This afternoon I sat on the steps to the back porch in the pale sunlight. The old garden is dead. On the dry grass a blue jay was tearing up a grasshopper. I watched the insect make desperate, crippled little jumps. Inside the house Mother began to sing in her clear pretty voice. She was in the kitchen baking a chocolate cake because today is my birthday. I’m thirty-five years old.
When I heard the newspaper slam against the screened door I walked around the side of the house to the front porch and picked it up. The headline told how another Negro civil rights worker had been murdered. I went in the house where Father was sitting in his rocker in the living room looking at the carpet. I held up the paper so he could read the headline. He raised his head and gazed at it.
“Well,” he said, “there’s one.”
Yesterday I whiled away the afternoon in the library. Today I decided to walk over to Sears and watch the fish tank. I’m very good at fitting my amusements to my circumstances. At Sears I decided to call Morgan. Would she like to meet me some place? While away a few hours discussing her neurosis?
Morgan couldn’t make it. She was watching a documentary on television about our boys in France and she was a little weepy. I asked her the name of what she was watching.
“Morgan,” I said, “that film is about World War One. All that stuff happened fifty years ago.”
“I know,” she sniffed. “But it just makes me cry to know how our boys suffered over there.” She began relating the history of World War I to me, from the beginning. She was pretty good at it too. I think she was using a reference book. But how much of that do you want to listen to standing in the parking lot at Sears? Morgan is only eighteen but her sympathies are all embracing. They span continents. It’s a real bother. Nevertheless, I’m going to wait it out with her.
Back at the house Father was snoozing in the rocker, snoring and gasping for breath. Mother was sitting on the sofa watching the television.
“Just listen to him,” she said, looking over at her husband. “One day one of those snores is going to kill him. It’s going to just tear everything out of his head.”
She leaned across the card table.
“HENRY,” she yelled. “WAKE UP. DO YOU HEAR ME? NOW YOU JUST WAKE UP.”
Father lifted his chin from his chest and said: “Oh, all right.”
He gestured vaguely with one hand.
“Pass me those worms and lights, will you?”
Mother gasped. “Henry,” she said, “what the hell have you been dreaming now?”
“Goddammit,” Father said, getting a hold on himself. “Just hand me the goddamm newspaper, will you?”
I sat on the couch beside Mother and we watched the black and white television together. A French couple were doing a comic apache dance on a bare stage. The woman was beautiful, her body incredibly packed and ripe, her little costume bursting with glowing flesh. She was full of milk and hot spices. Her luscious odor was so strong it was wafting out of the back of our TV. The scent made my heart pound. I felt shaken, saliva filled my mouth and then suddenly I had her. In my mind’s eye I saw myself dive right into the TV screen and fuck her so powerfully her brains popped out her ears. It was over in a flash.
“Isn’t she cute?,” Mother said, sitting up on the edge of the couch. “Most of those French girls who come over here look like street cleaners, but she’s real cute.”
Father looked up from the newspaper. “What’s that you say?”
Morgan’s driving me nuts. Six feet tall, a strong magnificent face. Meticulously groomed, her complexion is a tawny, velvet mirror. A couple abortions last winter set her back a little but now she’s picked up the weight she lost and she’s beautiful, just beautiful. So long as I remained aloof with Morgan she was aggressively affectionate, but the moment I turned, as it were, and faced her, she withdrew inwardly. She approaches me now wrapped around in fine sheets of clear plastic.
At Barney’s Beanery Morgan is a terror. She stares guys down, insults them, spews up on them in erratic fits of scathing anger. One moment she’ll keep me at arms length, the next she’ll grab me around the neck like a stevedore and hold on to me passionately. That’s her bar image. At home with her mother she’s still the teenage daughter, obedient, petulant, eager to please. At the same time, she wants a shoulder to cry on.
Because of Morgan I remember how it is to have the attention of a good-looking woman. Where the hell are they now when I need them most? They can’t all have died or gotten married. Where’s Freida, I wonder? I want to feel her heavy freckled breasts weighing on me again. And Mary Jane? She’s out of the convent now so maybe she’s thinking things over. Is Jessie still teaching fifth grade and tricking on the side? I really admire women who can follow two career paths at once. Jo was the best of the lot, and I cared for Jo most. That last night we were together in bed we fell apart sweating like horses and she heaved a sigh and with a note of wonder in her voice said: “My God, but I’ve had a lot of men.” That night I didn’t understand why we laughed so hard at that, but maybe I do now.
In two years a lot of water can go under the bridge.
Lying on the bed in the little room where I grew up, I become restless, then agitated in a way that went beyond restlessness. I started thinking again how I feel stymied, how there’s something I need to do, that I’m ready to do it, but that whatever it is it’s hidden from me. I went through the house to the back yard to the old shack where I have the typewriter set up on a card table, just like in the old days when Pamela was here with me. There was something terribly sad about being in the old shack again. About the old stains on the walls, the old plywood floor that used to be covered with carpet. About how old Mrs. Carney lived out her life here with her canary and her garden trowel and her breakfasts of mashed avocado on wheat toast.
Standing in the shack, my hands in my pockets, I didn’t know what to do. I picked up a manuscript but I was too agitated and too lethargic at the same time to work on it. I had a sense that it was going to start up again. I was exhausted. I sat in the old rocker and put a hand over my eyes. Immediately I saw the image of a white skull. It was the skull of an infant but its jaws were lank and billowing smoke. I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.
I looked methodically around the shack at the cardboard cartons stacked against one wall, at the manuscript file, the paper bags full of trash, at the crooked-neck lamp arching over the typewriter. Everything was in order. I felt reassured. I happened to glance out the window then and I saw the white skull hovering beneath the little orange tree, observing me. It’s long jaws were smoking and there was movement in the recesses of the empty eye sockets.
I understood with perfect clarity I was seeing a production of my own mind. I couldn’t be fooled about that any longer. The hovering smoking skull was in some sense my own creation. Nevertheless, I was seeing it. The fear was building up very quickly. I began breathing in a deep regular way. I shifted my gaze from the skull to the trunk of the little orange tree, at the rotted place that’s filled with cement. I noted carefully the grainy texture of the cement, then how the smooth bark of the trunk was enveloping the wound. I made orderly mental notes about what I was observing. My experience is that if I can go on seeing the ordinary things, I won’t go off. Then I saw the skull again. It was a lot bigger than before and before I could stop seeing it it moved through the window into the shack and confronted me.
Though I was seeing the skull I was still aware of how I was standing in the shack among my things. I was afraid but I wasn’t panicked yet. Inwardly I made a decision to look into the skull’s left eye socket. I don’t know why. Through the socket I saw an incredible panorama of destroyed and burning cities. Mountains of rubble were smoldering and spewing out poisonous gases. Dead and mutilated bodies were piled up in heaps while vermin the size of horses crawled over them. It was a magnificent view of catastrophic destruction. Seeing it exalted me. I saw myself thrust my arm through the open jaws of the skull. Murderous sensations whirled through my head. I wanted to go down into the madness I saw and finish the job. I wanted to smash everything that was left, pulverize it, smear it into nothing. But suddenly the hand that was inside the jaws caught fire. Then the whole arm ignited and burned with a roar like a turpentine bush. I saw myself leap back, crazy with fear.
The fear was so intense I knew I had to stop seeing or I’d go off for certain. I was able to look out the window and see the orange tree again, but its leafy aspect was terrifying. The skull grew even larger. I sat at the card table, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and began typing “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” It wasn’t easy. I typed it two or three times. I was conscious of misspelling some words but I couldn’t figure out which ones. The skull was swelling and growing. I stood up with my back to the wall and looked at it hard. I would face it down. Sometimes I could do that. Its eyes became long fiery tunnels. I knew I was on very dangerous ground but I kept looking and then I forced myself to leap through the left eye socket into the interior. It was crazy for me to do that and it was at that moment that I went off. Terror wrapped me around and I was no longer aware of being in two places at once. I only knew that I was in the fiery tunnel, that the body was scorching and burning and that the flames were enveloping my face. I saw fat fire demons appear in the tunnel in front and behind me. The demons had bushy coats of fire, flaming faces and black gorilla eyes. They roared down on me, threw me to the ground and held me there while searing blisters erupted on my flesh and marched in military formations up and down the body like troops on a parade ground. I saw everything turn white then and then, somehow, I was in a different place.
It was a cave inside the earth. I was still lying on my back, trapped, but the air was cool and dank and a black ape was straddling my chest. I understood I was going to murdered. I thought the fear would make me lose consciousness, that’s what I wanted, but it didn’t. From the corner of one eye I caught the image of a pair of pliers. I felt the ape shift its weight, I saw the pliers again, and then with a single back hand motion the animal ripped my throat open. Blood flowed out of the throat and seeped into the cold dirt. I felt the fear relieving itself, as if a tide were going out. I seemed to understand that all of it now was out of my hands, that events had carried me to that place where fear has no significance. The head of a little green snake emerged from the rip in my throat. The head looked around, smiling, red blood dripping off its face. A second snake head appeared from the wound, looked around like the first one had, then the two of them fell out onto the cool powdery dirt and wriggled off. Then I was alone in the cave.
I lay there placidly on the soft cool dirt on my back. I felt empty. Serene. No hurry, no worry. The moment I realized how much at peace I was I saw a bony green hand come slowly out of the gash in my throat. The hand put its fingers inside my mouth, its thumb beneath my jaw and held me in a lock grip while snakes slithered out of the rip in my throat one after another after another. As the snakes left me the body began collapsing inward like a balloon deflating. The toes collapsed into the feet, the feet into the legs. My fingers collapsed into my hands, the genitals into my stomach. When all that was left of me was the head and throat a second hand came out with the first and the two hands grasped my head and smashed it against a rock until the back of the skull split open in two sections. A long simian hand with spidery fingers reached down out of the darkness and scooped up a handful of the exposed brain. I realized that I myself was the ape, sitting on a rock beside the place where I’d been murdered. I understood I was seeing myself as I was forty million years ago, sitting on my haunches scooping handfuls of brain from a smashed skull and cramming them in my mouth. My movements were tremendously energetic. They were wild. I ate some of the brains and rubbed some in my hair. I smeared some on my chest and rubbed it in like a lotion. In my ape eyes there was a stare of stupid concentration. I began masturbating a rectangular ape-prick ferociously while overhead the top of the cave parted to reveal fiery meteors streaking through a black universe in brilliant criss-cross designs.
After a while I noticed that I was standing in the shack with my back to the wall. I saw the meteors shooting back and forth through the blackness and I saw the inside of the shack and my different things. For awhile it went back and forth. There was the window and outside it the old orange tree. Then I started recalling what I’d been seeing. I recalled the terror, but now the terror was gone. I recalled how I’d had trouble getting my breath. Now I was breathing freely, easily. I used the sleeves of my shirt to dry my face. I felt light, free, winged. The blood was coursing through my heart, foaming. The body was full of energy and happiness. I had seen it through one more time and here I was. One time more. I had accomplished it.
I stepped out into the back yard. The brown grass, the cactus, the old fences were luminous and vibrant in the pale sunlight. The yard pulsated with energy and unused power. It was profound, and I was aware that neither the power nor the profundity was an idea or associated with one. The body was flooded with clarity. My feeling of joy was so intense I wanted to stop having it. I wanted to stop seeing how things really are. I was afraid it would become more than I could bear. Then suddenly I was at loose ends. I was half-overcome with joy but I was restless too. I felt driven but lost. The only thing I could think to do was to go in the house to the kitchen and drink milk.
I started up the concrete steps to open the screened door when I heard a man laugh in an easy, seductive way. I paused, my hand touching the door handle. There was the sound of a flute being played. It was a pretty, piping sound. I turned and toward the rear of the shack near the stunted orange tree I saw myself dancing in a circle and playing an old pipe. I was naked, while at my feet the brown grass swarmed with snakes. My flesh was a white marble tinted with rose, my face a sculptured mask of serene happiness. The snakes too, in their snaky way, were dancing to the sound of my piping. They wound up my legs and around my body. They slithered through my hair. They whirled ecstatically around my legs. They formed themselves into whirling necklaces around my throat and all the while they laughed soundlessly as if celebrating with a joyous abandon their new found freedom.
Standing on the back steps watching myself, I didn’t have the fear that I was going to go off. I understood where I was, that my hand was still holding the handle of the screened door as if I were about to go inside, and I was clear too about seeing myself down in the yard piping the snakes and dancing. During that moment I may have understood for the first time the distinction between observing reality on the one hand and forming an opinion about it on the other.
I’d started inside the house for a glass of milk but now I felt so exhilarated that I needed something to calm me down. It wasn’t going to be milk. I remembered I had a fifth of Donleavy’s Straight Corn Liquor stashed behind Grandmother’s rocker in the shack. I tore into the shack and made a dive for Mr. Donleavy. It’s the cheapest whisky you can buy down at the corner at Morries’. I drank two inches from the bottle as quick as I could. It was a race against time. Within seconds I could feel the warmth and good cheer coming up in me, replacing the terrible burden of joy, level by level.
Calming, I thought about how joy doesn’t allow for comfort, on how it stands aside from language and laughter. Then I started thinking on how much pleasure there is in drunkenness and on how the intoxicants have been a boon to mankind everywhere in every age. It made me wonder why I don’t drink more myself since I like being drunk so much. Some of my friends think I drink too much but there are times when I drink nothing for days on end. I don’t know why. As casually as I could, I borrowed the family car from Mother and beat it over to Braum’s place. Braum lives in a storefront on Pico Boulevard and paints pictures of hard-edged creatures that don’t exist in daylight but creep out at night from the joints in his fingers. Good old Braum. He believes the North American continent is doomed because it has a wicked shape. He’s a geographer of immense proportions, Braum is.
“Full of evil,” he told me one night at Barney’s, tracing America ‘s outline on the bar top with a wet finger. ” Africa now, Africa has soft, female shapes. Gentle. Rounded. The shape of the future.”
Tonight he’d finished a self-portrait in greens, bright reds and yellows. We put it in the car and drove to the back entrance to the Parker Gallery on La Cienega. We hung around in the alley sucking on Mr. Donleavy. It was a balmy, tropical night. A warm breeze blew softly through the alleyway and over the buildings. The hair on my head crackled in the electric air. Behind my eyes the eyes were flashing like semaphores.
Inside the gallery, voices hummed. Parker himself was standing with his back to us. I hadn’t seen him in two years but I’d have known that dome of his anywhere, bald and shinning, creased like a dry desert river bed. Parker likes dirty jokes and young girls, which are two different things. Everybody likes dirty jokes. When I hear of a man who doesn’t, I feel a kind of respect for his sensibility and sophistication.
Across the street I said hello to Mrs. Esperanza, who has her own gallery. She’s telling several ladies how she has found an endless source of happiness and beauty in the continuum. Then she’s telling me something too. Explaining still one more dark corner of the human soul while I stand there grinning oafishly, everything in her special-education monologue going over my head. Maybe what I most needed to know about life had floated past in the middle of my happy grin. Maybe, at that very moment, it was hovering up there against the ceiling, a fat little sausage filled with understanding. Meanwhile, there were all the paintings to look at. Gallery after gallery filled with hundreds, thousands of paintings and plenty more where those came from. No shortage of paintings this year and next year there’ll be even more. Ten years from now whole cities will be constructed just to display the paintings being turned out now by the emancipated citizens of democratic nations. I ought to know. I’ve done a few paintings myself. I’m no stranger to the pleasures to be gotten from dabbing paint onto canvass.
Re-crossing La Cienega who do we run into but Wetzstein, the bankruptcy lawyer. Another figure from my past. I acted as if I didn’t see him put his hands in his pockets. I grinned like a bear and thrust out my paw. Reluctantly, he shook it, but he didn’t introduce me to his pretty, gray haired wife. Two years since I’d seen the sour bastard and I hadn’t missed him.
On to new picture palaces. Two chic, middle-aged ladies were eyeing a sculpture of a writhing, horizontal nude. Even in metal the body was changed with passion and a dangerous vitality. “I don’t know what she’s supposed to be doing,” one of the ladies said to the other, “but whatever it is I’d love to try it.” My heart leaped. My God, I thought, it’s time to act. I caught the lady’s eye and grinned. I started toward her. She was within arm’s reach. I saw her face flush, then she grabbed her girlfriend by the arm and disappeared into the crowd giggling.
There were still plenty of galleries and paintings. Braum is an admirer of Leger, who I don’t like at all. A man with a polished steel heart. Some stupid paintings by the head of the art department at UCLA, weeds glued over the surface like rabbit warrens. He’s in a fine position to contaminate a lot of students who can pass it on to their friends and their own children. Out in the alley again Braum and I finished off Mr. Donleavy then drove the couple blocks to Barney’s. The night was still blowing softly. Automobiles gleamed in the black air, fine looking people called gaily to one another across La Cienega. A lady dressed in white drew the back of her white-gloved hand across her brow, brushing gracefully at a wisp of blond hair. I thought about how Horace had written of such a night. A night for the old, “lightly-living gods.”
At Barney’s there wasn’t much of a crowd yet but the juke box was blaring. I was ready for a big blowout but I needed more people. Marvin was there on a bar stool, stoop shouldered and homely as ever, peering licentiously at a couple girls in a booth, sexual fantasies dribbling from the corners of his mouth. Marvin is an admirer of Proust so it doesn’t matter much that he works as a bookkeeper for the city. Morgan wasn’t there, but Ross was, the baritone with the mistress who has such a lovely belly. And there was his hawk-faced friend with a big, blond dusty looking woman with a beautifully ingratiating smile.
No thoughts for Morgan now. The dusty blond was the one for me. I backed her against the wall and over the racket of the music I told her about the snows at Lake Tahoe , the hunting habits of owls, the jungles of Yucatan . I delivered a monologue on Hasidic lore, about which I know nothing. My tongue was greased, ball bearings were in my jaw. The blond was impressed. Everyone was impressed except Ross, who was in a drunken stupor.
“You show off very well,” the blond said. “Sure, you can call me some evening if you like.”
Terrific, I thought. Then I thought, who knows? I wandered off forgetting to get her number. I was at loose ends. Braum had his sketch pad out and was doing a girl sitting at the bar wearing narrow little eye glasses and a big smock.
“No, I’m not a painter,” I heard the girl say. “I’m pregnant.”
Braum grinned and stroked the girl’s belly.
“I don’t have a husband,” I heard the girl say. “I’m going to give the baby to a friend in Texas .”
Braum gave her belly a couple understanding strokes.
“Oh, you’re too much,” I heard the girl say. When she hopped off the stool her belly blooped in an interesting, heavy way.
The room was starting to fill up. The music was deafening. I tried to think about why the pregnant girl didn’t want to stay with us. I was so drunk I was buying drinks at the bar rather than pulling on a bottle in the men’s room. I sensed that someone was looking at me. I turned my head very carefully and saw a female eye with a malevolent cast staring directly into mine. The same thing had happened a couple weeks earlier, the same eye, not twelve inches from mine. I’d never spoken to the lady who owned the eye. I knew she used to sleep with an Armenian painter who’d killed himself. Maybe it was that fucking eye. The first time I saw it staring into mine I was too cowed to ask her what she had in mind. Tonight I was too cowed too. I made my way toward the front door. Joan and Mark walked in just then and Joan began telling me about a new literary magazine being published in Greenwich Village that’s called Up your Ass, or Let’s Fuck or some shitty New York title like that. I must not have looked very impressed because she went on to explain that this new magazine is publishing all the newest people, the avant garde of New York City , nothing less. She said I ought to try it.
“Clearly,” I said, steadying myself as well as I could, “what we have here is one more New York literary mag setting out to right the wrongs of the people, of life itself. What do I care for those people? They think the final cure for every ill is to be fucked in the ass by some guy with a dark complexion and no inheritance. They’re constructing their literature out of cowardice and perverted sexuality. American letters is being stunk up badly by these literary shit-lovers, these creepy purveyors of black romanticism who sprout like slimy weeds from the gutters and garbage of decaying cities. Even when these guys flower their blooms are black and shiny. Under afternoon suns they exude the malodorous scents, the heavy fumes of steaming assholes.” I stopped to take a deep breath because I had a lot more to say on the New York literary scene but Joan said: “I can’t take anymore of this,” and turned and disappeared in the crowd.
Mark was ginning from ear to ear. “Hey,” he said, “I like that.” Mark’s a Jew like almost everybody else I know (NAME THEM) but Mark’s from Milwaukee so he’s had a chance to see things from a clearer and cleaner perspective than you do if you’re a New Yorker. With Mark’s encouragement I began to enlarge on my theme about the growing sordidness of American literature but just then Molly showed up with her boy escort. I followed them to their table and started to tell them about what’s really going on in Hamlet, I don’t know why, but every time I took a deep breath Molly interrupted me. She was so vicious in her comments that I lost track of what my point of view was. Then I couldn’t even remember what I was talking about. She got me so bogged down and confused I couldn’t pronounce the words I wanted to say so I just sat there looking at her, wondering how she’d be. That’s when Molly signaled her little chum it was time for them to leave. She had a tight little smile on her face. I wasn’t sure I still wanted to screw her but I took note of how she had combed and brushed her stringy hair for a change and how that was a point in her favor.
By the time the bar closed I was bushed, sitting alone at a table by the back wall. Braum had disappeared. I didn’t care. I needed to sleep. Then Rita came in and I watched her walk the length of the bar to my table. I came wide awake. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Rita’s a pretty, light-skinned colored girl with freckles. I’ve had my eye on her for two years. You never know when you’re going to get lucky. It’s a question of always being ready. Inwardly I made an effort to organize my thoughts, to work out carefully how I would arrange the night.
She sat down and bumped the knuckles of one fist across her teeth. “Very nervous tonight,” she said, her eyes looking in one direction then the other.
“What do you believe it is, Rita?,” I said consolingly.
“It’s because all my hairs hurt,” she said.
“All your hairs?” I considered that in an organized way from several different perspectives but couldn’t come to a conclusion about why that would be. I couldn’t even form an opinion. Rita didn’t say anything more. I was stumped, but I liked looking at her face, which was turning one way then the other like it was looking for something. Then a big Negro from West Covina came and walked directly to our table and Rita left with him. I tried to think why the guy had come all that distance on this particular night at just that moment. There were several possible explanations but no certain one. I went outside to the curbing and vomited on my shoes.
End