Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  Also I had an unwillingness to impede the pace of the enthusiasm generated by the idea of the Wake. Sometimes within the momentum of conversation, it is better to go apace with it – the motion, the going apace with the enthusiasm, is something in itself, regardless of the efficacy of the ideas.

  I acquiesced, is what I’m trying to say. Maybe the clashing of Kerouac’s anti-formalism with Milton’s academic modes would produce an electric synthesis, I wishfully told myself.

  Milton, on the other hand, not only acquiesced, but applauded the acceptance of his proposal because he had nurtured his ailing Arts Seminar Society (which existed only as a university record) for his own personal use. But he had no ‘own personal use’ yet for it. This was one. I do not put this down with malice towards Milton, my lover, my poofter.

  ‘You must not, though,’ Milton said quickly (he ever lives in terror of catastrophic repercussion), ‘you must not, though, have alcohol or pot there at the Wake, because of the regulations.’

  Yes, yes, yes, I said, fatigued by the restriction instantly, posthumously embarrassed with Jack.

  To contemplate what would happen to Milton if he lost his job over the Jack Kerouac Wake gave me some pleasure on the side. But it would also have meant that we had to leave the Big House. If he lost his job he would have to come down town with the rest of us, no comfortable fat salary, no leisurely vacations by the sea, no official filing cabinets, no common room banter and repartee. But he would have then been able to crouch with us in the dust, on his haunched legs, along the sunwarmed street, backs against the building alignment, whistling, yarning and wise cracking about those who pass in the commerce and traffic of the urgent streets, crouched there, close enough to smell the hot asphalt (the smell of Concord), the clay dust, the sawdust of the butcher’s shop. He could have joined with us in the quiet private laughter of those who squat in the street with plenty of time.

  Here at this point I did try to stop what now seemed a reversal of what I’d first seen as ‘the gush of human spirit’. I now felt that we’d abruptly fallen from our buoyancy.

  I complained, ‘How can it be a Wake for Kerouac without grog? Hell.’

  All this explained, not that explanation is needed, the poem about the Wake called A-waking.

  A-Waking

  A-waking/jesus

  christ/the scholars (school/arses) have

  again (for gain)

  taken our prankster bus

  angster

  and made it our hearse (hear-arse)

  a T short of

  heart

  hear-us Oh Lord

  I went in Kerouac’s wheel

  tracks

  noone got busted (take the T to heart) bus

  noone got the bus

  noone got (D for T’s) god

  noone got

  But up went the notices for the Wake among the coloured felt-tipped scribbles of little campus events, a boutique of intellectual homecrafts. No place for Kerouac. Oh we put them up so dutifully around the likely spots. Embarrassed as students read them over our shoulders as we put them up. All of us agreed without heart, to read at the university for the Wake. Balmain poets by the dozen. Our cheapest day.

  Now the whole shivering mystical truth about the Wake is that noone, noone, turned up. Noone turned up at the Reading, not audience, not readers.

  Or to put it another way, if that is needed, it is suspected that one or two people may have turned up individually, found noone there and left as quickly as possible, grateful that the obligation ‘to go’ had been fulfilled and relieved that it was possible for them to flee off, riding away on the excuse that ‘noone was there’. They knew in their hearts that chrome chairs were wrong wrong wrong for Jack Kerouac.

  It hardly needs to be recorded that Milton turned up with a Riven Springback binder of manuscripts to read, and waited, knowing Milton, probably for hours. I visualised him looking at his watch, checking that it was the right room, looking at his watch, asking an attendant, making a telephone call, looking at his watch, checking the date, ringing Time to check his watch, rehearsing his introductory remarks to the empty hall. He won’t talk about it. He turns away when I question him.

  I was one of those, having been an initiator, who arrived, lead-footed. But in the very real sense I did not ‘go’ to the Wake. I saw the chairs set out by the university attendants, in rows of seven, seven rows of seven. The lights were as bright as flares. The Please Use spittoonciga rette-ash-sandtrays lined the walls at arms’ distance from each other. The movement of feet and chairs on other floors as evening students moved with tired ambition from one lecture to another, their appetite disappointed once again by end-of-day reheated pies. Somewhere along the corridor, I could, quite distinctly but without comprehension, hear a Chinese student prattling quickly, sucking on his laughter as he talked with a friend on a public telephone.

  I lie.

  Two students came ‘to the room’ but not to the Wake. They were not there for Jack.

  ‘Are you here for the Wake?’ I asked – my self standing just at the doorway, my good sense having reared up, refusing to enter the room. I smiled though, a welcome, as I pig-rooted there. They looked into the room.

  I did the welcoming, feeling as I did that I had been appointed, against my will; somehow by the atmosphere of serious intention which the room gave off, as though the room itself by its arrangements had seized me and sworn me in as its human attendant, as rooms sometimes do, and as Western sheriffs do with town drunks in times of crisis.

  ‘No,’ they said, looking around, ‘we’re not.’ And they left.

  They looked in at the room as if someone had said to them down in the quadrangle, ‘Go see how expectant Seminar Room 6 looks.’

  As though they had come up and looked into the room, noted the ‘expectancy’ and, satisfied, left.

  No one came to the Kerouac Wake.

  The not-coming, the non-attendance, was an act of communal, subconscious respect for Jack. And this was its success.

  Not one student, not one Balmain poet of the dozen, not one academic with his hands into the bags of dollars of American Studies, not one weepy ex-beatnik girl, not one lonely city nomad in search of a warm public meeting, not one New Journalist with a nose for cultural legend, not one tolerant bedel oblivious to the smell of marihuana. Bunny Stockwell Anderson was not there.

  The room stood brightly lit. Down the hall a felt board with white moveable letters said over and over to itself without readers, ‘Sem Rm 6 J Kerouac Reading Arts SeM Soc’.

  Along the corridor the Chinese student shrieked shredded Chinese laughter to his invisible conversationalist.

  I was immensely gratified by the emptiness of the spurned hall and left for the pub.

  I know Milton claims that ‘some people eventually did turn up’. But no one admits to it. I have never found anyone who intended to go or who turned up. Except Milton, who won’t talk about it.

  The Party for Kerouac at Milton’s Big House the same night was a different matter. This seems to reduce to one conflict: my being thrown out by Milton.

  Everyone was at the party. What I saw of it wasn’t bad. No one got busted, as the poem said, but the poet also seems to be saying that no one ‘got’, a reference to karma.

  Everyone was there. Weepy ex-beatnik girls, Balmain poets by the dozen, Bunny Stockwell Anderson, American academics who claimed to have met Kerouac ‘at a party’ or to have been to his place at Lowell with a tape recorder. The American Coca Cola executive, an attendant from the university who projected the films at the porno festival and was converted, the Chinese guy who’d been on the telephone down the corridor was on the telephone in Milton’s hallway talking in breathless high pitch. The two students who came allegedly to ‘look’ at Sem Rm 6 were there. George Munster was there. Richard Walsh was there.

  Milton had at first been quite friendly and then had turned on me. He accused me of changing the ‘date or time or both’ on the notices we’d put around
the place. I remembered his outburst as I was breaking the neck seal of a wine flagon. Interestingly not one of the notices could be found the next day.

  Really, I don’t have the surplus time for that sort of prank. What with meetings, parties, dances, trying to make contact again with the suburb where I was born, with Concord. My efforts to be well read. Telephoning. Seminars. Conferences. And the search for volupté.

  The Reading failed because of the vibes which said ‘antipathy’.

  Oh I know what was really getting at Milton. We had tried for a homosexual experience on a starless night earlier that week in that very house. He didn’t penetrate. He claims he did. I know damn well he didn’t. There is a sensation I know, which feels like penetration for the one doing the fucking, a pleasant lubricious feeling, but not penetration – down between the cheeks of the backside and legs, very nice, nice for the person taking it too, but not penetration.

  What more is there to be said? As anyone who has tried it will tell you, anal penetration is no matter for dispute for the one who’s taking it.

  The argument about the pronunciation and meaning of Kerouac was a blind. It’s all based on a phonetic description of the sound of Kerouac in Lonesome Road. And the argument over whether his name means ‘language of Cornwall’ and so on – all old stuff, very much Kerouac’s ego trip. I have only liked one Kerouac book. I may as well say that here and now.

  It was this tension about penetration which caused Milton to throw me out.

  He had wanted the homosexual experience to be straightforward or he wanted it not at all.

  My public flippancies about his failure to ‘get it in’ irritated him, nicked his sexual ego too. But I wanted to establish a joking, public ease about it, to carry it out of the dark medieval zone of unspoken knowledge, to liberate our experience into a light-hearted public candour. I mean, who cares these days? I wanted to make it ‘speakable’. That was what all those flippancies were about. Not to make it discussable in the Forum magazine sense, necessarily, but to make it mentionable, in the dinner party sense.

  I don’t buy that Simmel crap about ‘self invasion’ – lack of personal reserve, leading to self-destruction.

  No, it was his believing that he did in fact ‘get it in’ and that he had had a classically complete homosexual experience, and not an experience which was, while being homosexual and as sensuously complete, not in his mind complete, because it did not sufficiently resemble classic heterosexuality, with which he was quite experienced.

  Although I joked, affectionately, smilingly, sportingly, about it, about his ‘not getting it in’, he did not like it.

  Anyhow it is all in the Alter Ego Interpretation – every vaselined detail of it.

  I think the joking turned Milton away from the Gay Life and its style which he had played with while playing with me.

  It should, in conclusion, be noted that the ‘failure’ of the Reading marked the end of the Arts Seminar Society, and Milton’s aspirations regarding it, on campus.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE TIME PIECE

  From them. A watch.

  A crumpled noise, a dumbfounded syllable, masquerades as gratitude.

  You don’t give a thirty-seven-year-old poet–philosopher a wrist watch. I mean, gee …

  Strapping me back in. How many times.

  ‘You’ll need it if you’re going to get a job. You can always write poems in your spare time.’

  ‘He’ll need it anyway, even poets have to know when it’s time for lunch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’m always the suitable applicant – never the satisfactory employee. I look and sound good. But my mind is too much on the job. This may sound hard to understand but what I mean is that I think too much over and around the job. My concentration, it … well … it patrols. It doesn’t wander, it patrols. I’m always aware of the theory of the job. I devise infinite calibrations to assess my own proficiency. I’m too aware of how the job dovetails into the economy, the international monetary arrangements, the balance of trade. I see too far back and forth – when I’m loading a truck at the markets I see the Ganges, a children’s sack race, but never the bag of potatoes. Never employ me.

  Should I say that it is necessary for me to be unemployed, to leave me a distinctly uninvolved distance from the society, or something like that? They would ask me how to distinguish dozing from creative disengagement. Am I now the poetic visionary in the Omega Automatic from Geneve. What will be the social reaction to this.

  My sister thinks it is easy to do what I do. The late hours, the drinking and dancing to sunrise, the sexual licence, the special tolerance for deviation, the indulgence of idiosyncrasy.

  Journalists, on the other hand, say there is nothing – nothing – more pathetic than a bohemian in his late thirties. What will they say of the watch?

  ‘What do you do with your time?’ my sister, my probation officer sister, queried.

  ‘Cavort …’ I stammered.

  I go to meetings too. Cavort and go to meetings.

  ‘You find the time to dress well enough,’ she observed.

  ‘Yes, I care about these things.’

  ‘That’s good,’ my mother said, ‘there is a time and a place for casual dress.’

  We sit around the suburban lounge room, or lounge around the sittingroom.

  The visitor’s book – the first signature in the visitor’s book is mine. Why did I feel compelled as a little boy to sign the visitor’s book?

  A Book of Preferences – a book from the twenties, a parlour book where you answer your favourite colour, statesman, poet, quotation, flower, your wish for the future. I filled out many, as a child, feeling that somehow I could influence the direction of the world by the repetition, clamour, of my preferences.

  I still do.

  In the painting, the surf rolls in. My father thinks it is ‘very good, quite realistic’.

  ‘What is good art?’ my father asked rhetorically, ‘in my time you knew what a painting was supposed to be.’

  He was speaking to the suburb outside as much as to us. To the Roxy Picture Theatre. Apex Transport. Paragon Cafe. Rainbow Fabrics. Mediterranean Seafoods. Auto Port. Tasty Delicatessen. Supreme Meats. Boomerang Coffee Shop. Dream-line Fashions. Fastway Taxi Trucks. New Mode Dry Cleaners. Blue Ribbon Cakes. Harmony House Records. Floradora Florists. West End Real Estate. Wine Dine Nite Spot.

  Fortified by the CMF 23rd Field Regiment and 113 Anti-aircraft battery.

  My first watch lost at the old swimming baths just near the wooden plank office where you bought Season Tickets: Men and Ladies. Searched until dark. Did I lose it because I didn’t want it, even then? One boy stayed to help. Barry Dean. Why for christsake did he stay? Maybe he stole it. Maybe Barry Dean stole my first watch.

  ‘Now is the time to choose some job you’ll like and settle into it. It could be something creative.’

  Window dressing.

  Barry Dean stole my watch.

  Wallace Stevens was vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Hartford, Connecticut, and when he died members of his club said they didn’t know Wallace Stevens, the poet. It must be someone else, they said, by the same name.

  My family liked that story.

  We stretched out the laughter as long as we could and then were quiet again.

  My mother gave an unexpected sighing laugh a little later but that was all.

  ‘There was a time when you were going overseas,’ my sister probed, urged.

  ‘One should travel the same ground again and again until it speaks to you.’

  They let it rebound from eardrum to eardrum and then die into the lounge room carpet.

  ‘Anyhow,’ I said desperately, ‘that’s what someone or other said to Freud.’

  I meant to say, to be able to say, that travel gives irrelated, lineal experience. Staying put gives vertical, corporated experience. How much are we held stationary, in the grip – or the gripe – the vice or the vine – of our fear of the
unknown?

  ‘You never know what’s in the other fellow’s mind,’ my father said. ‘We have fellows coming in for jobs from time to time. One day someone walks in and he’s just what you’ve been discussing. It’s a mystery to me.’

  One night while petting with my first ex-wife before we were married, when we were still at school together, before we were fucking, I moved over on top of her, on the front step, feeling a woman’s body under me for the first time. Aroused, and fearful, instinctively sexual, she moved her legs apart, moved herself to take my weight. Both of us fully clothed. Both of us unexpressedly aware of where we were going – that irresistible, but unknown, destination. My arm underneath her took the pressure and the glass of my watch shattered. We sat up and looked at the watch, looked at it for an excessively long time, both making our escape from the uncertainty of that manoeuvre. Then we laughed. We laughed sex away.

  ‘In time, we’ll have a plaza here,’ my father decided in the lounge room, and announced.

  Ritzy word – plaza. A Mardi Gras in the plaza.

  Fiesta.

  Dutch Inn.

  Ali Baba’s Oasis.

  The Casbah.

  The El Paso.

  The Florida.

  The Boutique.

  The Continental.

  Le Monde Hair Salon.

  Le Petit.

  Miami Homecrafts.

  Hollywood Textiles. le Chateau. le Chat Noir.

  That was the extent of the exotica in our suburb.

  Mother drinking fruit cup, never a drop of alcohol to pass her lips, linen clean, no dust, and afternoon teas.

  How could mother have made it into my drug fantasies?

  Sitting there with your fruit cup.

  Naked mother; flop-breasted, lascivious, furry cunted, old mother. I smelled and touched your cunt only once in my life, thirty-seven years ago. But it’s still with me all right. I guess it is a very special link to a cunt (having been totally inside it, that is). I’m told that having a baby is no orgasm for the woman. The movement of the baby down the cunt is not erotic.

  Under drugs I’ve been back to that cunt.