out for the light of dawn but never quite make it.
I’m a vegetarian, have flat herbivore’s teeth. And I live here in the unassuming cruelty of fate. Where air is pumped under the skin to loosen hide from meat. Where calves are placed on slatted tables and immediately after their throats are slit they are yanked up by their ankles so that the blood drains quickly to make the best veal. Where dogs tear open black plastic bags of bone and gristle at midnight. Where the homeless kick away the mutts, to suck up the gristle hidden in among the discarded knuckles and joints. Where men on their knees suck off boys with veins the size of garden hoses, feeding blood to pecs whose sole charm is their sculpted uselessness.
Where the abattoir sign swings and creaks in the fat nocturnal westerlies, a racket that advertises pig necks and pig feet – Pork Extremities. And I remember the pigeon man in Central Park and remember staring at this black and white photo from Paris, 1908, “L’Oiseleur du Palais Royal,” in the Strand a few days later found inside a book written by Robert Anton Wilson that I did not buy. I fumble through my boxes – and miracle of miracles – found the postcard, put it in an old envelope mottled with green flowers of mold, and wrote on the back “Here’s to prosthetic drinking devices. Call 524-3293.” And addressed it to the Rum Seer of Brooklyn.
But soon, very early, the men in bloody white aprons arrive – slamming of van doors, sending one out for coffee – and then they begin sawing through bone again. They begin at 6 a.m. The sound of sawing has already entered my dreams as rhythm. Schree-schraw Schree-schraw Schree-schraw…
I sit down with an old issue of the  The Sol-Id Times I stole from Djuna. This is what Djuna had been reading for about a year now, this newsletter of “the Sol/Id Foundation, dedicated to worship of sol and the renaissance of the Bronze Age.” This was grassroots fundamentalism at its best/worst. She had indeed distanced herself from the makeshift partialists, those who did not go for full tans – as in labia minora. Djuna had mentioned that there were entire communities – in Sedona, Dubai, Canary Islands, but even in NY – devoted to maximized all-inclusive sun worship that had managed to fuse the ideas of fundamentalism, the sun, tanning strategies, and gated communities into a lifestyle with its own television network. Many of the strongest advocates, already called Sun Panthers, were former substance abusers, AA and NA members who were now redirecting their energies to the sun.
Meanwhile, there was another article: “Your Brain on Alcohol”, which stated in screaming  pull quotes that “the most widespread and damaging substance we have in society” and that “Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that causes irreversible physiological changes that make one susceptible to alcoholism.” Djuna had underlined this in red pen.
I see the Gansevoort Street Pier from my window. I live somewhere between Melville’s old hovel and Trocchi’s pad on Bank Street. The empty harbor, the collapsing cement, abandoned auto carcasses, and a huge smoke stack. They [or was it Jude?] say that after the failure of Moby Dick, Herman Melville withdrew into oblivion, worked right over there for 19 years as a customs inspector. Does the knowledge of this kind of suffering make me feel better or worse?
Thus I reach for another beer – a fortuitous Delirium Tremens, 330 ml BiËre extra forte 9% alc./vol. produit de Belgique. How did that get in my mini-fridge? Was it Nice? Or do I attribute too much Peter Pan-level magic to her? I inhale it in an attempt to reverse, in some small way, the spin of the earth. I discover myself up, up, and around my queersome gnarled foot digit, whirling in that stark yet magnificent checkerboard linoleum instant. And with utter amazement, balanced on big toe, I began to reverse all the damage the spin of the earth had caused us. This spin or anti-spin has the same shape as I remember the wombful spiral, that hypnotic swirl, that earring impression Djuna once left on me, this map to the way beer and consciousness work, dragging the whorls of self off my fingerprints like the rings of a tree suddenly unfurled out in a straight line. Like there is no end except in nausea, the nausea of knowing. And knowing that the result of discovery is just more discovery. That each morsel of knowledge has a million concentric circles of more knowledge spinning wildly about it and just as many spinning concentrically within it. Vertigo is the physical manifestation of this knowledge. How does this happen? How can I think all this and why does it calm me the way a balance sheet calms a CPA?
A message from Nice quoting Baudelaire: “‘One should always be drunk… It is time to get drunk! / If you are not to be martyred slaves of time, / Be perpetually drunk. / With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please’ and with me…”

[Nice: “The Beer Mystic converts the slightest memory of a beer, its faintest aftertaste, the cloudy residue, the Belgian lace, marking the inside of the glass, into that delirious oracular spiraling – the pinnacle of the inebriatory cycle. Suffice it to say that he inhales the head of a beer the way we breathe oxygen. He may be the very bridge between the whirling dervish and slam dancing. And this I could admire into something more if he’d only let me.”]

Beer Mystic Excerpt #40: Lit Net [Stellenbosch, South Africa ]