featuring Model: Kathryn O’Reilly
all photographs by Michelle Gemma
Photo Shoot for Aquarius:
Personal Universe series
24 August 2018
Bluff Point, CT USA
Eve of the Full Moon
script: Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night excerpt:
https://michellegemmaphotography.com/
https://michellegemmaphotography.wordpress.com/
Scotsman lost, probably still in the Hacienda on the second tier looking for “pussy”. I now hungover in sloppy OK place waiting for breakfast and the bus station across the street where bum was sitting next to me shaking too much from whatever bums shake from to even light a cigarette.
11:30 and the adventure continues. Very ugly punk girl wearing complete “I want to get fucked” outfit but butt-fucking ugly and a tooth out in front and even handcuffs hanging from skinny black belt.
I could dig being a bum with only worry being to stay alive, but too much violence and alcohol and man I do not want those shakes.
Nottingham girl did not show up and I waited for her until 1:00. Lesson: trust no one. On train to London Maura and this must be the bumpiest train ever built and 3:30 sunset first sunset I’ve seen since America. The sky is amazingly trippy. Three distinct layers of white clouds on blue with big like quarter sized orange ball of flame now under the bottom layer of clouds. Plane trails crossing and growing wider. England is beautiful. It isn’t flat, but it isn’t hilly. It’s kindda lumpy. Sky around sun now going pink and Jane’s Addiction blasting my brains out on way to London. Whoever came up with this sky is a genius. Even tho the sun is only about an inch from the horizon the rest of the sky is still daytime blue. Large cloud bank, dark and threatens not rain but to actually fall out of the sky and crush everything, looking very much like snowcapped mountains. Land growing hilly, trees bare and grazing sheep all blocking my sunset.
I signed a petition today for the ambulance staff. I guess there is some problem with the Govt.
Sun’s back and deep orange on bottom going to yellow on top. Bottom starting to no longer be round, but breaking up into little pieces like that logo I saw somewhere. Bahamas?
Into London and the Tube Underground whatever subway conquered because if you can kill a NY subway system, you can take anything else. Interviewed upon exiting and soon to Maura’s flat, but she wasn’t home. No one was. Into The Ashe’s Pub after phone call to make sure and I’m going to work my way down the bar on this large amount of change coins in my pocket. Three mates call me over and invite me to sit down with them. The further I go, the more friendly the people get, and one tells me of a hotel to be ripped down that I can stay in for free. Sounds really cool. Right, second left and the name I can’t remember and I think that they are going to tear it down. Mary Gross sits drinking to my right with her bunch of “yuppie” friends, the collegiate type of fucks and another bunch to the left. Chinese man at the casino machine ever since I got here and probably will be for a while. And maybe I’ll get a job out of staying at this derelict hotel. Maybe. And “It must be your lucky day.” And actually it has been pretty good. What would have happened if the Nottingham girl and her long red hair and ultra red lips had shown up? That would just have been kicks. Truth is found in derelict hotels.
America is Western Civilization. Everything else looks and smells and sounds just like it.
Back in Ashes talking to 36 year old long-haired weirdo before writing letters and all to the folks back home, blown out in two pints. Two letters, 45 mins and going and I cannot believe I am in London! Where?!? 36 year old tells me of smoke and his habit and drinking and gone and soon enough I am paying so off we go to see London pub scene. Next pub down, he with long hair and stubble, me with pack on back and all, just walk thru as this is like some kind of living hell for road scum and street smackster. And they playing chess and sipping sherry! Out into the street free pint partially done, but up it comes in his hand, as Jah really does love and off we go, he talking more and more of smack and hookers. Into another pub to talk of LSD acid, and me still buying, as he has all of 50p and talking of hooker friends so out we go and he saying that if I don’t find Maura, I will smoke some with him. Nerves on end in me as fear grows and I must try one more call to Maura to save my life, and he looking for hooker friends with smack, and the phone rings rings rings and is finally answered. Me pleading and begging to be saved to some girl in the building, which has all of one phone, but an agreement “ring on 2”. I am saved and say good-bye and even now he is still on pavement street or arrested once more.
{historical note for context: November 23, 1989 was Thanksgiving Day in the US}
Up at 8:30 for a “continental breakfast” (eggs sunnyside up, toast, coffee, cornflakes, OJ and bacon) and out to find world famous Mathew Street, home of the Cavern Club and a lot of crazy Beatles rip-off stores. Mathew Street is like a back alley. On the site of the Cavern is a mall. Where the Cavern eventually moved to is its replacement, The R@volution Club, and it looks to be a real dive. I went into the official Beatles store and bought cards for the two Mikes, my brother and my other brother, back home. Mike’s is a postcard of The Beatle Store, as I already got him another card. Michael’s is a real card with something The Beatles did, called Trippy the Bear. I wonder who ripped off who?
On the train to Manchester, here we go, boyo! Finally, I’ll see some England in daylight countryside. In the same day, I will see the beginnings of The Beatles and the end of Joy Division, Ian’s grave. Tarbox New Order/Joy Division tape playing and tape player acting up. Fuck off, Ian! This is my adventure.
Blue and white sky, Sun shining hot through train window, trees still green-leaved, smoke stacks vomiting forth white and seven reactor nuke plant (what a strange thing to see here). Houses everywhere. England is overpopulated.
Ticket to get OUT of the station, unpack, dismount, rummage. It is raining lightly or snowing and I start walking to the town hall tourist info place to ask not where can I sleep, but where is the Hacienda (New Order’s dance club) and to my surprise they know exactly where it is. Five blocks and I am there, but it is closed, even the pub. “FAC51 The Hacienda” reads a tiny plaque stone block in the wall and the big blacked out windows. I take a rubbing of the plaque with this very pen but I’m going to find a pencil or some charcoal and do it properly and twice for Tarbox and myself.
Very nice city, friendly and helpful, old and new meet and the result is quite nice. “Manchester: A Nuclear Free City” and a dove on signs around all over the city. Very nice and much nicer than any place I’ve been yet. I’ve decided to stay up all night, as there are not many B&Bs in the area and the hotels are all posh. I guess I won’t get drunk tonight either!
All checked in safe and sound at YMCA after drawing a rough rough sketch of Hacienda for Boxtar. All around Hacienda signs of Joy Division are found. Large flyer poster reads “Heart and Soul, small green flyer has a big bold Joy and Digital Underground in quotes and still big. But how the fuck do you get inside?
Nice bar lady giving help with money explanations and change and info and laughing with the boys: a Rasta with English accent and four white friends. Seventeen fags for £1.50 with Benson & Hedges as the strongest. Passing train shakes whole building and I am glad I did not get a room here, City Road Inn. Picture of map of Ireland with metallic blue ocean surrounding and I wonder why there are still bombings and killings and six month old babies being murdered, for what does a baby know of politics? And if you could explain politics to a baby, it would probably laugh. Or maybe even cry.
Out in the streets is a TV/stereo store advertising satellite dishes. Eight more channels! A whole eight. What? And the Government owns the air waves. TVs have only six buttons, so I guess they have to buy a new telly with the dish. And more deaths. Eleven English Marines are dead in another IRA bombing, just came over the BBC1 News at 6. Why? No need for death. I am really losing respect for the Irish and my own ancestors. There are actually songs about some of my long dead murdering relations.
Drunks and I am glad to have found this pub, as there are not even a third of the number of pubs here in the secondary capital as in any small city in Ireland Eire Death.
(Letter to Tarbox)
Manchester is a really friendly city. Big and happening and beautiful and the best place I’ve been yet. Come, definitely. I can’t figure out why Joy Division was so angry and depressed if they really lived here, but that was years ago. There are wonderful pieces of art in the parks and they love to laugh and poke fun at, but no harm is meant. Come see. Be. You’ll love it. Take a daytrip to Liverpool, but that is all it will take.
Oh, this crazy nut Scotsman, into music and knows loves Joy Division waiting for Hacienda to open across the street, talking of the new way of music, electronics. He carries a basic studio with him at all times, in a case that looks like it could fit a guitar, and talking about women and boy oh boy he is a blast. 35 and knows all, including life “don’t mean a thing” because, as Jack just told me last night, God is everything and I am nothing.
Back at his Holiday Inn £90 room a night room. If they only knew what they let in! Reading some December issue of a music magazine and he is listening thru headphones to disks, and note the “k” and not “c”, of sampling and shit he has done. And the TV is on and a bar stocked with beer and harder stuff and pool played, two games, let’s go to that club. Carrying about twenty pounds of paper and all all all all and now in shower after playing me some bassy stuff he put together this afternoon, god knows where, with Nazi and Jew movie on and talking as he showers, and he will look even more nuts without his stubbly beard. And soon to the long-awaited club and he paid for a cab to carry us two blocks with his gear as this is the first pub he fell into as if fate for this night had nothing to do with bringing us together; two music lovers. He has traveled the world and is into drugs and has acid but claims he is an atheist, but how can he be? And I have told him that he is going beyond, but his one drawback is all he wants to do is fuck, despite his wife and kids and shaves now, as I write, in the £90 room. We will dream the same dreams even tho his bed is the same as mine but bigger and nicer and the room smells better than mine in the YMCA across the street.
Empty hollow dark Truth lies or waits by The Hacienda on a Tuesday night. Five video screens. Beautiful sex girls pop to overdone bass and even I at 21 feel old. Death swings twice, armor and bong of aliens in the wind of electric fan and Death is —- {edited: was bumped and strongly warned by big bouncer that writing was not allowed}
Thirty-five year old Scotsman wondering what we paid for, got in and he the payer! All I want is a 33 Old Latrobe. And the young girls smell oh so sweet. New Order under tunes of all music. Beat Bip de Bop. There she is. Standing next to me. Her long red hair and traveled all they British and note British {edit: unreadable} within 5 mins to go to Nottingham with her in the morning and me already piss drunk. Gone is the 35 year old and hello 22 and all night we hang together just talking and her trying to get me even more drunk with evil death wine and shot/slammers. Off we go, she now friends with the bouncer, STONE, who stopped me from writing and gone with me and another lad to THE underground Rasta lounge of the North and we go, dime bag bought in under 5 mins from 50 year old Ratsa English and spliff a mile long. I can still feel. And so god damn drunk. What time is breakfast and 12:30 really 11:30 to bus station to meet Nottingham girl. Too drunk and high even to kiss. Burning sensation of fresh pot, good and off we go. Praise all to Jah.
The woman pretending to be my aunt tells me those are sex hotels on the side of the highway. They’re called “Tu y Yo” and “Paraiso Real.” I note the prices, marked on a sign outside: Seventeen American dollars for three hours/Thirty-five dollars for “Toda La Noche.” We keep driving.
I’m glad we have left Panama City behind. It’s like the city I grew up in and left, New York. But a New York long vanished, full of beautiful abandoned spaces, cracks in sidewalks, graffiti, shady characters and salt smell of ocean in the air.
We zip through mountains, one’s crags looks like a sleeping old woman, past roadside stands selling mangoes and cold coconuts towards the small town of Pedasi.
The whole country has been drenched in rain, lightning illuminating palm fronds against inky skies punctuated by glorious bright beach days. Rainy season in the tropics, you never know what you are going to get.
Guadalupe tells everyone she’s my aunt because she says it’s safer that way and maybe she’s right. She’s a retired Spanish journalist and television personality who’s interviewed some of the world’s leading political figures as well as hosted The Jackson Five on her television show “300 Milliones” back in the ‘70s.
“I used to be very famous, now I end up living like a gypsy in the country.” She tells me as she does over eighty on narrow highways lined with jungle and rolling pastures of cane sugar, corn and cows.
She has good reason to be paranoid. She’s been robbed twice on her campo, a big piece of land with tidy casitas guarded only by a rusted black metal gate. So I pass as her tall, grey-eyed nephew from the States and with my decent Spanish accented by the downtown New York bodegas of my youth, no one asks many questions.
After all, this is the land of Noriega, who died in a cell overlooking the Panama Canal. A land of drug lords and poverty, ghettos in Panama City still containing rubble from when Reagan bombed it in the ‘80s. A land where dead dogs line the highways, where pirates once burned down the old city and breezed along the coasts, a land stamped with the violence and greed of conquistadors before them and more recently the Panama Papers, dark money and lawlessness. Like so many others, I’ve come here to hide.
But it’s also full of heated beauty. Guayacan and Banyon trees silhouetted flaming against the sunset, nights full of stars and satellites, whales gathering off the coast in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific to give birth, pastel pink and blue cemeteries dotted with rich tropical flowers, warm people who insist on feeding me my favorite carimañolas, fried yuca patties stuffed with ground beef, iguanas crying in the night rich with fresh cut grass and promise.
I burn saint candles even though I’m Jewish, wish away my past and hope towards my future like a drunk leaning into the bottle. Most times, I am drunk sipping my tenth Balboa beer, my favorite, named for the conquistador who “discovered” Panama was the world’s only isthmus. A cradle of life full of sloths, crocodiles, snakes, butterflies, the country with the most species of animals on the planet.
In the jungle by the sea, I feel a peace I’ve never felt anywhere else.
Each crash of distant wave a lullaby helping me forget who I was in New York City. What I’ve lost and left behind. What, like so many adventurers before me, I hope to find in this part of the world they call Los Azueros.
He had triple tools of everything
but he didn’t know how to use any of them.
When we moved in
we changed the locks right away.
I’m just passing a message
Another beer
He hands me two fifties but, I said Mikey you only owe me 70-80 bucks.
Turns out he only owed me 80.
In a drunken stupor I leant him another 20.
At least he’s honest.
You can’t even remember seeing me
I owe you.
I only had the money for an hour anyway
he drank through what he had and borrowed it again
That’s when he pushed me and I fell on my head.
No you fell on your ass
Rolling dice.
Roll the dice
Keno only makes them rich
6 dollars? 6 dollars?
tv: Threat of hen-egg-sized hail tonight
Disregarding the fact that I can positively identify my own beer.
I’m leaving dodge
Step on the gas and go.
When That thing is hot
It goes.
There’s no paper towel in the can
Wipe on your dirty Red sweatshirt
This is the cleanest thing I’ve got.
the old systems are being destroyed
right in front of our eyes-
refrain from shielding your sight…
we exist within the hidden nature
of a heedless epoch.
a severance of our accepted
deference toward divinity.
our examination of
behavioral traits
stretches decades.
was it all part of the plan?
we participated, subscribed, and invested wholly
in the disruption of the anticipated outcome.
perhaps, the convincing argument
articulates a recollection,
not an institutional
creationism that
may protect the possible
consideration of the
work.
the evidence is everywhere.
a collation of failed firewalls,
as reckless malware
creates a composite portfolio
of corruption.
is the mirror image an exercise of divisive involvement?
we are being asked to
define formality.
a curious reclamation
of a previous reality.
This, my friends, is where the real adventure starts. One minute I’m on a bus looking around and the next I’m walking around downtown Liverpool at 6AM, dropped off on the side of the road. No map and nothing is open. Irish money in my pocket. Boy oh boy am I lost!
Everything is really BIG and serious, like the biggest, oldest inner-city university you can think of, only bigger and, for all I know, it stretches forever.
Now I have to wait for a cop and ask him what’s going on. It’s so cool. And chilly, too.
OK, Toto, I’m not in Kansas anymore. While looking at a beautiful Jaguar, an even better Lotus drives by.
Walking the streets and whatever Captain’s Walk walking mall type deal looking for tourist info center, whose signs just stop passersby look at me once in shock, twice in fear that I am maybe a mugger, and third in shock again.
The sky grows bluer and lighter and I have already seen a couple of things I want to do. But as it gets lighter, the temperature gets colder.
Imagine falling into the back of a twenty dollar bill with the people walking the streets in front of the White House. Imagine that happening and the colors stayed the same fake green and “white”. That is Liverpool with statues on top of pillar 300 feet up. It seems that their only two claims to fame are Pirates and The Beatles.
Oh my god, only thirty minutes ‘til nine! Then the tourist place and the money exchangers will be open. For now, tho, I’ll sit in this mall on this bench enjoying the warmth for as long as the security guard will allow me. In this waking period, I have done a lot and there will be more as I plan on being in Manchester tonight. I am so tired and hungry and there is a little dive coffee place with cheap breakfasts not 50 yards away, but I’m sure they don’t take Irish pounds or US dollars.
English pounds suck even worse than Irish ones. $100 = £62.25. Ten of this went straightaway to a “hotel”’s B&B plan. This should prove to be real nice.
I’ve been dying for pancakes or waffles so I went into Mickey Dee’s for some hot cakes and sausage – but they don’t have them! What kindda place…
In Ireland, you have to pay for a book of matches at a bar. In England, you have to pay for a packet of ketchup! What kindda place…
A seven hour “nap” and my first hot, powerful shower since leaving the US! Amazing how a hot shower can make you feel so great and alive. Some how I keep falling into La-de-da places, this a pizza place but unlike any pizza place I have ever been in before. Dimly lit, really nice décor, etc. (Rich, Grolsch is the only good beer.) Woman next to me ordered a half-rack of ribs and could not believe the size, and neither could I, with corn cob and salad and enough food for three people on one plate. The radio or whathaveyou plays a bit too loud and every song is by an American band! Let’s hear some English or even European or maybe Australian bands!
The best part of traveling alone is alcohol. How do I know when I am drunk if I can’t bounce it off of someone? How do I know that I’m not just wrapped up in thought because no one talks to a lonely traveler who looks as I do, with crazy just combed with a towel hair and a big, black army coat and a devil beard. That’s why on the second night of The Cure at Great Woods I did so much of even harder if you will drugs pot and shrooms just without end for the whole lonely amazing show. Because I was alone and did not realize how gone I was until I got with friends again.
Finally! A song by The Police! But after they were big.
Space capsule church high on a hill looms in front of me walking night university streets of Liverpool Dump Beatle-home. Pound coin as good to me as penny spent given to young artistic-looking beggar who knew Boston and the Truth of heartache. Yound black-haired girl leather jacketed tells me all of “Nutin’” when asked what to do in this Northern Hole.
Oh, sleepless night, leave me to myself. Lead me to my friends in dreams and Truths.
I can’t believe that I am in England, alone, posing as Post Warrior and suffering from all kinds of withdrawals. Liverpool is such a lovely town when you’re the only one in it at 6 in the morning.
I believe that if you search hard enough, Truth can be found in England. They are very critical and tell exactly bluntly what they think of a subject. An ad for a recently opened art gallery asks just Joe Fuck Shopper to come by and criticize! It is a confusing place, tho. Four, count them, four different types of stamps! I don’t even want to know about pay phones yet.
Older women walking in and shopping on streets model themselves after the Queen or Thatcher. Older men are very serious and stern faced with backs so straight that they almost lean backwards. After their generation, no one gives a shit and is just living life or going thru the motions of it.
The Irish and the English are, obviously of course, two different gene pools, but that comes as a shock when you see how different they are. Irish older men have very definite signs of alcohol abuse in their worn out faces , which sag and hang and look like they’ve been thru years of worry. English older men have plump faces with very few wrinkles. In general, English women are ugly. But occasionally you see a beauty. And there is nothing in between. Of course, tho, the beauties are probably Irish. Facial structure is opposite. That is where the Irish have concave noses, the English have convex. Very strange.
This picture is roughly the veins and walls of my Liverpool room. It is actually much smaller than this, with yellow walls and flesh-colored pipes, which really do look like veins staring at me from the other wall. This is the view from laying in bed. The whole room is about 10’ by 6’ and actually has the classic view of brick wall outside the little window next to (but not shown in the picture as I ran out of paper but really did want people to see it) the sink. I guess I have to work on my 3D!
