The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Frequently, on the Bowery, I had seen dirty winos enter and wipe off chair seats with their hands. I always marveled at this small gesture: there was still a touch of human pride in the men. In my novel The Wig, Mr. Sunflower Ashley-Smithe says, “I keep a dozen milk bottles filled with lice so I won’t be lonely.” I had slept around through the years, but I had never encountered lice. Small wingless insects, parasitic on men, especially Bowery men, and the sons and daughters of the Flower Generation.

  They were in my hair, under my arms, in the jungle of pubic hair. I itched and scratched day and night. You could take the large ones in your hands and crush them; they made a crackling sound, their blood was crimson. But the poor babies were interesting. Imagine a dozen white angora kittens about the size of pinheads, taking their first steps, crawling against the collar of your brand-new black knit shirt. Genocide, baby. Burn the shirt, shower, shower, shower. I anointed my body with so much oil that I was under the delusion that I was the Sun King, reincarnated.

  Toward 6 P.M. after the tic under my eye was sated and I could no longer stand the bone-white cubicle, after I had controlled my impulse to throw the typewriter out the window, I popped another Dexie, desecrated the wine bottle, and later joined the residents in the lobby to watch the news. This was the garrulous hour. Some of the men had returned from work, others from panhandling and dinner at the Municipal Lodging House around the corner. This was the hour of camaraderie, con games, great lies, illegal drinking, loneliness, anxiety.

  Always skulled, I made my way through the crowd, exchanging brief, social greetings. Then, sat on the windowsill, trying to concentrate on the six o’clock news or staring out the window.

  Against the deep blue of early evening, they turned on the spotlight at the Holy Name Mission and church at Mott and Bleecker Streets and you could see the white-and-gold-draped statue of Jesus Christ. It was not a life-size statue. From a distance, with the lights playing on it, Jesus Christ was larger than life. Sometimes He appeared to move. Extend His hand, turn slightly. Desperate, I needed a lift. Take me higher. Ground the motors of the stockcars racing in my brain. But “God never worked very well with me,” Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley said. Somehow I can’t get in step with the masses and their current religious phenomenon, seeking belladonna for the soul. Tricky business, too. For what is religion but the act of levitation?

  It would be much better if I read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Through his despair, I might be able to understand my despair, to cut the loss, elevate hope.

  Of course, I was unable to do this. I did not even reread Under the Volcano.

  The blank space is self-explanatory. There were a series of days and nights that I do not want to remember. Someday. Perhaps.

  I lost love because the threat of insanity, suicide, and murder began to tango around the perimeter of that love.

  Someone stole my passport.

  I sold the typewriter, radio, and books.

  I lost my grandmother’s wedding band.

  I kept my blackness.

  I always felt like a refugee among foe/friends, friend/foes.

  I lost my head at last. I watched my head boogaloo happily down the street. As Head desires.

  However, one irrefutable truth remained: I could always return to the Catskills.

  THIS CATSKILL SCENE is a Japanese watercolor: white poplar and pine trees command the fields; the mountains are shrouded in green. Serenity becomes a silent song. Then, suddenly, the sun is smothered by gray clouds. It’s an Idaho sky, a pensive Hemingway sky, and you know you are in America. The eye travels out across the land: a buff-colored, shingled ranch house in a clearing of young trees. Fronting the house like emblems are two late-model cars, which spell money. Closer at hand, beer cans litter the wild grass like baubles from the moon. About a dozen butterball kittens are playing in the grass. Running, leaping, rigid before the moment of attack, their multicoloring becomes a shifting pattern in this unofficial season of death.

  Originally this was hunting country. It still is, in a restricted sense, although No Hunting signs are everywhere. Vodka-mellow, I like to believe that Hemingway would have felt at home up here—Here where in summer young deer frolic like schizoid ballet dancers. But I wonder what Papa would think about the cats. “Any time you decide to shoot cats, it’s the cat season,” a man said yesterday. However, no one has said that it is the perfect season to hunt and harass men. Let me ease your mind: that, too, fuses in the clear air like the simultaneous orgasms of lovers.

  The lower-echelon employees do not talk of love. It’s always other hotels, booze, the Bowery, weapons. None of them own weapons as far as I know (should I write regretfully or gratefully?). Most of them are small-town men, accustomed to the hunting seasons and to being hunted in the ghettos of our towns and cities. Now all they have is this transient gig for a day, a week, a month. Loneliness is a mothergrabber for them.

  I would not like to look into their eyes without the cats. In the evening, the cats silently sit on the porch of the kitchen-help house and wait for dinner. Sometimes the men steal tuna fish and tinned milk for their favorites. I am neither lonely nor a fanatical cat lover, but I buy cartons of milk for them. I find myself talking to them in the evening. Questioning them about their lineage, calling them every mother in the book, carefully pouring milk into the tuna tins.

  Several ingenious men have built cat shelters out of cardboard boxes and remnants of carpeting. Some of them are violently jealous of the new kittens in the underground staff dining room—where at this very moment an argument has begun—and ends abruptly as one of the contestants exits with: “Fuck you. I’ll see you in Monticello.” A weekend employee turns toward me. He is eating Sacher cake and says, “Somebody is gonna break that son of a bitch’s neck.” This small man, who is very fond of sweets, is my dinner conversationalist, although we rarely sit at the same table.

  Nodding, the small man smiles. “Yeah. Last week I bought a rifle for self-protection. Yeah. Up here you gotta be nice or they’ll get you.”

  My dinner conversationalist is unaware of what I am writing and continues to rap, the Sherlock Holmes cap obscuring his eyebrows. A man’s skull was fractured on the stone floor beneath my feet. A dishwasher was knifed to death two miles from here. And they never found out who killed the maid in———. Two motorcyclists killed a man, dumped his body in the waterfall, which is a fifteen-minute walk down the hill.

  I question my friend about cats. “Yeah. They all right,” he says. “I got two in Monticello. They nice.”

  Cats—common domestic mammals kept by man as pets or to catch rats and mice. Sometimes roasted over an open fire or the base of a succulent stew at Starvation Hour. But for the moment, the United States of America is the richest country in the world. We do not have to worry about domestic cat on the menu—or do we?

  Certainly, I wasn’t thinking about cats when I went to visit Joey. In the sunflower brightness of a Thursday afternoon, I walked four miles to Joey’s hotel, stopping off at a roadside café for a cold six-pack.

  Joey offered vodka at ten in the morning. Why not, as we used to say in Tangier. We began drinking and exchanging local news. Then, shortly before twelve, the sound of bullets interrupted our conversation.

  “Whenever a hotel has too many cats,” Joey, an old Catskill hand, explained, “they shoot them.” At lunch Joey pointed out the two men who had killed the cats. The “second,” a transient mental-hospital patient, was Mr. Clean. His head was shaped and glowed like a choice eggplant. The main man was lean and rather placid. I watched as he placed his elbows on the white trestle table and hand-rolled a perfect cigarette. The second scooped up the dead cats with a shovel and threw them down the hill. Joey remembered a record by the DC-5 titled “Bits and Pieces.”

  Postscript: Exactly one week later, at my home away from home, the local fascisti shot more unwanted cats at dusk. House cats and favorites survived.

  On my dishwasher’s day off, I walked four miles into
the village of Monticello, shopped around, paid my respects to several bars, and returned to my kosher hotel. I hoped to spend a quiet day reading, finding out what was going on in the world. But it was payday. The transient workers were doing their thing, celebrating their past and future, the low cost of labor. I drank with them. Skulled in the middle region of my mind, returned to my room, and began reading Time magazine. The black print kept slipping off the slick white page. Sleep came down like a knockout drop.

  Morning arrived gray and disfigured. The afternoon was a merciless drag. Skulled again, I watched reality enter the kitchen. The bearded Puerto Rican “captain” (the dining-room porter) sat down on the floor and removed his shoes. A melodrama would end if someone moved a stack of plates twelve inches. Tottering old drunks put iced-tea glasses in the wrong plastic rack. A young black takes exactly twenty minutes to put on his apron. Fat Boy tells the fourth version of the woman he did not have on his day off.

  On the lunch break, the dishwasher went to his room and tried to sleep. His mind double-timed. Perhaps he would stay in the Catskills forever. Too much, too much, I thought, while the building rocked with the beat of an army payday. I felt as if I had been riding a headless horse for a long time, and kept turning on the mattress. My penis rose as if to protest against the virginal fast. “You should masturbate,” I said in a marzipan voice. Why was I always so sexually alert in the country, where the score was zero? New York City was impotent. Cold, corruption, hate had corroded the last vault of reality. Then I remembered Time magazine. It was quite by accident that I flipped to page 81—The Press. A magnificent photograph of Norman Mailer centered on the page. A tough, intelligent face outlined with compassion. The face of an urbane carpenter in a $200 suit. This emotion was enlarged by the dishwasher’s respect for the man. They had met several times and had exchanged notes through the years. Certainly Mailer was the best writer in America. He was one of the few writers who could force the dishwasher’s brain to waltz! I began to read “Mailer’s America” with great interest. Time was inspired to reprint choice bits from Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer’s comments about Nixon and Humphrey (by the time you read this, the name of the next White Father Bird will be on the tip of your red, white, and blue tongue) were pretty good. His description of McCarthy’s followers: “Their common denominator seemed to be found in some black area of the soul, a species of disinfected idealism which gave one the impression when among them of living in a lobotomized ward of Upper Utopia.”

  Like the overture of true love which will last until dawn or until you have brushed your teeth, Mailer’s comments got better. Naturally, his comment on civil rights and blacks interested the dishwasher: “. . . he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? . . . But he was so heartily sick listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black inhumanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subway by black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in bloodshot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, so envious finally of that liberty to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yokes of work and responsibility that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet republican. . . .” Does personal despair, aging, the general mood of the times make a writer from the avant-garde uptight? Or was this “simple emotion” caused by the Reverend Abernathy’s late appointment? Was Mailer looking for a fight? Years ago, he had written the famous The White Negro. He was the Father of Hip. He had almost single-handedly brought the world of Paul Bowles to the new frontier, exposing that world to thousands of middle-class youth and their elders. Certainly he had paid his slumming dues. Pot, pills, booze are old joys and nightmares to him—for he had touched the outer limits of despair in more than one instance. Even with his education, affluence, he went under in the dream, got flogged by the bats of hell. What could he possibly expect from American blacks in their situation? And now: “They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous, ruminating government gut of every cowlike Democratic Administration. Perhaps the WASP had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy—which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear a child—yes, take that root off the high attic shelf of some Prudie Parsely of a witch—ancestor, and plant it in the smashed glass and burned brick of the twentieth century’s junkyard.”

  Prudie Parsely might have been incognito during the grass-green Eisenhower years. Indeed. But as I hunt and peck and go to press, Prudie has taken root and is trying to strangle anyone who opposes her. For years she has been the little sweet pea in the jolly green giant’s pod; her small-town American heart (which is shaped exactly like a Norman Rockwell valentine) pulsed with security, a Dow Jones high of righteousness. Prudie was safe. Old Glory flew high, and God blessed the foreign descendants, and for a very long time they believed this was true. Heart of hearts! Vietnam, taxes, and black power made the beat irregular. Miss Parsely is aghast. She’s a little afraid and is now working her army overtime. Anything goes. Why, the lady will take anything with two or four feet. Indeed. The little uptight white Protestants and their non-Protestant followers are getting it together. Whips sing in the air; blacks beware. Genocide, masquerading as Law and Order awaits you. So be prepared, pray that you take one and, hopefully, a hundred with you.

  Just about the time you think everything is breaking even—even-steven, mail arrives. There is no escape. A survey questionnaire: “Why You Did or Did Not Sell Out to the Establishment.” Among the men and women listed: Norman Mailer, Paul Getty, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, and Charles Wright. The dishwasher was amused. What tony company. A shot glass of amusement, I thought, and then made it down the hill, down to Harrison’s. The lower-echelon employees were not allowed to drink in the hotel bar. Harrison’s was the only bar for miles around—a typical highway bar—these bars might well serve as a symbol of America; there was something magnificently expansive about them, yet they could suck in their breath, hold it, forever. Harrison’s was located in the middle of the Catskills, and I had been mistaken for a Puerto Rican by a small-town Wasp who puked drunken black hatred. Another small-town Wasp offered to buy me drinks, then informed me that Governor Wallace would shortly appear on the television screen.

  However, the mood of Harrison’s that afternoon had the camaraderie of a late-summer afternoon. The television was turned off, and I ordered a double Scotch (I had received a small royalty check) which meant I would not have to signal the bartender-owner, who was reading John Updike’s Couples.

  “Chuck, my man,” Chuck exclaimed. He was playing pool. Black, twenty-seven years old, he appeared to be extremely well adjusted. Chuck was the second cook at the hotel, and everyone liked him. Before making his last winning shot, he looked over at Miss Mary and winked. Miss Mary, as everyone called her, was a maid at the hotel and was something of a legend. Miss Mary owned a brand-new robin’s-egg-blue Cadillac. Miss Mary was a moonlighter. I looked across at her, laughing over a Seagram and 7-Up with a couple of transient rednecks. Perhaps it was true, but I wouldn’t fork over ten dollars or twenty dollars to Miss Mary. She was too much woman for me. But even after I turned away, the image of her tits under the white nylon uniform stayed with me. Those tits seemed capable of guiding an ocean liner into harbor. I wasn’t interested in Miss Mary’s face, although it was attractive, unlined. She must have been at least forty-five.

  Chuck won, and there were a lot of bravos. He left with Miss Mary, left in his yellow Thunderbird.

  The Thunderbird’s motor was souped up, and I heard it as Chuck zoomed up the hill. I ordered another double, feeling a little down, wanting a little loving. Then I ordered a six-pack and made it.

  About an hour later
, there was a knock on my door.

  “Chuck,” Chuck said. “Busy, man?”

  “No.” I yawned through the door. “Come on in. The door’s open.”

  Chuck entered in his dazzling cook’s whites. His dazzling boyish smile was wide. We were never buddy-buddy but got along well.

  “Oh, man. I’m sorry. You’re reading. You gotta let me read some of your books.”

  “Any time,” I said, sitting up. “Wanna beer?”

  “Sure could use one. Hot as hell this afternoon. Must have put away two six-packs in the kitchen this afternoon.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned. “That kitchen is a bitch.”

  “You read a lot,” Chuck was saying, “and I’m sorry to disturb you, but I came up to ask if you wanted a piece of ass.”

  This is just too goddamn much, I told myself. What’s the angle? But already Junior was standing tall, waiting for me to put on my racing shoes.

  “It’s just down the hill,” Chuck said. He wasn’t looking at me then with that dazzling smile.

  I stood up. “Anybody I know?”

  “Yeah, man. Great piece of ass.”

  “Let’s make it, baby.”

  “Man, you’re ready,” Chuck said as we made it down the hill. I kept on putting Junior in place, but the son of a bitch wanted to stand up and cheer.

  The low-slung maids’ quarters was a former chicken coop. Remodeling gave it the appearance of a jerry-built post-World War II ranch house. Hundreds of stamping feet had killed the grass around the quarters. But the hardy hollyhocks survived; they grew tall; their riotous colors were like a torch against the surrounding countryside, and all was quiet except for the distant sound of B. B. King on a phonograph or a radio within the quarters.

  Chuck, grinning, unlocked number 7; there must have been at least twenty keys on his chain, and they jingled like Oriental chimes.