A Moveable Famine

by John Skoyles

  Many workshop students enrolled in The Hand-Printed Book, publishing their own poems in tiny editions. Others studied photography and Chinese painting. Everyone studied drinking, and full-time instructors included Raymond Carver and John Cheever. After every workshop, I went to The Deadwood with Ridge, Pryor, and McPeak. McPeak lived across the Mississippi, in Moline, Illinois, where he taught high school. He was born there, married his childhood sweetheart and had two small daughters. Now, at thirty, he took one workshop each semester, hanging out in bars, moving toward his degree credit by credit, beer by beer. Wearing polyester pants and rayon ties, keeping his curly red hair and beard trimmed, he seemed a conventional suburbanite, which he was, except for his mania about poetry, jazz, alcohol and women.

  McPeak had a crush on Brandy and asked her to go to the movies. She put her finger to her lips and said, “I don’t tink-toe.” When she left, Pryor said that the bartender, a 300-pound biker named Fenster, was her boyfriend. Ridge urged McPeak to expand his quest. He nodded at a table of female students, saying, “Each one guaranteed to have a cunt.”

  Going from my parents’ apartment in Queens to an all-male college, I had scant sexual experience. I had met one girl at a Fairfield mixer, Holly Proper, pronounced, she said, Pro-per, from Marymount. A hippie flower child, she invited me to her midtown apartment when her parents were away over Christmas. We met at the information booth at Grand Central but, before she arrived, I found myself staring at the beautiful women, gawking, really, my eyes following a girl in a short dress. A rough voice interrupted my fantasy, saying, “You wouldn’t know what to do with it, boy!” I turned to see a smiling, unshaven man in rags sitting on a bag of rags, with a rag on his head.

  Holly and I walked down Fifth Avenue, past Lord & Taylor’s windows where mechanical elves hammered toys in Santa’s workshop. Her long bellbottom jeans, torn at the heels, scraped the cement. A rattling sound surrounded her every step, like a shaking tin of coins. She hiked her frayed cuff, revealing a string of brass discs tied to her ankle by a purple cord. “Anti-jingle bells,” she said.

  At her parents’ place, she showed me her collection of Richard Brautigan books. I thought his work childlike, but since she was deep into the west coast underground, I guessed I had missed something. She sat cross-legged on a couch in the living room and read:

  Fuck me like fried potatoes

  on the most beautifully hungry

  morning of my God-damn life.

  She unzipped my fly. She got on her knees and it didn’t take a moment, which surprised her. She tugged off her jeans and panties, sat on the couch and spread her legs, guiding my head there. I kissed her thick pubic hair, but the vagrant’s words at Grand Central came back to me. I realized he was right and, a few minutes later, so did she. She took off her top and pushed my lips against her large nipples as she masturbated, jingling the anti-jingle bells.

  On the train to Queens I sat near the open door between cars, miserable about my sexual performance. A man in a blue Dickies work shirt and pants dozed across the aisle, undisturbed by the slamming chain handrails and wheels clanging beneath the metal coupler. He was coming home from his shift, his newspaper and lunch box beside him. He leaned farther and farther forward, nodding off, then tossing his head upright, never opening his eyes. I was reading The Portable Blake, and the passenger’s fatigued shoulders and unshaven face bobbed at the margins of the songs of innocence. As the train lurched, he lurched with it and a toupee dropped from the crown of his head. The now bald man continued to bend over what looked like half a hollowed-out grapefruit, with four pieces of doubled-sided tape stuck to the inside. The train shifted and rattled, the half sphere inching toward the open space between cars. I debated retrieving it for him, but hesitated each time his head snapped back. The hairpiece nudged the metal grid next to the door, about to be sucked away, and I grabbed it. As I was about to place it next to his lunch box, he opened his eyes and saw me holding his secret, a badly kept secret, and now an open secret.

  “You dropped this,” I said.

  “Like hell I did,” he said, snatching it and checking the seat for his lunch box. “I’m calling a cop.” He popped it on his head with the sound of a thwacked tennis ball, shook his shoulders to recover his dignity, pulled himself erect, and walked off as if peering over a crowd. I felt that if I had let it drift away, it would have been a sin, wrong to let the man lose his disguise. My Catholic guilt had gotten me in trouble. I realized, too, that my poking fun at Ruskin had come back to haunt me, and I suddenly sympathized with him. What a better time I would have had if Holly were bald as a statue.

  Barkhausen stood by our table at The Deadwood and said, “I hear Belinda Schaeffer shaves her pubes.” Pulling up a chair, he lit a cigarette and ordered a shot of rye, saying to Brandy, “And make it a good, healthy shot, too.” It was the first time she seemed annoyed. Barkhausen wore a heavy motorcycle jacket with zippers and studs.

  “What are you talking about?” Ridge asked.

  “Someone in the workshop wrote a poem about her, that’s all I’ll say for now.”

  “How’s Lawson’s class?” Pryor asked. Pryor was smarting from Barkhausen getting in.

  “Great,” Barkhausen said, exhaling toward a poster of Jesse James. “But he doesn’t like much. He shoots everyone down.” He made his hand into a pistol and aimed his index finger at Pryor.

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” McPeak said.

  “Does he like your work, Ridge?” Barkhausen asked.

  “I think so,” Ridge said, taken slightly aback. “He’s been supportive.”

  “I’m disappointed in the lit courses,” Barkhausen said. “I wanted to study the Russians, not just English.”

  “Like who?” Pryor asked.

  “Mandelstam. Pasternak. Pushpin.”

  When we laughed, Barkhausen looked puzzled. He pulled magazines out of his leather satchel, and gave us copies of the journal he published, La Huerta. When I opened it, I saw he was the featured poet, with a special section excerpted from his series, “The Devil’s Dance.”

  “What does the la huerta mean?” I asked.

  “The whorehouse.”

  “Not really,” Ridge said. “It means the orchard.”

  Barkhausen tapped the tip of his Marlboro toward the ashtray, sending cinders into Pryor’s drink. “If you get in

  a taxi in Mexico City and say la huerta, the driver will take you to a woman.”

  Ridge laughed. “If you say la huerta, the driver will take you to an orchard.”

  Every song playing on the jukebox was by Elton John. After hearing “Tiny Dancer” and “Rocket Man” three times, Ridge gave a few quarters to Brandy, and we heard “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” and Scott Joplin’s theme from the movie, “The Sting.”

  “This is almost worse,” Ridge said.

  “I hate ragtime,” McPeak said. “My father played that shit when I was a kid, and here it is again.”

  Barkhausen disagreed. “I like Scotch Opera,” he said. Ridge looked at me, and mouthed, Scott Joplin?

  Pryor said he just framed a broadside by his former teacher, the English poet, Malcolm Gee. He quoted the first line: “Your pathetic isolation dwindles me.”

  “Sounds like a bad translation,” Ridge said. “And it’s self-pitying.”

  Barkhausen cut in, “And a bit sedimental. Did you hear that Rimbaud drank absinthe before he wrote? He disengaged his senses.”

  “You wish you could write like Gee,” Pryor said, huddling defensively over his beer.

  No one seemed to notice Barkhausen’s opinion.

  “Gee snorts baby chick fluff before he writes,” Ridge said.

  “Remember when Stanley Elkin was here?” McPeak asked. “He met with a student and said, ‘You are the god of boredom.’ That’s how I feel about Gee.”

  I didn’t know who Gee was, so I ordered another beer.

  Pryor’s feelings were hurt, but Barkhausen, off in his own world, asked, “If Lawson we
re a baseball player, what position would he play?”

  “Relief pitcher,” Ridge said. “He’d throw strikes for a few innings, that’s it. Could never go the distance.” He ordered more beer, and said that in one class there had been a debate over the difference between “gray” and “grey.” Pryor said that “gray” has a more metallic sheen. McPeak cornered Brandy under a holster holding two six-guns and asked her opinion.

  Ridge had encouraged me to send my poems out and, when the others left, I showed him acceptance letters from Chicago Review and Poetry Northwest. He smiled, not unkindly, but in a way that made me feel I was displaying silly trophies. I needed the physical proof for myself. Everything else about poetry was invisible—it wafted around us and sometimes through us. So seeing a concrete thing, even a slip of paper I’d toss to the wind on my way home, and even if that paper clung to the base of a litter basket, it was no longer an idea or a feeling, but something real.

  I adjusted to workshop life, and continued long days in the library. Someone in class mentioned the poets Dickey and Wright, but by the time I arrived at the stacks, I found many Dickeys and many Wrights. James, Charles, and Jay. I confused James, Ralph and R. P. Dickey, but I read them all.

  I had also come to understand the jargon of the workshop, the phrases that said one thing but meant another:

  I admire the poem’s ambition.

  It sucks.

  I see what it’s trying to do.

  But it doesn’t do it.

  I like the even tone.

  It’s boring.

  A tour de force.

  It sucks.

  Send it to the New Yorker immediately.

  You don’t listen to anyone, so why not get a professional opinion?

  Have you read X?

  You stole from X!

  Have you tried writing in form?

  You have nothing to lose.

  Don’t listen to what anyone says.

  You’re hopeless anyway.

  Toward the end of that first term, I found Ridge and Pryor in deep discussion at The Deadwood. McPeak, indifferent to their talk, looked over his shoulder and called to other tables. I guessed the subject was writing or teaching and it was both. Two students who had received fellowships were graduating. The debate was over who would get their funding.

  “Dane Hill could get the TWF,” Pryor said, ripping a napkin neatly into quarters.

  “Not after he read with the actualists,” Ridge said.

  “Think they’ll consider me?” Pryor said, peering up from his bowed head as if asking for mercy.

  “You have an outside shot,” Ridge said. “You’re a good poet and they like you.”

  Ridge looked at me. “We’re talking about aid,” he said. He turned to Pryor. “But there are other things to consider, like Anne Graff . . .”

  “Don’t tell me that, Ridge!” Pryor said. “Things better not work that way.” His lower teeth jutted out from his beard when he spoke, looking more like a wolf than a man, a wolf about to tear into the carcass of Anne Graff.

  “It could happen, that’s all I’m saying,” Ridge said. “And if one of the faculty’s girlfriends gets it, think of how John would feel. He’s got nothing.”

  “I know,” Pryor said, calmer. “What matters is the instate tuition.”

  “I could use that,” I said.

  “These appointments will go to those who already have aid,” Ridge said.

  “But John could get a research thing if one of the teaching assistants got a fellowship,” Pryor said. “Now that he’s published.”

  “I don’t know how it works,” I said.

  “And you and I never will,” McPeak said, getting up and corralling a girl by the pinball machine.

  “There’s Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants,” Ridge said. “And Teaching Writing Fellows. RAs, TAs and TWFs,” Ridge said. He pronounced TWF as Twif.

  “Ridge’s a TWF,” Pryor said. “I’m a TA.”

  Ridge said. “TAs teach comp and TWFs teach Creative Writing. The RAs do clerical work for the profs.”

  “The TWFs get the most money,” Pryor said.

  “The RAs want to become TAs and the TAs TWFs,” Ridge said.

  “But an RA will never be a TWF,” Pryor said.

  “I don’t know,” Ridge said. “Gus Dessler went from RA to TWF, didn’t he?”

  “He was a TA one summer.”

  “That’s right,” Ridge said. “But it’s rare. Most TWFs come in as TWFs.”

  “You could get an RA,” Pryor said. “Now that you’re published.”

  “And you’re smart. If a spot opens, you could be a TA,” Ridge said.

  “I hope they think I’m worth the TWF,” Pryor said, stammering. “I’m as good as Harvey. I mean, I’m as good as Harvey was. I mean, when he was my age.”

  McPeak held Brandy’s hips as she stood on a footstool, straightening photos of the Dalton gang.

  “They better not make that bimbo Anne Graff a TWF!” Pryor said. “It would make a mockery of the system!”

  I passed Pryor in the hall when January classes started, and he shook his head negatively on his way to Lawson’s office. I stopped by to see Ridge and he told me that Pryor didn’t get the TWF. He was not the only one disappointed. The TWF and the TA could have gone to Anne Graff, a faculty favorite, or Roy Napoli, whose minute, curtailed couplets of no more than four words imitated not Lawson, but Lawson’s translations of the French poet, Guillevic, which everyone thought was a clever, sideways form of flattery. The disappointed students were upset because the appointments were indisputable. The TWF went to Denis Johnson who had published his first book, and wrote a short story that appeared in the Atlantic. On that basis, he had a contract for a novel. Denis had a true insouciance, was a dedicated habitué of the most dissolute bar in town, The Vine, and coursed through the halls barefoot. Sam Silva got the TA, a quiet student with a poem in the New Yorker. Pryor raged, but it was only with himself he could argue, and his complaints flared behind Lawson’s closed door. We could even catch sentences about his having a wife to support.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  READING ASHBERY TO MY MOTHER—DAPPER DAN COOK—BARKHAUSEN AND WENDY’S TÊTE-À-TÊTE—DRINKING TO CONCENTRATE, DRINKING TO FORGET—LOUDMOUTH GETS SOAKED—MODIFIED LAWSON

  When Lawson brought a poet to campus for a reading, he made it clear that only those who attended were welcome at the after-party. He was grateful to Pryor and his wife, Wendy, for hosting Henri Coulette, his former Iowa classmate from Los Angeles. Suspecting Coulette might not be a big draw, Lawson left a reminder of this policy on the bulletin board. His messages were unmistakable. He typed them on rough yellow paper, and signed them simply ML. By the paper alone, the author’s identity stood out like the sun. Each visit by a star graduate turned the workshop into a version of Bede’s banquet hall, but instead of a sparrow flying in one end and out the other, the visiting poet, hatched here like us, circled above our heads, shielded in flight by a bevy of faculty friends.

  The audience was thin; the party packed. Ridge and I brought quart bottles of Pickett’s of Dubuque. Wendy placed a Van Morrison record on the turntable and bowls of popcorn around the living room. I was happy to be with friends after a reading, so unlike my solitary forays around the village and to Saint Mark’s where I once saw my favorite poet John Ashbery read and had no one to discuss it with afterward. Ashbery’s clean-shaven face shone among the stubbled and long-haired. He wore a houndstooth jacket with a tie and moved through the crowd surrounded by a few well-dressed friends who formed an elegant uptown aura around him. Ashbery’s arrival was like the coming of an ambassador from a wealthier nation, revered for his sympathy to upstart colonies. He took the lectern and said he’d be reading only one poem. The church went silent. He said it was a long one. He added that he had forgotten to bring the last page. After a pause, he said it didn’t make any difference. Everyone laughed. We loved the man who dismissed the linear narrative. The next morning, I sat in my b
edroom paging through Some Trees. I was bursting to share his poems with someone, with anyone, so I approached my mother who was washing the breakfast dishes. While she soaped an eggy plate, I read her the ending of “Le Livre Est Sur La Table”:

  Are there

  Collisions, communications on the shore

  Or did all secrets vanish when

  The woman left? Is the bird mentioned

  In the waves’ minutes, or did the land advance?

  Without turning from the sink, my mother placed a saucer onto the wire drainer, lifted a cup from the sudsy water and said, “The land advanced.”

  Lawson leaned against the refrigerator door, speaking softly with Coulette. Pryor stared up at the taller men and asked what they thought about pseudonyms. Coulette looked over Pryor’s head and out the window, saying to Lawson, “Things have changed. What’s the defunct restaurant chain you miss the most?”

  Barkhausen charged into the kitchen imitating the strumming of a guitar player in the living room. He told Coulette how much he admired his poems, especially “The Telephone Club,” about a bar with a phone on each table. He mentioned the line, “The blonde has all our numbers.” The poet was pleased and so was Lawson, who pointed at Ridge and me and asked if we were at the reading. We said we were. Feeling defensive, I said, “I liked the lines about the friend ‘who turned to games/and made a game of boredom.’ ” Lawson looked stricken and I realized the poem was about him. Ridge rescued me by asking Coulette what poem influenced him the most. Lawson was still staring at me as Barkhausen interrupted, “Easy for me. ‘Give Me a Hoax by the Side of the Road.’ ” Coulette burst into laughter and held out his hand.