Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Tomas reached into his breast pocket, produced a reporter’s notebook and handed it to Ram. “I hope it’s not for this evening’s reading, Ram. You’ll be on in an hour or so.” Ram took the notebook and headed out the door of the bus.

  “Methinks the spirit has moved the boy,” said Michael.

  “Either that or the revenge of Montezuma,” said Tomas.

  “It’s of no consequence,” said Michael. “I say, let’s us have another,” he said, taking two quick toots and handing the implements to Tomas who smiled.

  “You’re a good man, Michael. This reminds me of something, but frankly, I’m too fucked up to remember what it is.”

  They sat in the cubicle for another half-hour until the doorman came to announce that somebody was looking for Tomas. They watched from the stage wing as Robert Norvold was reading. Ram was next, but was nowhere to be seen. Vera approached them and grabbed Michael by the arm. “What have you done? Where’s Ram?” she demanded. “Tomas, where is he? What have you been up to?”

  At that moment, Ram walked up carrying the file with the three poems he was scheduled to read. In his hand were ripped out pages from the reporter’s notebook, which he handed back to Tomas. “I’m here, baby,” he said, removing a flask from his pocket and taking a pull. “And I’m ready.”

  Norvold finished his reading to polite applause. He took a bow, thanked the audience, then addressed it. “One of Refugio’s brightest and strongest poetic voices and one of its newest and youngest. I give you Ram Le Doir.” Ram took another pull from the flask and strolled onstage to tepid applause.

  He reached for the microphone and softly belched before he began reading the notebook pages with the poem he had just finished writing five minutes before.

  "I shot a faggot in a fern bar,

  Drilled him dead as a doornail,

  Boom, boom, boom, boom.

  Four times in the balls with my Ruger .44

  Little fruit google-eyed me,

  Did it twice, the little faggot,

  I don’t swing that way.

  So I shot the faggot in the fern bar,

  Four times right where it counted,

  Boom, boom, boom, boom."

  When he left it a half-hour and six verses later, it was to catcalls, boos, screams, and whistles interspersed with a scattering of wild applause. Some of the audience was standing when they did. There was a fistfight in a corner involving Mad Michael that Vera and Rogers managed to break up. As the festival’s main organizer, a small press bookstore owner named Sy Fellows was showing Ram the door, the reviewers who were present observed it and asked Fellows what happened. When they were told that Ram was expelled, the reviewers sprinted to the lobby and corralled the available pay phones. As he was escorted from the building, two longhaired security guards on either side of him, the procession was halted by William S. Burroughs. He extended a dead fish hand to Ram, looked him placidly in the eye, blinked, and drawled, “I have to tell you, Mr. Le Doir. I admire a man with balls.”

  The phone was ringing, and when Vera wouldn’t pick it up, Ram finally did. “Hello,” he mumbled.

  “Are you up, Ram?”

  “Who’s this?” Ram slurred, still half asleep.

  “It’s George Rogers. You’ve got that interview at 11:30. Are you awake?”

  “No. Is that today?”

  Ram knew that the interview was scheduled for this morning but moaned the question anyway, hoping, somehow it had been canceled or postponed.

  “I’m coming by to get you in half an hour,” said Rogers.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost nine.”

  “Why so early?”

  “I thought we’d stop for breakfast along the way.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you go do the show and present yourself as me. She’ll never know the difference.”

  “Don’t pull that shit on me. You’re not backing out of this, Ram.”

  Rogers’s tone was firm and uncompromising.

  “All right all right. But give me forty-five minutes. I’m still in bed.”

  “Okay. Get out of bed now. I don’t want to have to pry you out when I get there.”

  Rogers felt obliged to mention this, as he’d been forced to play nursemaid on more than one occasion since Ram’s rise to prominence.

  “Alright, I’m up. Hear my feet slapping the floor, Dr. Goebbels?”

  “It sounds like you’re in a fine humor. I trust you’re not too wrecked.”

  “Not at all. I spent a relatively tame evening last night. Mad Michael and Tomas came by but we kept it to a dull roar.”

  “You hung over?”

  “No, I’m just a little apprehensive.”

  “This will be a piece of cake.”

  “I’ll see you when you get here.”

  Ram showered, shaved, and dressed casually in boots, jeans, white shirt, a wine-colored knit tie, and a beige jacket. He re-heated yesterday’s coffee and used it to wash down two Valiums. "Strictly medicinal, absolutamente necesario," he assured himself.

  One evening after the interview had been arranged, Ram tuned into the program to see what he would be up against. The hostess, Ms. Avoirdupois, was a slim blonde with an earnest demeanor and blue eyes that regarded her guests through granny glasses. She had an insistent attitude that seemed to demand the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Ram saw her as the type of woman who’d read Virginia Woolf and George Sand in their entirety and had two children who attended a Montessori school. On this particular evening, she was wearing a white blouse embroidered with hummingbirds and a macramé belt over a rust-colored, mid-calf length skirt. A style Ram characterized as “California ecologically attuned traditional”. He thought she’d probably hand-sewn the ensemble herself out of natural raw silk, cotton, and wool. Maybe she’d wove the wool on a loom that her husband, some local craftsmen probably had constructed and given to her on the Celebration Day of their unspecified union.

  Ram saw them as one of those couples who regularly attended meetings of the county Board of Supervisors and were probably concerned about “growth” in all its manifold implications; the kind of people who could quote zoning regulations with the fluency of Richard Burton reading Lear. As he mused about Ms. Avoirdupois and her imaginary spouse, his projections grew more splenetic. He pegged them as East Coast refugees, the kind of people who embraced the “California lifestyle” with a fervor approaching Pentecostalism. The suspension of disbelief that this exercise required was probably engendered by their escape from some urban tomb like Buffalo or Philadelphia, where they’d previously resided and fled with all due haste after procuring their degrees, just two more pilgrims in the stream pouring out to California, beckoning the Avoirdupois’ and thousands of others like them.

  Over breakfast at the Broken Egg, Rogers prepared Ram for the interview.

  “You have nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s not how I see it.”

  “What are you getting so worked up about? You get in the studio, get made up—”

  “—like a Dutch hooker,” Ram interrupted.

  “Come on. Don’t make this a crusade. Try and be cooperative. People watch her show, and if you go over well, it’ll help your sales. And one more thing: take it easy on the booze. The producer said you called and instructed him to have Tanqueray and fresh limes on hand, and I notice that you’ve got your thermos, so don’t do something you’ll regret later.”

  “Right,” Ram sighed.

  They arrived at the studio. It was in a one-story building up in the mountains on Summit Road, with a huge antenna and no windows. It otherwise looked like a hamburger stand. They were introduced to the producer, a longhair in his early thirties dressed in sandals and an Indian shirt over faded jeans. The producer guided Ram to a young woman who proceeded to apply makeup to Ram’s perspiring face. After calling “five-minutes please, quiet on the set,” the producer steered Ram to his chair and placed the microphone around
his neck. He waited in silence, adjusting his tie and pushing his hair off his face until the hostess arrived and briefly shook hands. A moment later, the producer pointed at them with a dramatic gesture, accusingly, Ram thought, and the taping began.

  “Good evening and welcome to Art Talk. We’re pleased to have as our guest, Ram Le Doir. Mr. Le Doir is a writer of verse and prose who publishes his work in Kayak, The West Coast Poetry Review, City Lights Books, and other magazines. Welcome to Art Talk, Mr. Le Doir.”

  “Thank you. It’s good to be here,” Ram lied.

  “When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer, Mr. Le Doir?”

  Ram picked at the calluses on his hand, fidgeted with the microphone around his neck, and raised his head to look at her. She returned his gaze expectantly. Ram pondered the question, which he considered inane, and deliberated whether or not he should answer honestly or fabricate some story. Recalling the advice of Rogers, Ram opted for the former. “When I was about 14, maybe 13. Somewhere in there.”

  “Tell us about that.”

  “Well, I was sitting in the backseat of a car, a ‘59 Ford station wagon in the parking lot of a supermarket, and I was waiting for my brothers and a couple of their friends who were inside shopping for a camping trip we were taking. We’d each brought a friend but we hadn’t picked up my buddy yet, and I’m sitting there alone in this loaded down Ford—God, did that car take a beating!—when the thought occurred to me that all of us who were going on this trip; my brothers, their friends, my friend, all of us were without fathers, and when I thought about that, I began to see this fatherlessness as a common bond that distinguished us somehow and made us different from the other kids we knew. I remember wondering whether or not we; my brothers, these other kids who were going camping with us, myself, actively sought friendships with fatherless children. At that moment, I had my first inspiration to write. I recall saying to myself: ’When I get older, I’m going to write a book called The Fatherless.’ And as corny as that might sound, you meet kids like that all the time these days, kids who don’t even know who their fathers are, or maybe they’re being raised collectively by three fathers. That was when I first thought about becoming a writer.”

  “Did you actually begin working on it? On The Fatherless?”

  “God, no. This is just something that I thought of at that time and later abandoned, thank God. It was a set of impulses that until then I was unaware of, but the notion that I would someday write continued to fester, and not long after that, I started writing verse.”

  “Did growing up in the Central Valley have any influence on you as a writer?”

  Ram winced. Had Ms. Avoirdupois took the time to read any of his work she would know the answer to the question was an emphatic yes. Ram decided to play coy.

  “You could say that.”

  “Could you expand on that a little, Mr. Le Doir?”

  “Well, it was flat in the valley,” Ram drawled, his voice softening as if in wonderment at the recollection. “And I grew up in the suburbs which were laid out square—except for the curly-cued cul-de-sacs, which really didn’t connect to anywhere. And there was a lot of open farmland nearby. So I guess you could say I acquired my sense of form from that environment. Yes, the valley influenced my form.”

  He began to wonder how many minutes had passed. The program was scheduled for a half-hour and yet it seemed an eternity had already gone by. Since this was public television, there would be no breaks for commercials and Ram’s only recourse seemed compliance. He’d have to weather the storm that was slowly engulfing him.

  Ram was pleased with himself for having the foresight to bring along the thermos of gin-and-tonic, which he substituted for the water the TV crew provided. During the lull following his reply, he poured a stiff one in the ceramic cup the hostess insisted he use beforehand, when she discovered that it was alcohol, not water, that he would be wetting his whistle with.

  The interview proceeded with a series of questions as the hostess inquired who Ram had been influenced by. “Ruben Dario and Eddie Cochran,” was his reply. Where had he gone to school and whom had he studied under? “UC Deerville and Stanford, Piggott and Fisher, Cowley and Stegner.” How many volumes of poetry had he published? “Two, with one forthcoming from Mercury Press, Damaged Goods, it’s called. But it’s not about product shelf life,” he assured her. When the hostess changed tack, sensing the interview was dragging, and proceeded to more personal questions, Ram’s supercilious attitude was shattered. He felt his composure melting like an ice cream cone on a hot afternoon.

  “Mr. Le Doir, you’ve been described by some writers as wild, crazed, undisciplined, and unpredictable. American Poetry Review, described you as, and I quote, ‘A veritable volcano of impassioned verse who seems destined to follow in the footsteps of his forebears, Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry.’”

  Trying to restrain himself, Ram inhaled shortly and replied in a whisper, “I wasn’t aware of that.” He recalled Rogers’ advice but found it difficult to follow. Leaning back in his chair, Ram considered the rigging overhead like a mountaineer contemplating the process of how many steps it would take to get through this tricky pitch.

  “Well, could you respond to that? Do you see yourself in those terms?”

  “No.”

  It was unclear whether the no was a strict answer to the first or second part of her question, and Ram took advantage of the interviewer’s initial perplexity by struggling in his seat to regain a more comfortable position. In doing so, his legs got entangled with the microphone cord, which cinched like a noose around his neck and made his breathing laborious. Ram raised the camouflaged gin to his mouth and drank greedily.

  “Well, there must be some basis for these characterizations?”

  “If it sells my work, it doesn’t matter to me what I’m called. I’ve been called names far worse than that.”

  Ram picked up the mug and drained it. The alcohol had a soothing and bolstering effect and Ram felt his fear was perhaps best mastered by arrogance. Figuring he’d already been typecast and feeling like a show dog on display, Ram decided to give the hostess her money’s worth.

  “What I believe they refer to is the anger, (ah, he was right) which seems to be evident not only in your work, but in your behavior as well.”

  “Well, I’m not up for the good conduct medal, if that’s what you mean.”

  Random giggles came from the audience behind the lights and it inspired Ram. He loved playing to an audience. Having already consumed the contents within the thermos, he passed his mug to a grip off camera for reinforcements and, in an audible whisper, said: “G and T rocks, twist, thanks.” The antic didn’t go unappreciated; the laughter increased. Ms. Avoirdupois glared at him as Ram grinned stupidly at the audience in back of the stellate kliegs. She was about to ask another question when Ram leaned toward her, waving his hand as if batting away a mosquito. He exploded.

  “Look, you ask me to come on this program and talk about my work and now you want to know about my notoriety. Is that it? Do you wonder if it’s true what they say about my drinking two six-packs before a reading? Not always, sometimes more, sometimes less. How about the circumstances surrounding my arrest for indecent exposure? Or what about the one for assault on a police officer? Or maybe the time in Moscow, Idaho where Michael Menninger and I were thrown into the slammer for destruction of public property, 86’d from four bars in one night, my personal record. So, okay, there’s that aspect of me that we can discuss, and maybe if I look and sound repentant or abashed enough, I might win some new friends who might cherish me as another one of those excitable artistic types. The truth remains that this crap has absolutely nothing to do with my writing, which I work very diligently at, I might add. What all these incidents amount to is a cartoon character; a personality. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to sell a celebrity, no matter how big a jerk he is, than it is to succeed as an artist on the basis of merit.”

  His diatribe took the hostess by su
rprise. As his remarks grew more vehement, she felt herself moving away from him. She curled her shoulder in front of her defensively so that she now faced Ram at an approximate right angle.

  “I really had not intended to dwell on this at any length.”

  “Oh, you just thought you’d mention it, right? To see what kind of dirt I might offer willingly?”

  “Since you seem to feel so strongly about this, how do you perceive the artist’s responsibility to his public and do you feel that celebrity is, in and of itself, such an abhorrent aspect of artistic recognition?”

  “To the first part of your question, none. But let me expand on that as it correlates to my feelings regarding celebrity.”

  Ram paused and moved to the edge of his seat to engage the hostess more closely. As he advanced, so did she retreat, and an observant viewer could notice the camera pan to the right.

  “I don’t believe that the artist has any responsibility to anyone other than himself and maybe God, if such a being indeed exists. That is, if the artist is concerned with art solely as an aesthetic pursuit. Art for art’s sake, or beauty’s sake, or truth’s sake, or even the artist’s own sake. If, however, the artist is concerned with the marketability of his product for public consumption, then his responsibility to that public is total, for it’s their approval that he requires in order to deem himself successful. They, his public, his fame, become his raison d’être for whatever artistic discipline that he, or she, I should add—wouldn’t want to offend the women, God forbid—has chosen to work in.”

  Ms. Avoirdupois was about to say something in reply and attempt to change the subject, but again Ram waved his hand at her. This time as if he were erasing something silly from a blackboard.

  “Some artists can play that celebrity game quite successfully and I don’t begrudge them their fame a bit… Ah well, sometimes the bastards,” Ram saying this directly to the audience, raising guffaws from his growing claque. “People like Warhol, Vidal, Dali, Capote, I sometimes think of them as these giant over-inflated balloons that float about the Palace of Public Art and, wherever that’s located, probably Los Angeles, fart praises at each other whenever they collide, ‘Loved your new picture,’ ‘Oh, your exhibit at the Whitney was a knockout,’ ‘Gee whiz, your new book was fantastic,’ or whatever. And that doesn’t really gnaw at me. Warhol has even managed to go so far as to create an art form within that fame genre, but I sometimes wonder if he’s consciously doing it as a send-up or if he actually believes that hokum. I know I’m digressing, but here’s my point, that’s okay for them and, in fact, it’s expected. But that’s not why I write. I’m not trying to gain entry into that circle. The kind of excesses that I’ve indulged in that you’ve either read or heard about are not an attempt by me to be cute or perverse, formerly a faux pas but now socially acceptable. I’m not proud of my antics; of the fripperies and follies that I’ve engaged in, but I don’t deny them either. I’m just saying that they have nothing to do with my writing.”