by John Skoyles
“Not me. I’m not wild about meeting poets,” Post-Elliot said. “They have a bad effect on me. Stanley Kunitz, for instance,” he said. “Do you know that whenever he’s around, something bad happens?”
“Really?”
“I could feel it the minute I spotted him at your table.” He pointed to his eye. “Two summers ago, I saw him looking in the window of the bookstore, and just then a madman on roller skates jabbed my neck with a knife!” He showed the scar.
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Just zipped through the crowd and kept going. I walked to the Drop-In Center with blood running to my shoulder. I’m not crazy about being around poets, like I said.” Then he looked at me.
“Well-known ones, I mean.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OLD MR. BOSTON AND HAFFENREFFER PRIVATE STOCK—PARALYZED—IRON MAN—EDDIE BONETTI AND JACKIE O—DEAN MARTIN—AN UNMAILED LETTER
Kurt had invited the fellows to stop by anytime, so the next morning I walked west to his place on Cottage Street. The entrance was through the garden, and I stepped over enormous zucchinis, tripping on the tangled vines. His wife Penny, a former visual arts fellow, sculpted in papier-mâché. I had to squeeze between a six-foot crucifix holding a dying German shepherd, the words above it saying, The Last Dog to Shit on My Lawn, and an equally tall lady lobster, claws raised like castanets, nipples adorned with clamshell pasties. They had just returned from the liquor store. Penny held a bottle of burgundy and Kurt a six-pack of Haffenreffer Private Stock, a malt liquor. That, and a pint of Old Mr. Boston gin would float him into the evening. Penny’s friend, Carole, knocked at the door, and she, too, carried wine. The women began drinking at the kitchen table among shredded newspapers and a gallon of wallpaper paste. A gray cockatiel whistled in a cage, and Penny poured birdseed from a huge bag into a small feed dish and it splashed across the floor. She opened the cage and dropped the bird to the linoleum, trusting he would devour the mess.
Bookcases surrounded Kurt’s desk, a door propped on saw horses. I joined him in a glass of Private Stock, which he served in a mug smudged with fingerprints. He wore a heavy sweater with moth-eaten holes on the sleeves, and wide-wale corduroy pants thin at the knees. An old phonograph played scratchy Mozart. A big dog snoozed on the rug, its square head on Kurt’s boot. When it rolled over, I saw a stomach of scabs and scales. Kurt called it autumn eczema, and scratched the dog’s belly, causing his glasses to fall from his nose. He grabbed them from the rug and adjusted the pipe cleaners. In the next room, Penny and Carole loudly affirmed that each should drink from her own bottle of wine and not try to share, a pact made from experience.
I looked at a copy of Pound’s Personae, a former library copy stamped Discard. Every book in Kurt’s library was damaged and every book a classic. He had the best of everything in the worst condition. When I remarked on some arcane volumes, he said, “Many books are unjustly forgotten, but no book is unjustly remembered.” He was working on a first collection of poems, some of which he had published in the New Yorker, Harper’s and Poetry. He wrote every day, rising early, but expected little attention. He felt poetry had no place in shaping the world, and yet he made a world of it. When I asked him how his work was going, he said, with the happy cynicism of the creative mind, that he was already ahead of last year.
After an hour, Kurt walked me to the door and told me not to miss the upcoming brunch at Hester’s, which overlooked the bay. He complained to Penny, “That mineral oil you put in the dog’s ear got onto John’s pants.” I hadn’t noticed the stains on my knees and said it didn’t matter as I edged past a five-foot swordfish standing on its tail. Back at the Bull Ring, my ankles began to itch, and black dots on my cuff bounded toward the rope rug. The result of my first visit to a house in P’town were oil stains from a dog’s ear and a family of fleas.
I spent the next week watching the tides come and go, and leaves fall from the slender oaks outside my door. I walked through town, browsed the shops and crossed the breakwater at land’s end. The beauty of the town hypnotized me into paralysis, but there was something else. I felt I had to write significant work to justify my time there. I finally placed my typewriter on the glass table. With each clanging keystroke the machine inched away from me. I moved to the bed and filled a few pages of graph paper with gobbledygook, which made me feel I had done something. I heated a can of Campbell’s clam chowder. The label said you could use water or milk. I had to make the stipend last, so I chose water.
I tried typing a letter to Ridge, but the metallic thudding on the glass felt like banging out a bad drum solo. I wrote again by hand, describing the coast, the people, and my plans for a long poem. Each section would focus on a part of P’town: the bay, the wharf, the boats, the fishermen, the dunes, the beech forest and more. I would pattern it after Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, as he had followed the Duino Elegies. Happy with the accomplishment of defining the architecture of my poetic sequence, I left to mail the letter.
Post-Elliot urgently waved me in from the Fo’c’sle window. I approached his table, but he rose and walked to the bar, ordering me a beer. The bartender yelled, “Wait till you hear!” Post-Elliot couldn’t stop grinning as the bottle was opened.
“You know that poet you like?” the bartender asked. “The one from the beat generation? He was knocked stiff at the Governor Bradford. The bouncer tossed him out the door, and he stayed there all night, curled on the sidewalk, wearing a jester’s cap.”
“He’s clever,” Post-Elliot said. “He’s already moved in with Connie who owns the New World Deli.” I had gone there once for a sandwich, the sticky hardwood floor grabbing the soles of my shoes as I approached the register. Connie rose lethargically from a booth where she sat with friends, and said, “I can’t believe you want to order something . . .”
Post-Elliot continued talking in a dreamy way, “He’s all set, got plenty to eat, a place to stay.”
“John,” he said, as we moved to a table, “Corso is the only poet who makes me want to take up the whole poem again.” Before I could reply, he continued, “He caused a big ruckus at the Bradford, insulting women. Howlin’ Jack coldcocked him. Either him or Crobar.” I had seen Crobar and Howlin’ Jack, huge bearded fishermen, through the Bradford’s window, holding forth at its circular bar amid loud music and bustling pool tables.
“Uh oh,” Post-Elliot said. “Here comes Iron Man. What’s he carrying?”
Porter had pointed out Iron Man, banned from every bar in town, a swarthy mesomorph walking a bicycle whose handlebars sported a row of American flags. He got his name from the time he found an abandoned boat engine on the wharf and asked his longtime friends to help him load it onto his truck. When no one volunteered, he lifted the huge hunk of metal himself and threw it into the payload. His family said he was so hurt by the incident that he went to the liquor store that afternoon and kept drinking for thirty years.
The bartender was washing glasses and didn’t notice Iron Man enter holding a large wooden top painted with a map of the world. He sat down grasping the toy by a cord in his left hand and spinning it with his right. Post-Elliot told the bartender he had a customer.
“Okay, Iron Man, you’ll have to leave,” the bartender said, lifting mugs from the sink. “And take your world with you.”
On his way out, Iron Man dangled the top between our faces and said, “It’s not funny. I can send you to the cemetery.” He spun the top. “I have nothing to lose, you know.”
Post-Elliot and I watched him mount his bike. “He’s harmless,” Post-Elliot said. “Unless he drinks, that is.”
Vince Leslie and Eddie Bonetti walked in. Eddie, a short dark man with a broken nose and bowlegs, shook my hand heartily. He was a writer friend of Norman Mailer’s. He went to the bar and came back with four tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. He downed half his drink, said he had just finished a story about killing a lesbian on the beach with a shovel, and left. When I asked where he went, Vince said, “He keeps drinks
in each bar. He’s got one at the Bradford and one at the Old Colony.”
“And fights too. Last month he got in a fight at each place, ” Post-Elliot added.
“You know that big brick house in the east end? That’s Mailer’s. There’s a boxing ring in the basement,” Vince said. “Eddie was a pro. He once fought Willie Pep. Now he spars with Norman.”
A pretty woman walked past the picture window wearing a white rabbit fur jacket, tight white pants, and a red wool hat. Her skin seemed whiter than her pale clothes.
“There goes Lint,” Post-Elliot said, as I leaned forward to get a better look.
“Who’s Lint?” I asked.
Vince said, “I crowned her with that nickname last year when she came to town. You must have met her by now. Hester.”
I said I hadn’t.
“She stopped in a few times with Porter,” Post-Elliot said. “She didn’t take to the place.”
“I went to her reading last year,” Vince said. “And I never go to readings, but she’s a good looking woman, so I thought what the hell, but how can I listen to any poet after hearing Alexander Scourby read Whitman!”
“She’s a good writer,” I said.
“She didn’t care for Vince’s moniker,” Post-Elliot said.
“She’s not lint,” Vince yelled. “She’s more like virgin wool.”
“She outran the shepherd!” Post-Elliot said.
Bonetti passed the window and, as he did, he dropped lower and lower, as if walking into a hole in the street until we could see just his head and shoulders. Everyone laughed as he entered.
“Descending imaginary stairs!” Post-Elliot explained. Eddie swallowed his drink, walked to the bar, again lowering himself with each step, and returned with another round.
“Whoa, Eddie,” Vince said as he stared happily at the full glasses, their fragrance lifting toward us.
I hadn’t eaten anything. I had been reading the soup can labels and I learned that each had three grams of protein if you made it with water, and nine grams if you made it with milk. I decided to just drink a glass of milk.
“I’m feeling great!” Eddie said. He had returned from New York, where he met Jackie Onassis who was editing his book of stories, The Wine Cellar. He described her gardenia-filled office at Viking Press and how she praised his prose, telling him that a lot of writers write with their wrists, but he wrote with his whole body.
“She whispers,” Eddie said. “She never raises her voice so it’s rude to disagree. If she shouted, well, then we could have gone at it!” He made two fists and ducked a shoulder forward.
“A pug like you with a lady like that,” Vince wondered. “I heard the compound in Hyannis Port has heated towel racks.”
“And her favorite dish is unborn calf,” Post-Elliot said.
“I was on my best behavior,” Eddie said. “Though a big guy at the reception desk gave me some guff when I asked for Mrs. O. But I knew I could take him.” He stood up, pointing at his thick thighs. “The guy had spindly legs. You should have seen his face when we left for La Grenouille. By the way, Mrs. O never says hello, just smiles.” Eddie’s deeply turned-down mouth tried to imitate Jackie’s greeting, a twitch that lifted his lips slightly upward from their usual frown.
“Did you fuck her?” Vince asked.
Eddie didn’t answer. He was registering the question.
“Eddie, did you fuck her?” Vince asked again.
Eddie continued thinking and I wondered if he’d get violent but instead he turned indignant, then gallant, raising his chin in the posture of someone who had escorted the wife of a president.
“Of course not. She’s a nice woman, Vince. A nice woman.”
Hester walked past in the other direction and I was the only one who noticed. She carried a brown paper bag, a loaf of French bread sticking out of it along with the New York Times.
Vince bought a round, then Post-Elliot and then it was my turn. At the bar I crammed a bag of pretzels into my mouth. Porter walked out of the library across the street and joined us. It was getting dark and I was drunk. The jukebox played “Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me,” and a man at the bar began singing along, “If anyone should ever write my life story . . .” He was smiling, but his eyes were watery and my eyes got watery watching his. Vince said that if his life were made into a movie, Anthony Quinn would be a good choice. The sad singer at the bar continued with a keening mew, “For whatever reason there might be . . .”
Post-Elliot chose Steve McQueen. Bonetti said his life couldn’t be portrayed by an actor, but only by someone who had endured real pain. Like Rocky Graziano, the middleweight champion.
Porter was not interested in the game, so Vince said, “Ichabod Crane would play your life.” He paused. “If you had a life!”
Porter just smiled. He enjoyed the atmosphere, the company, even the insults. He was memorizing their words to record verbatim in a book of monologues called On the Cod.
Vince turned to me. My forehead felt numb, and my body paralyzed, encased in a block of ice, ice that was beginning to melt onto the ragged floorboards. When I announced the man who would play my life, I meant it with all my heart and with all my soul.
“Dean Martin.”
Vince, Eddie, and Post-Elliot all repeated the name at once. Everyone in the bar turned around and shut up. There was one second of silence before a thunderclap of laughter stormed around me and over the puddle I had become. I was smiling a dumb smile, the smile I hated in myself when I did something stupid, or found someone doing something stupid and was afraid to call it stupid. But no one was afraid to call me stupid, and amidst the horselaughs, which reached me as if I were underwater, Porter helped me from the bench.
“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.
I kept smiling, but I knew I’d made a fool of myself before the author of fourteen books and Mailer’s cohort edited by Jackie O.
Over fishwiches at The Post Office Café, I remembered the letter in my back pocket. It was wrinkled and smudged and looked like it had been mailed, received, and remailed. I put it by my plate and told Porter about my plans for the long poem. He said he was writing a short story about Isaac Babel, in the way Babel had written about Maupassant. Porter’s literary talk and the sandwich almost snapped me to my senses. He paid. He always did. And I stumbled to the Bull Ring, past the Fo’c’sle’s continuous roar, holding the letter outlining my plans.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HESTER’S BRUNCH—STATUES AND STATUETTES—COCKS AND COCKERELS—ONE POTATO—A MOUSE-LIKE DOG—DON’T BE A RAT—A NEW START FOR STAVRULA
A stairway on the side of the Flagship restaurant led to Hester’s second-floor apartment overlooking the bay. Robert Creeley sat at the kitchen table surrounded by the writing fellows. Dugan’s wife, Judy, cracked eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk. Hester came toward me wearing an apron. A tumult of hair sprung from her head, hidden the day before by her hat. Her breasts, tightly checked, rode high on her body. She wore no makeup, eyeliner or lipstick. Her pale skin made the streak of flour on her cheek seem gray.
“I’m Hester,” she drawled, offering her hand. I was so struck by her that it took me a moment to notice the Chihuahua under her arm. “Would you like a Bloody Mary or a bullshot? Heretofore, I served only beer, but Porter brought vodka. This is Pepe.” Pepe’s eyes bulged as if overinflated.
It was eleven A.M., the appointed time, but everyone was drunk except Judy and Stanley. I learned that Creeley had arrived the night before and asked to meet the fellows right away. Porter herded them to the Fo’c’sle and then to his place after the bar closed. Many left, but this group had not yet gone to bed. Hester said that she and I missed it because we didn’t live at the complex. Dugan downed a glass of vodka. Porter had told me that Dugan drank in the morning and through the day until, as he put it, “the curtain dropped,” around eight o’clock, and all communication ended.
Hester poured a Bloody Mary for me from a silver pitcher. I couldn’
t come up with anything to say to her, my pulse had raced all the way there and was still pounding. Kurt waved from a white wicker armchair where he wrote on a paper plate, printing along its circumference. Hester brought me to the table, which was cluttered with glasses and lit candles. “We’re having a conversation of interest to some. We’re naming our five favorite sea foods.” She raised her eyebrows to show it was not of interest to her.
I said hello to Ted and Gail, Jeanne and Wayne. Creeley was not wearing an eye patch. His black hair fell over his forehead like a wing. Creeley said to me, “In reverse order! You have to name your favorite sea foods in reverse order!” He stared at the table as he spoke, and tapped it with the heel of his fist, as if he had made a significant point.
Gail counted on her fingers, saying, “Scallops, squid, shrimp . . .” Dugan tallied her choices on his legal pad.
Judy interrupted from the kitchen. “Squid? Before shrimp? Are you crazy?”
“Well, I like squid . . .” Gail said shyly. “I never had it until last week.”
“Ridiculous!” Judy said, leaving the stove. “I’ll serve you some rubber bands!”
Stanley said, “At Ciro’s they do it right. Sautéed lightly, they turn it out on your plate.”
Gail looked at him thankfully. “We should try Ciro’s,” she said to Ted who closed his eyes, nodding off.
Stanley made the motion of a spoon above a dish, and said again, and with such feeling, you could see the squid being served. “They turn it out on your plate . . .”
Dugan drank from the vodka bottle at his right hand. “I’ll go for smelts, cod, oysters, clams and lobster.” He said it again as he wrote.
“Smelts first?” Ted said.
“No,” Dugan said very deliberately. “Number one: lobster! Number two: clams!”
“Dugan,” Judy yelled, “You said smelts first!”
“Okaaay,” he said, pressing down on the pen, saying, “Number one: smelts!”