SECTION THREE

The Blacklisted Journalist Picture  The Blacklisted Journalistsm

COLUMN FORTY-FIVE, MAY 1, 1999
(Copyright © 1999 Al Aronowitz)

THE SAGA OF MANUEL MENÉNDEZ (CONT'D.)

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MANUEL MENÉNDEZ

PART 10: A PAIN IN THE SPHINCTER

To continue with Manuel's story as told by his email:

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: 50th. birthday.
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 05:49:23 PDT

18/10/98.

Caro Maestro:

I don't blame you for not greeting me on my 50th birthday: nothing to celebrate anyway, just another step to the grave or the crematorium. If God had been really smart, men would be born old, and go backwards in time, to die as newborn babies.

Andrew Hill came here and we became friends straight away. We drank Guinness and smoked some high octane hash. He's a very nice guy.

But this Sunday I'm bored as hell, with a dual hangover, but nevertheless I'm going to finish a chapter in English, one of the most difficult in the whole novel, with diagrams, tables, the works.

Maestro: I need a favor from you: I need US maps impossible to get in here, not even through the Web. Concretely, I need a map of the East Coast of the US, from New York to Miami, the biggest scale possible; and an A-Z, a street directory, of Miami. Don't worry, I'll send you back the dough. A friend is sending me maps from Madrid, where the last chapter and finale takes place.

It's very likely that the novel could be published by November next year, coinciding with Miami's International Book Fair. After that, I can kick the bucket for all I care. Well, back to the book, an artiste manque trying to achieve what no one has done so far.

Take care:

Manuel.

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject:
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 16:07:42 PDT

18/10/98.

Caro Maestro;

Just plain don't publish it: it's a very divisive issue, and we'll need perhaps another decade to address it properly, retroactively. Just plain forget about the "N" for Negroes question, tempting as it seems to be.

Yours:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: A_hill61@hotmail.com
Cc: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Re:
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 11:17:33 PDT

>From: "Hill, Andrew P"
>To: "'manuel_menendez@hotmail.com'"
>Subject:
>Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 09:33:42 +0100

>Manuel

Thank you for your hospitality on Saturday - I was really glad I came. I hope you were OK in the evening - I felt a bit bad having to go so soon but I had other commitments. Hope you remembered that I left a little something in your tin ! > >Just read your e-mail to Al & you ask him for US street maps - you may be able to find these on the 'Infoseek' search engine - have a look. > >I'll call you soon & we'll arrange to meet again.

> >Your friend,

>Andrew.
> Andrew Hill

19/10/98.

Course I haven't forgot, mite: Your medicine was miraculous: I just completed a full chapter that I attach. I don't know if you'll be able to open it. If not I'll send it to you in print. I hope you liked what you read. So far I have had no trouble with Windows 95 compatibility. Mr. Al can use my MSS, they come out in Plain Script, but readable. There's plenty more on this hard disk, whenever you feel in the mood of reading work in progress.

Un abrazo:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: A_hill61@hotmail.com
Cc: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Chapter attached.
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 11:27:20 PDT

Monday, October 19th, 1998.
"Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam"

Brothers in arms:

I attach the 14th. chapter of the novel, and suddenly I realized that it's almost written. Just remaining a few intermediate chapters, and the last one, the climax, the lethal mental orgasm. I don't know if you'd be able to open it: Mr. Al uses Window 95, and he has no problem, only that it prints out as Plain Text, and therefore is difficult but readable.

Cheers to three friends:

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Chapter, apparently lost.
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 14:14:53 PDT

19/10/98.

Cher maitre:

I just wrote to you a 1/2 hour e-mail, that was lost in the Web traffic . Only to remind you: 1) Perhaps you weren't here when Andrew came to celebrate my 50th. birthday, but you were spiritually, and both of us praised your hard-won three stars status.

2) Your stuff about me in your latest column was excellent. Did I really write that stuff in letters? Epistlography has been dead since the 1700s. If writing on a word-processor is difficult, what was like to Marquis de Sade? Using a quill pen, with no light except that lone candle in his dungeon at La Bastille? With no hope, except the brief one brought by the French Revolution, and soon lost?

That's what I call dedication in an artist, which I myself lack. I attach one chapter of my novel, in English. I'd really appreciate if you rerouted this chapter to my friends "EMadri7239 @aol.com" and to Andrew. They use some version of Windows and I can't get through to them.

Loves You:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Chapter.
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 08:30:35 PDT

20/10/98.

Cher Maitre:

I don't know how the chapter arrived to your PC, but for what I saw on my end of the line, the typing was impeccable. What do you think about it, maestro? Spare not my feelings, please, no bullshit.

And If you did like it, do you want to publish it? It's twelve pages long in 18 type, so it would shrink to 9 pages when converted. Exactly 18,263 words. It could give you breathing space, which I think you need badly. Also, very important for me, would be sort of a probe, I would like to know what the readers think. This was no by far my best chapter, but if they like it, they would like the book at large.

It's already 160 pages long, and about 80 or so lacking: it would be a small book, bone-bared to the essentials. No use in wasting paper. I got rid of about 60% of the original material. I'll try for the jugular of the potential reader.

Loves you:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Blackjack
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:42:01 PDT

20/10/98.

Cher Maitre:

By all means it's all yours. If you say it's excellent, I trust your instinct. Let's hope the readers also like it. Please resend me any e-mail with opinions, I don't know, if they are favorable, I'll know for sure I'm in the right track. You know, to research that brief chapter took me months of work and a grand in Canadian dollars; just for 12 pages.

I found a veritable treasure trove of Cuban photographs, some in jails, that you can download and enrich your column when using my stuff.

It's a new movie entitled "Escape from Cuba." I just printed some of the photos and they are great. I'll eventually use one of them for the portrait of the would-be book, if ever.

The e-mail address: reagan@escapefromcuba.com

(No relation to the cowboy.)

Loves you:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Calabaza
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:23:26 PDT

22/10/98.

Maestro:

It's fine, but whenever you try to replace a Spanish diacritical mark, it becomes a jumble. Just plain forget about them: they add nothing to the story itself, only confusion.

It's very simple: when I write "compañero" just write companero, with a plain "n." If I write "El Químico," just write "El Quimico," without accent. I hope people like it, I think it's a funny story.

Take care:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Drunk, I 'm.
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 00:41:38 PDT

Write to me Maestro because I don't want to live any more.

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: RMadri7239@aol.com
Cc: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Winter.

31/10/98.

To my friends, acquaintances and partners in crime:

"Especially when the October wind/ with frosty fingers punishes my hair..." Dylan Thomas.

It's winter, and the withered leaves fly in the mean streets of this black godawful Hackney ghetto. Drizzling, cold spikes. In this Saturday I can't stand. When the pubs, cinemas and restaurants are full, and the lovers chat hand in hand, and I face this screen like an uninspired mediocre painter gazes at a white canvas, not knowing where to start or what to say. And that big clock that only moves forward is a constant reminder of my ephemeral empty existence, every second bringing me nearer to extinction, to obliteration, to oblivion. To nothingness.

Blocked, incapable of writing, the only scratch I'll leave behind. Never existed a being like myself, and never will be. It's useless trying to decipher the meaning of my life, just a speck in the maelstrom of the DNA. Who knows who engendered me, since the Neanderthals and the Homus Erectus convived and even copulated, and mixed genes and blood. Who am I, and where do I come from? And what's the reason I roam this planet, itself a product of sheer chance, tiny particle of dust from the Big Bang? The Holocaust is still going on, and Adolf Schickelgruber was merely a deranged instrument of an imagined providence.

What's the meaning of flesh and suffering, all the time aware that there's nothing more than a few years ahead. When the marrow of the great poets and the geniuses are nothing but dust. And even empires pass away, be they Roman or Slav. And for two millennia the cowards have been preaching resurrection, in the name of a spurious Messiah. Just out of fear of nothingness, of vacuum.

There's no soul, there's not even mind, just plain brain, a muscle, just more complex than the penis, the amalgam of 40 billion or so neurons, but cells nevertheless, and therefore condemned to extinction. As irrelevant as cavemen wondering at the flames, and burying their dead without knowing what death in itself is.

Two millennia of what? What is to celebrate? Nothing. The passing of fascism and communism? In a sense more human than the populace of Rome claiming for death, thumbs pointing down. Kolim, or Auschwitz, what does it matter? Man is the wolf of man, even in today's welfare states, Hegel's unfulfilled dream. Pipe dreams.

All I want is to drown my impotence, physical and mental, in those old Nepenthes, hashish and alcohol. I only wish I could shoot some heroin, to feel, at least for some hours, my mind above the fray. Up there on Nirvana, far from the madding crowd. To escape this solitude that is not of the flesh but from the mind. This existence I didn't ask for, that was given to me by sheer chance, a single one of a million spermatozoa piercing the precise ovule, which made me be. I didn't ask for it, but that kinetic explosion has brought so far from Auckland to Vancouver, all around the Earth, and what for?

The wolves are baying at my door, the would be assassins. And I only wish they put an end to the pain of living, and I could go to sleep forever.

Take care:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: RMadri7239@aol.com
Cc: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Subject: Ying & Yang
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 16:10:21 PST

2/11/98.

My dear friend:

You are wise beyond your years, no wonder you're a psychologist. Only I'd need a psychiatrist instead. Don't pay attention to my Hamletian lucubrations that come to me every weekend I spent in this claustrophobic hovel, that reminds me of Villa Marista.

This is the most cosmopolitan and beautiful town I have seen in all my wanderings around the world. I could go to so many art galleries, I could go to the movies, I just plain could go to a pub and get drunk on Guinness watching a soccer match between Arsenal and Manchester United. But no, I remain here, with the Memphis blues.

There's a name for that: anhedonia, the total impossibility of enjoying life. You see, depression is the cancer of the soul. When I combat outright depression, it comes back in another shape, like an amoeba, even more insidious. People talk about physical pain, but what about psychic pain? In civilized countries like Holland the doctors give you euthanasia for that.

But it's the easy way out: I have to get on living, and I have to finish this book and the next one: it's my revenge, and I only hope they survive the great paranoid tyrant, which isn't anymore a communist, or a fascist: in his desperation he's showing his true colors. If with my books I could only hasten his demise for a single day, I would have not lived in vain.

I'm better qualified and equipped than Reinaldo, poor guy, with his old Underwood soldered to the metal table, so it couldn't be robbed from his room in Marianao. For lack of one, I have two word processors. No use. What I lack is inspiration, that divine spark. The Gift. And I despair, and waddle and stumble on my own desperation.

Loves you, and take care:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Untimely death.

Thursday, November 5, 1998.

My dear friend:

I just reread the story about your heart attack and I couldn't help but laugh. I'm plain waiting for mine and I only hope it will be massive, to kill me once and for all. Most probably they'll send me to the London School of Medicine, for the kids to practice on. They'll shave my head, eyebrows and pubis, so I'll be less offensive on the mortician's table. I have been there before, but cutting up corpses myself. I remember one, an old bitch that weighed around 300 pounds. The pathologist had to help me to get her down from the hook. When I cut her up the liver looked sinister to me: too pale and enlarged. As soon as I put the scalpel to it, the stench was so gross that all the medical students escaped, some vomiting, and only me and the pathologist remained there laughing.

So who fucking cares, Maestro? There's nothing sacred about death, it can be funny and obscene at the same time.

Take care, and don't you die on me:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Book.
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 19:34:08 PST

7/11/98.

I just wrote a long e-mail, the server failed, and I lost it. It's frustrating.

Good question: because I don't write in chronological order, sometimes I go backwards. Perhaps I tackle a chapter, proves too tough, and I go for easier one. The result is a crazy patchquilt, and maybe in the end I discard away all the stuff just written.

I've been fasting for six days now, away from the bottle and Andrew's stuff. I'm starting to feel weak already.

By the way, today is the 81st anniversary of the Russian Revolution, or rather the coup d'etat that brought the bolsheviks to power at machinegun point. Root of all my evils.

Take care:

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: RMadri7239@aol.com
Subject: Happy holydays.
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 03:19:58 PST

November 7th, 1998
(81th. Anniversary of the Russian, or October Revolution.)

Caro Maestro:

I know it's confusing, but I'm not going to go on the Gregorian calendar and the Cyrillic alphabet. But it's baffling that the October Revolution was celebrated until recently in November. By the Party fatcats, the nachsolovos. Up there in the Lenin mausoleum, greeting the tanks and the ICBMS. They can't feed their people, and this year is another of famine, but they, the Russian Republic I mean, still keep 700 ICBMS that can obliterate the world as we know it, each one with ten independently targeted one kiloton warheads.

But I guess that's not forte, Russian politics; well, It's mine, and for the last 30 years or so, especially since I have access to free country libraries. I guess you don't know Lavrenti Beria from Allen Ginsberg: Everyman to his obsessions.

You asked an interesting question about my writing methods. A simple answer: I don't have any. But nevertheless, there's some semblance of order inside my chaos. And after being refreshed after a long abstinence on high octane Carlsberg beer and Bekaa Valley turnips, I'm going to tackle the second most difficult chapter, the last, that takes place in Madrid: I have all the street, subway and bus maps, the works. And when I finish it three months from now, those 18 pages of it, I'm going to handle the main one, the anagnorisis. That's an average of 0.22 pages a day, or about 358 words, a day, which is a record from me. That is, if I don't start working on the double, cash-in-hand. Some restaurant or other.

So in the meantime, you can always use my stuff to fill half of your columns for three months. Don't worry, I'll send more. Hope you don't resent my sending copies to Andrew and to my literary agent, Mr. Roberto Madrigal, with abode in Cincinnati.

Take care, enjoy yourself, you needed the break.

Manuel.-

* * *

From: "manuel menendez"
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Cc: A_hill61@hotmail.com
Subject: Where was I?
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 09:39:22 PST

Saturday, November 21, year of the Lord 1998.
"Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam."

Where the fuck was I? Good question. Hell and back. I was at Homerton Hospital, with an arm out of socket, four broken ribs and assorted hematomas, the most notable an eye like blackened by Mike Tyson. I rolled down the stairs with my supper on my hands. What really fucks me up is that I was sober, had I been drunk, I would have suffered no damage. That's a well known fact since Aristotle.

The operation in itself was no big deal, I even enjoyed the gas. The problem is that the bone was so impacted that it severed the nerves, and the doctor says it will take at least six months until I recover the use of my left hand: if ever, he wouldn't give guarantees, at 50 the nerves regenerate slowly or not at all.

I won't dwell on all the inconveniences, like not being able to button my jeans or tie my shoelaces, and having to sleep prone, all my life I have slept on my right side in the fetal position.

Well, first thing I did when I came back from the anesthesia was to rip off the intravenous solution, roll myself a couple of Old Holborns and go to the smoking ghetto. There was an old Jamaican on a wheelchair drinking beer, and asked him where he got the stuff. This junky blond girl charged me six pounds, but she brought me two Carlsbergs Special Brews, which tasted like glory and washed away the fumes of the gas.

Now I'm back to this hovel, facing a Scrooge Christmas and a fucked up 1999.

Manuel.-

PS: To write with a single hand is a real pain in the sphincter.

* * *

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