A Moveable Famine

by John Skoyles

  “What about your father, Ridge?” Monique asked, but he just stared at the table and shook his head.

  “His father drank himself to death,” I whispered.

  “Don’t be so efféminé, Ridge,” she said. “Whose father hasn’t?” She laughed and lifted her glass. Then she looked at me and said, “My father wrote the slogan, With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good. Did you know that, John?”

  We left for a poetry reading by fellow workshop students. McPeak nudged me as I slipped out of the booth, nodding at Monique and making a big frown. As we passed Epstein’s, a sign announced that the actualists would be writing poems of “beastly English,” using nouns that had become verbs like “crow and “sponge.” Outside the room for the reading, Monique flirted with Falcon Namiki whose retro Carnaby Street dress caused McPeak to dub him an outlandish pansy. I told Monique I was going to sit with my friends and she was fine with that as I could tell she was ready for a night of karate/writing.

  The first reader was a brooding solitary farm boy whose mystifying work entranced us all. He read only a few poems and ended with “Darkness Begins with the Dark,” the last two lines of which were:

  wavering like a moist nun,

  like a sad placenta.

  Ridge said he admired the double simile. The featured poet, an overweight woman with a following of overweight women, read a poem called “Twenty Lovers”: twenty sections which described in detail twenty rotten sexual encounters with twenty rotten men. Her audience knew the poem, and cheered favorite passages. She got the biggest hand when she reached Number Twelve, a oneliner she recited in a smashing tone:

  You miserable little bastard!

  McPeak started dating Taryn, a stripper who worked at The Dugout. He begged us to go with him to see her, and finally one night Pryor, Ridge and I agreed. We met McPeak on the ground floor of EPB, where the university hospital was conducting a blood drive, cots and tables of cookies and punch filling the lobby. Ridge began speaking intimately to one of the nurses and a moment later told us to go without him. Barkhausen got off the elevator and joined us. McPeak swung by Black’s Gaslight Village so Barkhausen could change his clothes. McPeak knew the complex, which had been crazily rigged together by Mr. Black, an eccentric who retrieved his morning paper from his front yard in the nude and who spoke in a falsetto when he spoke to women. On the drive over, McPeak said he had gone out with a girl who lived in the Chinese room which Black had furnished entirely in bamboo and silk and which contained an indoor waterfall pouring from a huge tea pot. Barkhausen’s place was on the second floor, which you could get to by stairs, or climbing a tree in the lobby that leaned toward a balcony. Artie put on a starched white shirt and jeans with pressed creases. He pomaded his hair with Yardley’s Brilliantine, its lavender scent causing Pryor to sneeze repeatedly.

  The Dugout had a bar on each side of the room and a round stage in the middle. Taryn waved to McPeak, and we joined her at a table. I was surprised to learn she was an undergraduate English major. Her freckles and dyed hair matched her orange blouse. Drunken men in T-shirts hollered at a woman in a bikini who danced to “Teach Me Tiger,” deftly manipulating her theatre in the round, blowing kisses and whispering to those in front. Taryn told us it was a night of novelty acts and praised her friend’s charms as the girl flung her bra to the crowd. Arms flailed for it, and the winner pressed it to his nose. Barkhausen beamed at an Asian woman in a top hat and green velvet three-piece suit who contorted herself across a green velvet couch. Her last number was accompanied by the theme from Exodus. At the final crescendo, the dancer, naked except for pasties and a G-string, tipped her hat, and long, straight, beautiful black hair fell down the length of her back and almost to the floor.

  When Taryn appeared, we were amazed. She had painted more freckles onto her cheeks, large ones, and had braided her orange hair into pigtails. She wore a white bonnet and a white dress, a dress for a lawn party, and twirled around the stage to “Chicago,” her many petticoats lifting, revealing her thighs, hinting at the flesh above, and then lowering the whirling white slips which spun like discs, higher then lower, until for the last five seconds, she spun very fast, raising the petticoats and revealing her perfect buttocks and ruby G-string.

  Two businessmen took the table next to us with two women. One said to the other about his date, “Don’t ever come to my room again with a piece of shit like this.”

  “Come on,” his friend said. “She’s not so bad.”

  Barkhausen turned to them and said, “You watch out how you talk about the lady!” With his youthful face and ironed clothes, Barkhausen hardly seemed imposing, but he spoke so fiercely the men shut up. A few moments later, one of them rested his shoe on the table, in the middle of his party’s drinks.

  “The floor’s for your feet, so keep them there!” Barkhausen yelled, and the man sheepishly removed his loafer.

  I told Artie he should just enjoy the show, but he said he couldn’t stand a lack of manners. When he went to the men’s room, Pryor asked me, “What’s with him?”

  I said I had no idea.

  “I kind of admire him,” Pryor said, shrugging.

  Taryn returned to our table. McPeak praised her grace and imagination as he petted away the freckles on her face with a napkin dipped in beer.

  Pryor told everyone about Barkhausen and, in his telling and retelling, Artie became known as a great defender of female honor. Pryor visited Harvey and Lawson in their offices, spreading Barkhausen’s fame, a little rubbing off on him by association.

  Black Tuesday, the day of financial aid decisions, was approaching. The RAs might become TAs, and the TAs, TWFs. Those like me hoped for anything. The stipends were small, but each appointment came with in-state tuition, worth thousands of dollars. I had received mild praise from teachers and had stopped straining for surreal effects. Ridge said that one of the graduating TWFs had insisted to Harvey that I had shed my New York School influences and should be recognized. At The Deadwood one afternoon, Pryor said that he had gone to both Harvey and Lawson to make a case for me, bringing a copy of my poem, “Blue,” which was a list of blue things. Pryor said Lawson liked it and called it “an exercise in syntax,” which was news to me. Barkhausen joined the table and said his stomach was upset and asked Brandy for “a cup of teat.” Ridge squinted at me, but we really couldn’t be sure if we heard right. I glanced over at laughter coming from the two women at a table across from us, both pregnant, and each with a cup of tea. This made me wonder further about Barkhausen. He seemed to absorb things around him, and spit them out in a cockeyed way.

  “I might go see Lawson myself about giving you aid,” Barkhausen said.

  Ridge said, “Soon, the guy mopping the floor around Lawson’s desk will be whispering over Mitch’s shoulder about you.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” I said.

  “Just wait,” Ridge said. “You might get something.”

  The next morning I couldn’t open my left eye. I went to the drug store and the pharmacist said I had either “reader’s eye” or “drinker’s eye” and gave me a bottle of artificial tears. I worried about my vision because my health care had always been poor. My family doctor worked out of his house with no staff, opening his wallet to make change. When forms had to be completed for admission to Fairfield, he signed the papers, saying, “If anyone asks if I gave you these shots, tell them I did.” My tonsils were removed in his office without anesthesia while I was sitting on my hands to keep me from knocking the scalpel away. The optometrist said my eyesight was twenty-twenty. After college, I was drafted, and an army doctor told me I was nearly blind in my left eye. Now I had only myself to blame, for drinking and reading, reading and drinking.

  Pryor’s marriage was failing and McPeak broke up with Taryn, saying that having sex with her was like playing Chutes and Ladders. He dated an almost catatonic girl from the northwest, and another who hid her voluptuous body under heavy woolen ponchos before he found Maud Deering, a Boston debutan
te who mocked his Chevy Nova when he offered her a ride after class. He cashed his high school teachers’ pension to buy an MG he garaged in Iowa City, then raced along the Coralville strip with Maud’s scarf snapping in the wind. Meanwhile, Wendy flirted with everyone, and Pryor escorted his drunken wife from party to party, leaving a wake of torn paper.

  Ridge was studying for his doctoral exam, and sat in an armchair surrounded by books, broken toothpicks and stained coffee cups. One evening I visited him after he had read Middlemarch in a day. He couldn’t remember the main character’s name.

  “I’ve reached a point of diminishing returns,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.” We left for Hamburg Inn No. 3.

  Pryor sat at a table by himself, inviting us over, his red eyes showing another fight with Wendy. Our banter couldn’t shake the sadness from his face. We all ordered the meatloaf special. While we waited, a shadowy ectomorph appeared at the open door, hesitant, stepping in and stepping out, as if the floor were a burning pan. Shielding his eyes, though it was not bright, he charged inside.

  “Mitch!” Pryor called.

  Ridge asked, “What is Lawson doing at Hamburg Inn No. 3?”

  Lawson, dressed in a silver houndstooth coat with epaulets and a belt around the back, approached our table, all smiles for a change. He asked if he could join us, saying his wife was out of town visiting her mother. Pryor told him about the special and he ordered it, asking the waitress to pour the gravy on top of his fries. The three of us locked eyes at this first instance of inelegance. He looked around in wonder, as uncomfortable with the Inn as it was with him, as we were with him, as he seemed with us, and with his life, a night in an uncomfortable inn, Hamburg Inn No. 3.

  Ridge got him on the subject of his hobby, gambling. He told us of a board game, “Win, Place & Show,” which he called the greatest game ever. He said that when Mark Strand visited, it stayed on his dining room table for days. We all wanted a good marriage, a longtime poet-friend, a dining room table, and a leisurely pastime. We ate quickly, hungrily, while Lawson fiddled with his plate, handling his fork like a pen. He lined the canned peas into rows, mashing some of them with a loud tick. When he had taken a few bites of the meatloaf and eaten most of the sopped fries, he looked at his watch, said goodbye and settled with the cashier.

  As soon as he left, Pryor pointed to his plate. “Did you see that? He smashed one out of three peas!”

  Ridge and I looked at the row of dots.

  “He did!” Pryor pulled Lawson’s plate toward him. “He crushed every third pea. Two unstressed, one stressed. Dactyls!”

  When we asked for the check, we found Lawson had paid.

  Dan Cook parked in front of the restaurant and came toward us, head down, the leather heels of his black boots clicking. He lifted his chin from his ascot and took Ridge aside, his arm circling the shoulder of Ridge’s peacoat, which was dappled with cat hair. Ridge turned to us, said that they were going to meet a couple of girls, and they drove off.

  So we spent our days, literally scanning the plate of our teacher in Hamburg Inn No. 3, seeing the world madly in stresses and unstresses.

  On Black Tuesday, Ridge came to my door to tell me I was again passed over.

  “I hate to tell you, but they gave Barkhausen a TA.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “They think he’s original.”

  “He is that,” I said.

  “I tried to point out that his stuff is word salad, but Harvey and Lawson really like it.”

  “Did you see that new poem of his, where he puts a ‘chug of wine’ on the table?” I said.

  “I know,” Ridge said. “And there was one in the manuscript about fucking a woman outside a strip club, in the ‘porking lot.’ Lawson wrote in the margin, Streetwise wordplay.”

  Ridge leaned against the doorframe and said he dropped by so I wouldn’t learn the bad news around town. I said I would meet him later that night.

  After he left, I imagined Barkhausen misusing words in his class. He had recently complimented Pryor on his rigorous writing schedule, praising his “wheel power.” I was not as good a writer as many of the others, and Barkhausen did have a rough glamour. I understood the decision and, in some ways, I was relieved to be outside this laying on of hands. I felt the latitude of enjoying that freedom, but a few hours later, I realized I could be laboring in a simple bubble of neglect.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE IDIOT SAVANT—LIKE A MAN—MOVING IN WITH KIM—McPEAK FALLS IN LOVE—A MECHANICAL CANARY—RUDDY JOHN CHEEVER—RAYMOND CARVER IS MISSING

  Unlike most of his explosive Iowa City romances, McPeak’s affair with the feminist Stavrula Pallas seemed like it might endure. He had broken up with Maud Deering and sold his sports car. He said that having sex with her was like building a geodesic dome. Stavrula was his age, thirty, with a faculty appointment in both sociology and art. She was a conceptual artist who wrote about the reception of her work among various social classes. They met when he parked at EPB and noticed a party in the adjacent field among haystacks and bundles of corn. He got in line for a cup of hot cider, which he intended to spike with his flask. Stavrula approached him, thinking he was a new, older student, possibly lost. When he told her he was a poet, she was charmed, and inquired about his interest in sociology. He quoted Auden, “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians, nor commit a social science.” She saw his trip from the parking lot as a social act, an opinion solidified by his supplementing her own glass of cider with a splash of bourbon.

  We went from watching Taryn dance to hearing Stavrula lecture. McPeak basked in her cutting-edge conceptualism the night she gave a talk describing how the patrons of the Detroit Institute of Arts appreciated her piece where she sat in a booth and invited confessions. As I was leaving the auditorium, a tall blonde nudged me, saying, “When was the last time you went to confession?” I recognized Kim Costigan who had made that sharp comeback to loudmouth Trotta at the Coulette party, and who had dated almost everyone in the workshop, both poetry and fiction. She wore a short skirt and her large breasts pushed against her blouse.

  “Admit it,” she said, smiling. “You were staring at me!”

  I confessed. I passed the time of Stavrula’s talk watching Kim cross and uncross her legs. Here I was in Iowa, the hotbed of hotbeds and still a paralyzed voyeur, like Dickie, the janitor’s helper at Fairfield, an idiot savant who swabbed the cafeteria floor and could name the day you were born if you told him the date. Whenever a woman entered, Dickie pushed his broom in her direction. One night I sat with my favorite teacher, the Joyce scholar Lou Berrone, and Nina, his teenage daughter, in the campus snack bar, and Dickie swept his way toward us. Lou gave him her date of birth.

  “June 9, 1953,” Lou said again and again, but Dickie just stared, fixed on Nina’s thighs as he pressed the broom. “Dickie!” Lou said.

  Dickie’s eyes focused on the nylon stockings, the bristles moving closer and closer until he touched Nina’s toe.

  “What day was she born?” I asked, but he continued to push, a little white spittle at the edge of his mouth.

  “Daddy!” Nina whispered, covering the side of her reddening face with her hand. Lou took Dickie by the arm, escorting him to an empty table by the window where Dickie returned to his routine.

  Berrone said, “It’s my fault. I didn’t realize he’d get like that. And maybe I somehow forgot that he’s a man.” I could have stared at Nina all day myself. Being marooned on a few acres with only men had turned us all slightly mad. The insistent broom, the helpless, ignited eyes of the idiot savant losing his slender hold on the world, and Berrone’s apologetic words, brought back phrases from my reading:

  He is a man, therefore nothing human is alien to him

  Take it like a man

  As a man, therefore he came to all these sufferings

  A Man’s a Man for all that

  Lou might have forgotten that Dickie was a man, but I never doubted it, or that I was a man, or Lo
u—but I didn’t know it could mean to become hypnotized, to forget everything, to repeat yourself fruitlessly in the face of beauty. And now that beauty was nudging me as we walked out of a lecture hall.

  Ridge had told me that Kim had recently won a hundred dollars at The Dugout’s Amateur Striptease Night.

  “Congratulations on the prize,” I said.

  “I knew I’d win if I just flashed my beaver at the jukebox a few times,” she said.

  “Want to get a beer?”

  Two weeks later, we decided to move in together, and interviewed for an apartment over a garage owned by an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Alva Yoder. Pretending we were married, we sat in their living room with Mr. Yoder in his honest overalls, and Mrs. Yoder, who sewed a quilt draped across her lap. As I looked at Kim, wearing her shortest skirt yet, I felt less married by the minute. After half an hour of conversation, homemade donuts and buttermilk, they let us have the apartment. Mrs. Yoder said a lot of students had been interested, but she preferred a man and wife.

  Mr. Yoder handed me the keys and said, “We’ve been married fifty years. I still remember the day. It was raining. They say that when it rains on your wedding day, you’ll have good luck. And we had good luck.” He paused for a moment and added, “And we had bad luck too.”

  Kim and I were happy in our little place. Our desks in front of a picture window overlooked the gravel driveway. Because I kept a photo of Neruda’s studio on the Pacific taped to the wall, Ridge started calling me, “the poor man’s Neruda,” and confirmed the wisdom of my move with Kim. “You got the best deal in town,” he said, letting me know he had gone out with her too. To pay the higher rent and the upkeep of Kim’s aged car, I took a job as lunchtime supervisor at Iowa City High School, patrolling the halls with the retired county sheriff who wore a greasy double-breasted blue raincoat. We pushed our way through the crowd, stopping kids from hurling clots of wet toilet paper or aiming jelly donuts at each other. I cornered a boy who rode a unicycle down the main hall, but he simply spun around me and zipped to the other end, as I plodded behind him amid laughter. Lacking all authority, I realized it was probably best I was not given charge of a freshman class.