Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  But I’d gotten my ticket. That was it.

  Adios, compañeros de mi vida.

  I’d met not only Borges but every other major Argentinian writer around. I’d go to a play by Mario Satz and like it, write a note to Satz, give it to an usher (it was opening night, after all), and Satz would come out with the usher at the end of the play, invite me over to his place where he was having a little party to celebrate the play’s opening.

  It was that way with everyone.

  Carlos Gardel had me over one night and instead of talking about his novels, he played tango records for three hours, gave me a whole history of the tango from A to Z.

  I got to know poet Edgardo Antonio Vigo, the great visual-poetry artist, and as I sit here writing these words more than thirty years later, his work surrounds me, all over the walls around me. I published him in my magazine Ghost Dance, and he invited me to the most magnificent barbecue I’ve ever been to in La Plata, where he lived, just up the river from Buenos Aires.

  It was a difficult world to leave, Buenos Aires, but left it I did: wife, kids, a world of great authors and even greater parrilladas/barbecues. Adios, compañeros de mi vida. (Farewell, companions of my life.) Back to East Lansing.

  Nona had rented a tiny little apartment on Grove Street. One of those places with a granite rock overlay exterior. You know the kind where it looks like the boulders are going to fall on top of you and crush you to death.

  First floor. And on top of us a librarian from the Hannah Middle School who got up every hour all night long, took a piss and flushed, the pipes in the wall right next to our bed. Very heavy-footed, too.

  And the next day, instead of getting up and going to work, Nona got up, made me coffee and toast with loads of butter and strawberry jam on it, and announced “Well, I quit my job with Bergman. We simply didn’t get along.”

  “So what are we going to live on? It’ll be four months before I get my first check. I’m on leave. Remember?”

  “Well, we’ll just have to scrimp, that’s all . . .”

  “Scrimp means there’s something to scrimp with—we’ve got nothing. I can’t very well go out and get a job bricklaying or digging ditches or working in some restaurant. You know, professor and all that. Besides I’m supposed to still be in Buenos Aires, want to keep a low profile, you know . . .”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t you get some other job, secretary or something? And don’t say anything about not wanting to support my brats. It’s just us this time, no brats involved.”

  “I don’t know, I’m working for my Ph.D. now . . .”

  I just happened to have some $5,500 saved up over the years. Mr. Scrimper. Years of living on nothing more than cabbage, sauerkraut, red peppers, potatoes, hamburger, apples, oranges, milk, cottage cheese, bread, peanut butter—the cheapest stuff in the store—never buying anything for full price, like my grandmother, a super-specialist in the ultimate, last-chance bargain . . .

  So I went to the bank, took everything out but a couple of hundred, sent half to Mimi, and we lived on the rest for the summer until I got my first check in the fall.

  Mimi, instead of staying in Buenos Aires, almost immediately went to California and moved in with my parents in Sun City, full of stories about me. So I started getting hate-letters from my mother and father practically every day.

  Very predictable. Nona was a whore, I was a fool: licentious, no control, no sense. And what about the children? What about the children?

  When we’d been in Caracas I’d met a painter named Fantuzzi who had painted the classic portrait of Pope Pius XII which you’ve seen around everywhere. And he’d painted a portrait of Mimi, me, and the three kids based on photos he took. I’d given it to my parents.

  Now Mimi wrote me somewhat triumphantly:

  “Yesterday your father grabbed the picture of you, me, and the kids and took it down off the wall, cut it out of the frame, and todo furioso crumpled it all up and threw it into the garage. I just keep thinking that I wished it was you instead of your portrait . . . pretty boy not so pretty anymore . . .”

  Was it worth it, this leaving Mimi?

  Well, there was plenty of sex, but more than once we fought about something trivial and Nona would call her sister, Martha, have her send money and she would get on a train and take off for Kansas City.

  Trivial stuff.

  She got pregnant; I started divorce proceedings with Mimi, and found a lawyer who let me postpone paying until I got my first check in the fall. Made a couple of little loans over at the MSU Credit Union.

  We got by, don’t ask me how, but we got by.

  And by Christmas we were married and had even managed to get a down payment for a big white Victorian house on Grand River.

  Margaret, our firstborn, appeared in April, and I hate to admit it but I was happy. Named after Nona’s mother in Kansas City.

  She was a beautiful little thing.

  Was.

  Is.

  Almost thirty years later, now a professor at Harvard, married to a Frenchman who teaches French at MIT.

  Next came another little beauty: Alexandra.

  Named after my pal Alexandra Garrett, the big wig at Beyond Baroque out in Venice, California.

  Nona had asked me, “Among your friends who do you think of as the most fulfilled, happiest, best woman you know?”

  Not a moment’s hesitation.

  “Alexandra Garrett.”

  Beautiful little brick Cape Cod cottage in Santa Monica. Always so, so positive with me. I remember her one time, years after I’d left California, coming back to Beyond Baroque and she was in a meeting of some kind, so I just left a message, went back out to my (rented) car, and she came running out after me.

  “Hugh, Hugh, Hugh: how could you possibly have thought of leaving without seeing me?”

  So baby girl number two became Alexandra.

  Nona and I bought various houses in East Lansing. The one on the big street (Grand River) was too dangerous, she thought, now that we had two little babies. This big collie we had (who we’d gotten at the pound, one of the dogs that was going to be exterminated because it was a stray), Buffy, had gotten pregnant, had three puppies, and then strayed out on the street and gotten hit by a car, died that night, the local vet unable to save her.

  So we moved to Okemos. A nice house in a snazzy neighborhood. But spring came and the basement turned into a swimming pool, so that was the end of that.

  Finally found a place on Forest Street, the highest hill in East Lansing, a house built in 1904, just the right degree of antiqueishness. And we stayed there for almost thirty years.

  I was happy. The old house on top of the hill, the big wooden staircase, all the oak moulding, chandelier in the dining room. We got antique furniture. The girls went to the local school in East Lansing. Glen Cairn.

  It was funny. One day I was talking to Florence Rudman, Alexandra’s kindergarten teacher, and she told me she was from Chicago.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “I even had a teacher named Fox. Elsie Fox. High school. Wendell Phillips High School.”

  “My Aunt Elsie! My father’s youngest sister.”

  “What a coincidence. If you’d set out to search for your aunt’s former students you probably never would have found any!”

  Loved the house. Loved Michigan State, the wooded landscape artist’s dream. Loved the town. My students. Neighbors mostly old, old people who rented out a room here and there to students.

  Nona and I would go down to Kansas City for Christmas, Easter, for a while during the summers. Her parents lived in another big old Victorian house on 4500 Adams, just a stone’s throw from the center-center of Kansas City, the Plaza.

  Her father, Ed (“Big Ed”), worked for the railroad. Night job. Big gruff, rough, heavy guy. Big football, basketball, golf, tennis, baseball fan. Smoked Marlboros full-time, saved the coupons and cashed them in for all kinds of nonsense prizes.

  Her mother, Marg
aret, was a microbiologist technician in some lab. White hair all permed into cute curls all over her head. Originally from Texas. The soul of hospitality.

  We’d go down on the train, they’d meet us at the station.

  “Well, hello, hello, hello . . .”

  All kinds of hugs and warmth.

  Nona had two sisters, Martha and Jean. Martha, a librarian at Rockhurst College (now University); Jean, a pusher working her way up at Penny’s.

  Brother Bill was a psychologist. Tall, bearded, a total nerd. Married to a cute little piece named Darlene. One son: Douglas.

  Nona’s mother’s mother ("Manny") lived with them in the house on Adams. And so did the mother’s mother’s sister, Nona’s great aunt.

  So you had these two ancient ladies puttering around in the kitchen making mashed potatoes from scratch. Meatloaf that tasted like the real thing. Fresh bread that, of course, they’d made from scratch. Tomatoes and green beans and apple pie covered with ice cream, loads of coffee, beer and wine on major occasions.

  Ed, Nona’s father, always a little “rough” with me, the same way he was with everyone else.

  But one night, when we were alone in the living room (boxing on the TV), during a commercial, sound turned down, he told me, “I want you to know something, Hugh. I think you’re a terrific guy and I like you a lot. I’ve got to put on this ‘act’ in front of everyone. You know, Mr. Macho and all that crap. But I think you’re doing a great job with Nona and the kids.”

  We’d spend endless hours in the Plaza, in the malls, in the parks, down by the river at the city market, going to movies, a piece of pizza, some falafel down in this middle-eastern place in Westport, so called because it was the last “port” in civilized territory for the pony-express as it went west into the then-wilderness.

  Was I happy?

  I was home . . . this was life as it should be lived.

  And I’d somehow always fit in a New York visit or San Francisco visit, a little trip to Boston into my trips to Kansas. What the hell, San Francisco wasn’t that far away from Kansas, was it?

  I was on the Board of Directors of COSMEP full-time. There was some kind of rule that you had to get off the board every fifth year or something like that. But otherwise full-time.

  One time even made it as Chairman of the Board.

  We’d have a spring board meeting in April every year in San Francisco, stay at the Pacific Heights Bed and Breakfast, this fanciest of fancy bed and breakfast places up on the hills facing the Pacific.

  Then in the summer we’d have annual COSMEP conventions, east coast, then west coast, then middle-west, north, south, from New York to Los Angeles to St. Paul-Minneapolis to New Orleans, Chicago, you name it.

  When I’d go to New York three or four times a year it was always a homecoming. Harry Smith was some kind of literary mafioso. That’s the way his whole personality worked. It was the Smith Gang; don’t mess with us.

  I had my little place in the basement, would work with him on his mag, which he’d changed from The Smith to Pulpsmith. Also on his Newsletter on the State of the Culture and a periodical he used to produce called Newsart: The New York Smith.

  Let me just pick up an old Newsart here at random. Volume I, Number 4, October 15, 1977. Start browsing through it.

  Page 32. An article called “Bet on Ungaretti’s Traditional Spaghetti” by yours truly, Hugh Fox. It’s a review of Cesare Pavese’s Hard Labor (poems), but somehow manages to sound like an overview of twentieth century Italian poetry.

  Browse a little more. Page 50. A review of a book of poetry by John Oliver Simon’s wife, Alta: I am Not a Practicing Angel.

  Alta writes from inside the Seventh Circle, standing

  on the Seventh Rung of the Seventh Ladder

  on the Seventh Level on the Seventh Day

  just as the Seventh Seal is being unlocked

  on the Book of Revelation.

  She's a great

  Buddha . . .

  Hmmmmmmmm!

  And just below my review is a “rebuttal” by Alka Butazolidan: “Alta Has No Pull with this Bull: Rebuttal.”

  Alka Butzazolidan was some the name of some kind of medicine that Harry Smith was taking. It’s him; making fun of me.

  It was all great fun, reading the books, writing the reviews, having him make fun of them.

  In the evenings we’d go to plays, to poetry readings, parties, or just stay home, Harry, Marion, the three kids, after our usual dinner of corned beef sandwiches over at Junior’s Delicatessen in Brooklyn.

  I became pals with Stanley Nelson, Dick Higgins, Richard Kostelanetz, Richard Nason, the whole Smith “gang,” the best of the outsider-underground writers in New York.

  And usually when I went to New York I’d get up to Boston and stay with Jerry Dombrowski in his old Victorian mansion in Somerville.

  I’d written a book about Bukowski and Jerry published it in 1969: Abyss Publications. In 1970 Whitston Press published The Living Underground: A Critical Overview, a kind of overview of everything I'd learned since the first big COSMEP get-together in 1968.

  At the COSMEP conventions I'd meet all the editors of all the underground mags, became friends with Duane Locke down at the University of Tampa, who also just happened to be editor of The Tampa Review. My poems began to come out there all the time. (In fact where didn't my poetry begin to come out?) The Galley Sail Review, Quixote, Black Sun, Poet and Critic, Expression, the Western Humanities Review, Ann Arbor Review, Ante, Voices International, Wisconsin Review, Maguey, Folio, The Goodly Company, Prairie Schooner, Nola Express, the New Orleans Review, Vagabond . . . basta! genug! enough!

  I became a good pal of wildman poet John Bennett out in Ellensburg, Washington and when he did his Vagabond Anthology (1966-1977), of course I was there.

  I became pals with Curt Johnson in Highland Park, a northern suburb of Chicago, and his wife just happened to be a Betty Fox. I'd visit them in Chicago whenever I got the chance and in 1978 he published two-novels-in-one-volume, Honeymoon/Mom. Honeymoon, of course, is about my honeymoon with Lucia at Lake Delevan, and Mom is a portrait of my mother. Writing about Lucia and my mother was a form of exorcism. Write about them, get them out of your nervous system, mind, sub-mind/sub-conscious.

  I met novelist-poet-jazz pianist Bob Fox at a COSMEP conference, and in 1981 he published Leviathan: An Indian Ocean Whale Herd Journal, my Moby Dick. Carpenter Press. Pomeroy, Ohio.

  Articles about me began to appear in the Michigan State University newspaper, and I became a kind of local celebrity.

  Paul Ferlazzo, a pal and colleague in the Department of American Thought and Language at MSU, worked with me in putting out Ghost Dance, my little poetry mag (as did Nona when she was still Nona Werner), and a photo of the three of us appeared in the Michigan State News, April 4, 1972, an article by Robert Smith about my graphic/concrete poetry appeared the July 28th, 1970 issue of the Michigan State News: "Graphic poetry: Prof works in new genre." Another article appeared in the MSU News-Bulletin ("Tapping a 'fountainhead' of prose and poetry") on May 18, 1972, again with a photo.

  I became friends with English professor-poet Bud (Albert) Drake and his poet-wife Barbara and he started having parties practically every week with all the literati in town. Jim Tipton would always be there, Diane Wakoski, Arthur Athanason, Sherri and Dick (F. Richard) Thomas.

  Archives bookstore started having series of poetry readings every couple of weeks and Leonora Smith, another poet in my department, would always have little parties over at her place after the readings, this big old Victorian mansion on the edge of the woods.

  She and I became close, close, close.

  Sometimes I'd go to Drake's place as Connie Fox, black wig and black lace. It was fun for everyone. MSU was the ultimate liberal campus after all, and when I began to get published as Connie, I'd submit two bibliographies every year (for a little extra raise; the more you published, the more money you got), one for Hugh, and another for Connie.

  It
was fun being a kind of mini-celebrity on campus.

  Nona and I would usually have lunch over at the student union, got to be close friends with Keith Williams, head of the Alumni Association, and his wife, Marcie.

  Funny guy. Black. From Trinidad. But one of his grandfathers was an English sailor, and he tracked him down, went over to England and met him; the old man wouldn't let him go, kept him with him for a month.

  We lived just down the street from Judy Greenburg, the ex-wife of Herb Greenberg in the English department, and I'd go over there all the time. Just little visits here and there.

  She'd always make coffee, find some cookies somewhere.

  It was totally San Francisco-ish right here in East Lansing. The Hippy Mystique of Love Thy Brothers and Sisters, it's all one big Love-Game became the norm.

  Imagine my life: four or five visits to New York (and Kansas City) every year, meeting everyone who was “in,” getting paid to work on The Smith, Pulpsmith, Newsart.

  I mean Harry would hand me twenty books.

  "Try to review these today."

  "Twenty books in one day?"

  "Well, if you can't . . ." starting to take them away.

  "I can."

  And I would review them, turn up the brain-juice, skim, penetrate, let my voices tell me what to write.

  I'd get a nice big check just before Christmas, just before I left for Kansas City, and I'd go down to all these job-lot places and buy wild things, stuff that had cost a fortune, now down to almost pennies.

  Like Helena Rubenstein would make a big mistake with some perfume, make a bottle-portrait of Sancho Panza (Sancho Big Belly), you know, the fat stooge of Don Quixote, and no one would buy it. No svelte, rigorously dieting beauty, that's for sure. But great perfume.

  They'd be practically giving it away. So Martha, Nona's sister, would get a bottle, maybe one for my daughter, Alexandra.

  Some green pantyhose that no one had bought.