“You’re the Atcliffe commune, aren’t you?” asked the barman. “Yanks, right? It’s on the house, courtesy of the Guy. Cheers!”
They were, for all intents and purposes, the Atcliffe Commune, although it never occurred to Ram and his housemates to call themselves as such, and, besides, they weren’t all Yanks; there were Canadians and Australians as well. Ram called a thank you to the bartender, who returned it with a wink.
Ram took the tray with the drinks and made his way over to where the rest of the Atcliffe dwellers were gathered. At the table were John and Miranda, Ram’s girlfriend Hillary, John Altavista, David and Barb and Kathy. Miranda told everybody to raise glasses and join her in a toast. “To Atcliffe, who all drinks to the memory of the guy.” They raised their glasses but Miranda held her hand up, indicating she hadn’t finished. “And to Singapore and our reunion at Raffles.”
“To Singapore and Raffles!” they all shouted.
They took their drinks and exited out the glass doors, onto the veranda overlooking the beach and bonfire. Later, when the crowd had thinned somewhat, they commandeered a large table that entirely filled a banquet room, ensuring their privacy, and ordered two magnums of champagne, courtesy of Jaime. They stayed until closing, getting silly drunk and sloppy, all of them except Ram.
On the way home, climbing stairs cut into the cliff face, they became aware of the degree of their inebriation, but nobody said anything in acknowledgment of it until John Devlin spoke. “I don’t know about you guys, but I am really fucked up,” he said, shaking his head and bending over to catch his breath. His utterance cut the tension and brought them laughter, nervous at first, then general and joyous.
“I heard that,” said Ram. “God, I’m gone.” They staggered upward, and at each landing along the switchbacked cliff trail, the main party would wait for a straggler too drunk to keep pace. The straggler role was constant, but the personality who played the part changed with each new landing. Near the top, the trail changed from stairs to a long incline, the worn path ascending up it, slippery with chestnut leaves.
Ram turned backwards facing down, waiting for Hillary, while the rest of the commune raced back laughing to the safety and warmth of their large Georgian home. Ram could hear Hillary’s breath as she labored upwards toward him. Looking across the flat blackness of the water, he could make out the lights of Calais barely visible on the eastern horizon.
Later, Ram remembered thinking to himself: This is it; this is my moment, this is my time; these are my people, these are my friends. Inside, someone would light a fire in the reception room on the second-floor and someone would make tea while Ram would play DJ until dawn.
…Sitting in the bar of the Doelen in Leidseplein four months later, Ram listened as Altavista told him of the trip north from Sitges. Altavista rolled a Drum, talking slowly and softly in his barely audible Perth drawl. “We had to get him out of there,” he said. “The Guardia Civil was beginning to get a little too interested in us and they didn’t much care for Señor Dormadina.” Altavista finished rolling the cigarette, put it in the corner of his mouth, lighting it with his wood matches, then moving the flame away and waving it until it expired. “He was too sick to drive or really do anything, but Kathy and I took care of him and Mac gave him a little opium from time to time. Then Kathy flew back to Canada and it was just three of us—Mac, and Jaime and I. He was better here in Amsterdam. He went to the Van Gogh a number of times. Then he flew back to Sagrada. He was sorry about all the trouble he caused you, Ram. He was sorry you weren’t here with us.” Ram nodded, looking out on the bare limbs of the elms along the Amstel.
“What could I do? I was stuck in London, waiting for money.”
Altavista exhaled and shrugged noncommittally. “You’ll see him whenever you get back to Sagrada.”
The Allman Brothers cranked up on the jukebox, and Ram’s gaze, that had been fixed outwards onto the canal, shifted to a direct look into Altavista’s eyes. “Whenever that is, if ever that is. Just think, Juan, we’re all that’s left of Atcliffe now”…
…Ram had known Jaime almost all his life, but it wasn’t until he came home to Sagrada from Canada that they really became tight, with heroin providing the solder that bound them together. That was in Alkali Flat, a thirty-odd square block neighborhood of decomposing Victorians, cash and carry liquor stores, card rooms, and diners; an ancient neighborhood beneath the levee, in an elbow crook of the Nacionalé River, in that last mile or so before its confluence with the Sagrada.
It was once one of Sagrada’s more respectable districts. Not nearly as fashionable as East Sagrada or Old Dillon Park, but up until the 1930s and the first wave of Mexican immigrants, Alkali Flat was a tidy district populated in the main by Italian businessmen, shopkeepers, and tradesmen. Ram’s great-granduncle, Paul, built many of the homes here during Sagrada’s era of expansion before the turn of the century. But by the 1950s, the swelling population of Mexicans gathering in the area began to alter the chemistry. Gradually, and with a fair measure of resentment, the Italians abandoned the flat and moved north across the river or south beyond Dillon Park to the newer subdivisions being built, where they reckoned they’d be more comfortable among their own kind. The Fremont Dairy at 18th and C Streets was the only business that had not changed hands during the displacement, but armed guards patrolling the grounds behind cyclone fences gave silent testimony to the decay and transposition that had taken place there.
Alkali Flat was no longer a neighborhood. Now it was a slum, or barrio, as its residents called it. The city discussed its future in The Sagrada Stinger, using terms like “transient nature,” “urban blight,” and “eyesore of the community.” Plans were drawn up for redevelopment, then discarded. Federal money was promised for new businesses. Tax incentives were offered but ignored, while the barrio suppurated under the burning sun.
Rumors circulated in its subaqueous atmosphere. Alkali Flat was controlled by the Mexican Mafia or the Nuestra Familia, depending upon the week and whom you listened to. There were casinos in operation that permitted Mexicans only. It was said that more cars were dismantled and assembled here than in Flint or Dearborn on a good day. The police avoided all but perfunctory patrols after an arrest of a purported drug dealer sparked a riot and sniping jamboree that left three patrolmen dead and a number more wounded. It was decided, in the interests of justice and community relations, that Alkali Flat was best left to police itself. There was talk of a deal struck between the police commission and the vaporous forces controlling the barrio. A denial was issued.
If you were white, it was either an act of bravado or sheer stupidity to enter the environs of the flat. The chances of an Anglo junkie sauntering into the Reno Cafe and finding good chiva were slim; the chances of your winding up ground chorizo or with a letter opener in your abdomen were much better.
This was where Ram moved following his return from Vancouver. He had little money left and when Jaime suggested that he share his flat above the laundry near 16th and E Streets, Ram accepted. He’d heard all the horror stories of shanks in the back, chains in the groin, and boots to the head, but so far as Ram was concerned, that was someone else’s bad luck.
He and Jaime met one another in junior high, and during their adolescence, they knew one another well enough to occasionally hang out together but never really considered each other as tight friends. In the two years following Ram’s return from Canadian exile, their friendship grew out of that mutual reliance that heroin addiction demanded. They were each other’s alibi, second set of eyes, a street survival unit whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts. In those first few months on the street, Jaime trained Ram in the nuances of junkiedom. How to cop, where to stash, how to pick locks, different cuts that you could add, who you could burn, who to avoid burning.
Jaime was short and stocky with the taut musculature of competitive swimmers, which he had previously been before his immersion in the junk pool. He had shoulder-length strawberry hair, limp
id green eyes, and when Ram encountered him in Sagrada again, a chest-length, russet-colored beard. While Ram was away at college, Jaime remained in Sagrada, periodically attending City College between periods of addiction.
In high school, Jaime had won numerous prizes for his artwork, mostly collages and assemblages, and at City College, he continued studying art before discovering photography which seemed to suit him better, he said. His instructors were humbled by Jaime’s feel for the medium and the technical facility he displayed in the darkroom. An instructor gave him a Leica M3, telling him, “There’s nothing I can show you. Come back when you have some rolls to print. We’ll talk then.”
Perhaps photography was too easy for him and he felt a need for the circumstances that would engender the kind of suffering that he felt real art sprang from. He told Ram he believed he was unworthy of being an artist; he felt that he was bullshitting himself and being bullshitted by his instructors. He said he didn’t have the talent or temperament of the artists whom he respected. Ram figured that Jaime embraced junkiedom with this twist of sinistral logic; that the opiated Purgatorio provided the sensory rearrangement that he felt he needed to ‘truly’ create. Ram thought it was something more basic, like fear, which kept Jaime out of the studios and darkrooms and in the streets and pool rooms, quivering over racks of nine-ball while Marvin Gaye sang What’s Going On.
…Those days of junk that began with Jaime began an era without reference for Ram. The days and seasons were episodes of ethereal dimensions, their chiaroscuro tone defined only by those events, usually cataclysmic in nature, that related directly to addiction. In Ram’s chronology, August of ’72 was the time when Randy had the good white, another month and time was right around Greek’s funeral, or when he and Jaime were knocking off the poison shops, the weeks and months amalgamating into an eerie quiescence—“like living in a sea of embalming fluid,” as Ram wrote Fran in a letter, adding that “time seems to pass very slowly during the day, but I don’t notice that it’s passing at all. I get used to it being summer and then suddenly it’s November, meaning it’s time to start wearing a sweater or a jacket. It’s like watching a film that’s running sideways through a very slow projector.”
OD’s and ambulances, rip-offs and rousts, brief periods when Ram and/or Jaime tried to kick on their own, or were forced to kick because they were in jail. It went on like that, with time moving sideways, living half-lives, other lives, pickled lives, until that day in the winter of ’73 when the shootout on Q Street went down, just down the block from where Devlin was staying at Allen’s house.
That scene—part carnival, part police melodrama, all nightmare—came alive for Ram again as he sat remembering Jaime. That was when Ram fell off the diminishing junkie pyramid, that was his line in the sand; seeing the shootout and the bank robbers who brought it on being burned alive by the fire in the apartment building just down the street from Allen’s. Ram remembered the flames shooting through the roof—just like they did at Z’all’s house, the two events somehow linking together now, then the long climb back to health in Europe, finishing again in Amsterdam. Ram thought back to when he knew for certain that he was whole again, that day on the Dingle Peninsula when he climbed the Magillicuddy Reeks, arriving at its swale-topped ridge in a dark fog, waiting until it burned off when he saw the cross at the other end of the ridge, a crude intersection of wooden beams 20 feet tall. He watched as the fog burned away and saw the world reveal itself fully again—the dark blue sea, the hard green pastures, the tilled brown fields, the white cottages of human habitation, the small moving variegated flecks of farm animals—and was able, after three months of painful withdrawal, to fully and finally know it was over and something new was beginning.
Ram thought of Jaime over the past couple of years, remembering the times that Jaime would call to tell Ram that he was clean, or was kicking, or was about to start methadone, or about to start a new job, or was moving out of Sagrada, knowing that it was all a riff, every time. There was nothing as powerful as the Q Street shootout to persuade Jaime away from heroin. Unlike Ram, nothing scared him enough to make him move on, nothing outside his boxed, timeless pickledness held enough attraction for him to abandon his self-crucifixion and pursue the next phase of his life, Ram thought. Then Ram dug deeper, looked at it outside his own survivor perspective, and admitted uncomfortably to himself that it was probably more true in Jaime’s case: that he had found what it was that defined him, that it was all he felt was worth living for, and was maybe as good a way as any to die, that it was his own choosing to do this, devil come what may…
“Are you okay, man?”
Tor was standing in front of him ten feet away. Some time had passed—a half-hour, maybe more, Ram couldn’t say. His cheeks were wet, and he was shaking a little.
“Come on inside. Sit by the fire and have a brandy. We should toast Jaime’s memory,” Tor said softly.
Ram wiped his face with a bandanna and struggled to rise. The fog was beginning to burn off and the sky was pearl colored with scraps of robin’s egg blue in the clear patches. Ram rose up, dusted his pants off, then strode toward Tor, who put his arm around him, guiding him toward the open door where Shalleen was standing. She handed Ram a snifter of brandy and hugged him as he came through the door.
Inside, they talked of Jaime and Refugio, recalling scenes from the past, some of them horribly sad, some of them impossibly funny. Jaime always made his friends laugh. He had an appreciation for the ironic and absurd that heroin had not cloaked or cut off, although it had diminished it. Jaime Randolph saw man as an essentially comic figure immersed in bizarre situations beyond his control, which possibly explained why he chose to dwell in the cocoon of opiates. He was a gentle soul, sensitive, soft-spoken, kind, and well-mannered from a working family, and if he had a steady supply of heroin, he rarely did anything untoward that ruffled anyone’s feathers or required a police call. It was his continual need for more that took Jaime down, Ram thought. His need for something other than himself and trust in his gifts that caused his death, Ram believed.
Ram and Tor lobbed their theories of Jaime Randolph’s demise back and forth as they passed the brandy bottle between them; the TV flickering images of football in front of them, while next to it, a crackling fire raged.
Ram’s heart was torn in a different place from where Vera usually ripped it. There’s nothing quite so self-leveling as losing a friend who you’ve walked through the fire with, Ram felt, at least not in his experience, although John Devlin understood it perfectly when Ram and he talked about it later. “Nothing like losing a combat buddy, I know, Ram. Jaime was your combat buddy.” That explained it better and helped Ram sort through it and compartmentalize and file away his feelings about Jaime. But as he sat there in Tor’s cedar house in Doe Bay, nothing that Ram reached for could be grasped. It was all emotion and image, pain, loss, anger, and frustration; images of Atcliffe and Alkali Flat; and in the middle of all this, the living image of Jaime Rudolph, now dead, but still alive to the living he left behind whose lives he had touched.
Suddenly, the brandy and the talk weren’t working anymore, and he knew there was something that he had to do—for Jaime, for Tor, for Jaime’s friends, but mostly for himself. Ram got up from the fire, walked over to the desk, grabbed a pen and a notepad, and headed outside again.
He swept the leaves and needles from the picnic table, clearing a space for himself, and sat down and began marking out the words to the first real poem he’d written in seven years, since that long-ago, fabled time in Vancouver with Jonas and Shaughn.
The images of Jaime and Ram’s time with him and what made Jaime Rudolph singular, rose and fell and flickered and adhered in Ram’s rusty organized system of poetics, searching for the ineffable, bordering the unapproachable, the near inexpressible. Then he remembered the train trip that the two of them took that long ago day from Sitges to Barcelona, when they’d gone to look at the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, roaming the city at Christm
astime, going from Sagrada Familia to Casa Batllo to Palacio Guell, exhausting themselves to visual drunkenness on Gaudi’s organic forms, ornate mosaics and vegiform casework, and how, at the end of this breathtaking visual bender, they were brought back to the real world, on the train ride home to Sitges, by a dead horse lying in the field, his belly distended, his feet in the air, remembering what Jaime said when Ram called his attention to it: “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Ram. The horse doesn’t mind.”
When he was finished with it two hours later, Ram rewrote it again and again until he was satisfied. The poem was called Plea Bargaining with the Drowned.
…The lights fell and a single spot followed Ram out to the microphone. He didn’t bother to adjust the mike to his own height. He didn’t preface his reading with an explanatory note. He placed his pages on the lectern and spoke:
"Over the phone, during a lull in an argument over money,
Your death was tossed out; a bone to weaken my bargaining,
It was a brief punctuation.
So I drew a breath for assurance,
Resumed wrangling and then slammed the phone down.
I’d grown so used to you drowning, I’d been expecting that news for years."
By that point, the audience in Refugio’s Civic Auditorium was holding its breath. By the time he finished his debut, they were on their feet whistling and stomping, insisting he come back and read another poem. One more was all he had. Ram moved back into the spotlight and read Static’s Stinging Whip, a poem he’d written about schizophrenia, taken from the point of view of the schizophrenic. It brought down the house. When it was finally over, of the five new poets who’d read that evening, Ram had emerged as a rising star. As he sat backstage, two men approached him, the oversweet berry scent of gin announcing their arrival. One was a squat Mexican in his mid-thirties, wearing a tan suit and orange Panama straw hat. Ram recognized him; Vera had pointed him out once, telling Ram: “Tomas Gutierrez, what a character! But he’s a real poet too, one of the best poets in Refugio.” Gutierrez’s companion was a sallow-skinned, popeyed rail with bloodshot eyes. Gutierrez introduced himself, and then introduced the sallow man: “This is Bill Burroughs Jr.,” he said. Ram said hello and shook their hands. “That was an excellent reading, stunning, and powerful. I was impressed,” said Gutierrez. “So was Billy.”
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