A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER II
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
The Before and After was the peak of materiality. Dudes, chicks, fags, blacks, whores. Kids seven years old ditching school and hanging around in the store, smoking on the car seats under the candle shelf. A little black kid trying to decide whether to put the cigarette or his thumb into his mouth. Junior high girls meeting and teasing the boys. The older hangers-on eyeing the fresh ripe melons on jail-bait chicks. Teenage boys trying to catch a glimpse of a brown tit as chicks tried see-through shirts on behind a curtain. Spades trying to be cool. Rock musicians trying to be hip. Fat middle-aged mommas and poppas trying to recapture Youth, to be where it’s at. Secretaries, nurses, college co-eds, buying bait to catch breadwinners. Dudes hanging out … waiting to be accepted by the merchant marines’ school … waiting for the next key to come through the store … or just waiting for something to wait for. Zap Comics with Captain Pissgums and Honeybunch, hash pipes, spoons, American flag fringe jackets, blacklights, leather pants, posters, smile but John Lennon kept singing, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” over and over again on the robot record player as we, too lazy to run up a tower to change the record, said “Right on!”
We too believed only in ourselves … at least the Before and After crew thought they did. Smoking dope in the back room, three o’clock in the morning after closing the store, after selling the last lid to the last longhair, Thai, exchange student in a gray trench coat. All except Moe, my big, bush-haired friend who ran the shop.
Moe didn’t do dope, drink, smoke; he really believed in himself. HE DIDN’T NEED TO GET HIGH BECAUSE HE WAS ALREADY THERE. He was the undercurrent of love, real love, in the store. He sold the fancy leather bags, sash pouches, and belts smelling of the ether of the independent hip artisans for no profit. Moe was a strong man that could do anything because he believed in himself and didn’t give a shit about anything. But that was an illusion, and I saw through it.
Why couldn’t I stop seeing through the surface into the other things? Moe was trapped in a prison called Before and After, the curse that his chrome-plated society Jewish mother had zapped upon him, the cross that he foolishly carried to ease his father’s loneliness. Now he said he controlled his own life.
He didn’t control even the heat in the store. He sat there, stripped to his waist, waiting, sweating in the heat that some asshole miles away decided to give to the store. Waiting, with coconut incense and perfumed candles to hide the body odor … trapped in the store without a shower … sneaking out once every two weeks in P-coat and multi-colored sunglasses. Sitting, waiting with his spears of irony, keeping people from getting too close to the real Moe. Pretending to be satisfied sleeping with chicks with bib tits on the back-room floor. Pretending to be happy, to be doing his thing, when all the while he really wanted to ride the chopper that sat in the middle of the storeroom, to ride with his furry buffalo horns, searching for that Something. But now pretending everything.
On acid one time, I saw Moe as he would become … an old Jewish storekeeper, imprisoned behind a tired, sad face. Talking to the dudes who hang around. Talking about how it was on the merchant marine’s ship. How the men made one another look like queers. Jimmy Hendrix was on the record player playing Foxy Lady. Philip, a skinny doper, described how Hendrix had jerked off his guitar at Woodstock. Quite a showman, that motherfucker.