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JIM FALLS IN LOVE
The immediacy of it hit Jim like when he heard the line "THIS MAGIC MOMENT." It was hard for Jim to explain the hit, meaning the feeling of utter and shuddering suddeness he felt, like when he saw THE ROLLING THUNDER REVUE in Madison Square Garden in 75, or the last time he saw THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. It smacked his brain real, real hard, all moshed together like The Kinks and Harry Dean Stanton and Jimmy Page and Winslow Homer and Pollock and Margaret Bourke-White amd the Parthenon and the Chrysler Building and Juniot Kimbrough and Jerry Jeff Walker and Sonny Landreth and Kubrick and Degas and Brando and Denis Lehane and Bogart and Tom Waits and Duchamp and Schwitters. Jim didn't know where he was at anymore, and didn't care. He didn't exactly feel like the tin foil you wrap a potato in and put it in a campfire, not exactly, or when you run your hand against the bottom of a desk at school when you're a kid and find dried-up gum there and pry it off and chew it, or some Mexican working at Dunkin Donuts, and he didn't even really care if you know what I'm talking about. He was tired and he just wanted to smash that "fourth wall of literature," the one that he dreamt that his orthodontist, Dr. Jendrysik, said could only be broken with your mouth, and by doing so would inevitably cause extensive occlusal damage, but he did it despite this warning and through this painful jaw fracture, though his mandible would be wired shut until the shadow of the groundhog saw CASABLANCA in Cyrillic subtitles and broke on through to the other side, divided day into night, and then, as Stravinsky, the old World War II veteran who lived upstairs, that guy who was always listening to Perry Como, who led Jim to believe that even though it was his, Stravinsky's, birthday, and even if he never saw the dawn's early light again, that if he went to Staten Island, all would be well in a concatenation of flashfox ineffability and mainline depravity, and that he might become his twin's cousin, and that most of the shore places that were closed now might be dark, that the only light would be a shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound, and that as the moon rose higher the inessential houses of yje holy might melt away, and that he, Jim, just might - maybe, he prayed - become aware of the old island.
