THE ROUGH
by ARCHIE BOUVIER WASHINGTON
$12.00 (plus shipping & handling)
available from Archie Washington
206 W. 6th St. #801
Los Angeles, CA 90014

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experiences, and how to record truth truly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Driven, driven some
Driven some driven
Taken in out of the cold
Loved, given some food, no questions asked
Held close to absorb the trembling
Reawakened to Love’s common ground
Talk some talk
Talk, talk some
Taken into the silence of feeling
Safe enough to let it all stream out
Andrew Phillips Hayes, 11/13/76

In a world grown paralyzed with frozen tongues of a barren commercialized billboard mind, this little book is a fresh tonic to the unexpurgated soul. The violence and obscenity of a life on the streets of San Francisco is here presented in an unsentimental, unromanticized form through the mind of a young gay black man on a mission to suicide his tortured origins, and free himself from the ultimate cruelty of the purgatory of memory. However, there is also a strangely innocent abandonment to the moment, a mad gaiety, a lust for life, at times almost a delirium.

Bumping up against that heart attack machine strapped on by all citizens at birth in the belly of a North American beast is grist for the mill for honing the mind and soul. The protagonist engaged in the time honored tradition of coming West to San Francisco to escape a cursed and violated past and suicide himself, or reinvent a new identity where the dream machine reality studio reigns supreme. Go West young man, go West young man until you cannot go any further. I have found the enemy and the enemy is “I.”

I am the “Andrew” that weaves in and out of Archie Washington’s diary of a homeless man on the streets of San Francisco. This gives me a strange deja vu personal lens from which to view this unique experience of the urban underbelly of American life as reported by one of its’ frontline participants. I was a social worker/poet in the Department of Public Health’s Homeless Programs, mixing clinical social work practice with radical community organizing.

The past is the past and we are stuck with the psychological significance we have attributed to each experience in the vault of our memory. Throughout his vivid remembered experiences is an invisible attempt to draw meaning and order from seemingly random chaos. This is natural and human. We all do it. What makes this book rise above most reports back from a descent into hell, as it were, is his honesty and almost naïve delicate expression of the simplicity of the mystery and pain which always accompany the act of creation.

What allows one person to eventually walk away from spiraling down into death and destruction and another to careen like a train wreck towards multiple deaths imploding into inevitable annihilation. You can never ultimately predict with any accuracy who will make it to the other side or end up another casualty in a system gone terribly awry. In my 27 years of working the streets, I have seen too many train wrecks rise up like golden Phoenixes from the ashes of certain death. Archie Washington is one of those resilient souls that we can all learn much from. He has no political or personal ax to grind, and carries the reader into his moment to moment world with relative ease. You want to follow him as the eternal seeker of some larger wisdom hidden in the seemingly random violence and brutality of the world. Yet, he is hot on the trail of the restorative value of experience as the prime source of wisdom and creation.

Reading this narrative painfully reminded me that we each live in our own ‘separate realities’, and occasionally break out and have a meeting of the Minds, drifting back into our separate thought dreams. If you give yourself up to the flow of the protagonist’s mind without undue critical analysis you will be rewarded richly.

There is no central point, no heroes, no bad guys, no question of will, but only the flux of events and an obedience to flow. Take what you will from this book, and leave your comfortable opinions as road kill on the highway to hell. These characters are internally exiled refugees from the false cultural void in which we are drowning in America and the world. Do we dare hope? Do we dare leave the dead past behind and enter the luminescent moment where we are whole, pure, perfect as the day we were born. How does one “walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil,” and burn the radiated contaminated thought beams from our consciousness and join the dreaming reality beings that we are The backdrop of the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, a wild, crazy bus ride of 25 homeless people across America to the Housing Now March on Washington, and the homeless occupation of the Civic Center Plaza (Camp Agnos) for over one year replete with dramatic resistance and confrontations with the political power structure of San Francisco surround and inform the lives and relationships between a cast of “homeless” characters who populate this other America. A deep and ancient culture of nomadic hunters and gatherers on the edge of post-modern America.

As the society continues to disintegrate and is unable to support life, the streets emerge as a new frontier, or raw laboratory for radical social and political change in America. Hope is ever present in all who tread here, and nourishes the roots of all quests to break down the mindset that separates the vast connective tissue weaving all living things together. Steal this book and start your own revolution from within. From the streets of America and the world rise up O Phoenix from these ashes of modernity’s compost and co-create a conscious evolutionary path together now!

Andrew

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 1st, 2002 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.