soon it was close to
noon.
we ended up in bed
together.
we must have
slept.
when I awakened it was
evening going into
night.
I saw her getting
dressed.
then she was finished.
she walked to the door,
opened it, then walked
out and was
gone.
I got up and sat in a
chair and looked out the
window.
I watched the headlights
of the tiny cars
moving down
there.
and I still didn’t know
what to do with
myself.
and all the snow melted
she was a
German girl with a figure like quicksilver
quick something
anyhow
I’d say, “I want to fuck you”
and she’d smile and say
“So?”
we’d be sitting in some cheap nightclub
and the “So?” meant
go ahead
rip my clothes off now
but you won’t do that—
so what are you going to do about it?
dear old Gertrude
a design in Sex
in dear old St. Louis
her quicksilver jumping up and down
inside my god-damned soul.
screwing her was like going to heaven
on a drunken trolley
but first it meant
a walk through the snow
watching her ride those haunches
like all the magic in the universe
on those high heels
and up to her vast bed flocked with the
toy animals—stuffed bears, giraffes, elephants, whatever—
all looking at us
and my sweeping them to the floor
and the biggest toy animal of them all
taking over
with those bastards on the rug
with their sawdust hard-ons
and dripping cotton tongues, ah
we rode all the way out and
never came back, really,
any of us.
an empire of coins
the legs are gone and the hopes—the lava of outpouring,
and I haven’t shaved in sixteen days
but the mailman still makes his rounds and
water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of
myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music
in golden trunks and 8 oz. gloves when I made the
semi-finals
only to be taken out by a German brute who should have
been
locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.
Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would
stare
at a Dali (he has lost it) or an early Picasso, and I send
the girls out for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe
their asses and say, “well, I guess I won’t comb my hair
today:
it might bring me luck.” well, anyway, they wash the dishes
and
chop the wood, and the landlady keeps insisting “let me in,
I can’t
get in, you’ve got the lock on, and what’s all that singing
and
cussing in there?” but she only wants a piece of ass while
she pretends
she wants the rent
but she’s not going to get either one
of ’em.
meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and Shakespeare
and old football scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John
Baker field goal.
I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns,
always
the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like
young
L.A. cops too young to shave, and the younger sailors out
there sex-hungry, trying to act tough, trying to act like men
but really closer to their mother’s nipples than to a true evaluation
of existence. I say god damn it, that
my legs are gone and the outpourings too. inside my brain
they cut and snip and
pour oil
to burn and fire out early dreams.
“darling,” says one of the girls, “you’ve got to snap out of it,
we’re running out of MONEY. how do you want
your toast?
light or dark?”
a woman’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between
her
kneecaps and I can see where
empires have fallen.
I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I
say.
“why?” asks one of the
whores.
BECAUSE RATS DON’T LIKE OIL! I scream.
(I can’t go on. I don’t belong here.) I listen to radio programs
and people’s voices talking and I marvel that they can get
excited
and interested over nothing and I flick out the lights, I
crash out the lights, and I pull the shades down, I
tear the shades down and I light my last cigar imagining
the dreamjump off the Empire State Building
into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on
attitude.
already forgotten are the dead of Normandy, Lincoln’s
stringy beard,
all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,
all the love that has died in real women and real men
while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent
sneer
and I have fought red-handed and drunk
in slop-pitted alleys
the bartenders of this rotten land.
and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the
whole thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns,
the half-wits,
the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers,
the
poets…are interesting?
in the dark I hear the hands reaching for the last of my
money
like mice nibbling at paper, automatic feeders on inbred
helplessness, a false drunken God asleep at the wheel…
a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces
and
the football heroes, and everything has meaning, and an
editor
writes me, you are good
but
you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,
study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying day by day?
The door closes and the last of the great whores are gone
and somehow no matter how they have
killed me, they are all great, and I smoke quietly
thinking of Mexico, the tired horses, of Havana and Spain
and Normandy, of the jabbering insane, of my dear
friends, of no more friends
ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, “you won’t die
you won’t die in the war, you’re too smart, you’ll take care
of yourself.”
I keep thinking of the bulls. the brave bulls dying every day.
the whores are gone. the bombing has stopped for a minute.
fuck everybody.
A NICKEL
I.
It was a lazy day and a lousy day to work. It seemed that even the spiders hadn�
�t thrown out their webs. And when I finally got to my job down at the railroad yards I found out that shithead Henderson was the new foreman.
I learned that the old Mexican, Al or Abe or somebody, had retired or died or gone insane. Too bad. Now Henderson was boss. The boys were matching pennies down by the barn when Henderson called me over.
“Gaines,” he said, “Gaines, I understand you’re somewhat of a playboy. Well, that’s all right. I don’t mind a little horseplay now and then, but we’ll get our work done first and then we’ll play.”
“Just like recess at school, eh coach?”
Henderson put his face real close to mine. I put mine real close to his—
“Or haven’t you been to school, Hendy?”
I could look right down into his red mouth and his frog jaws as he spoke: “I can tie the can to you, boy.”
“Proving what?” I asked.
“Proving you are out of position.”
Which was a pretty good answer, and a pretty good criticism: I was always out of position.
I took a nickel out of my pocket and flipped it to the cement where the boys were lagging to the line. They stood back stunned, looking from the nickel back to me. I turned around and walked the hell out of there. For good.
II.
I laid up in my room and studied the Racing Form for a couple of hours and knocked off half a bottle of left-over wine. Then I got into my 1958 Ford and headed for the track.
I wrote the morning line down on my program and walked over to the bar where I noticed a big blonde, about 35 and alone—well, about as alone as a big babe like that can get amongst 8,000 men. She was trying her damnedest to burst and pop out of her clothes, and you stood there watching her, wondering which part would pop out first. It was sheer madness, and every time she moved you could feel the electricity running up the steel girders. And perched on top of all this madness was a face that really had some type of royalty in it. I mean, there was a kind of stateliness, like she was beyond it all. I mean, there are some women who could simply make damned fools out of men without making any type of statement, or movement, or demand—they could simply stand there and the men would simply feel like damned fools and that was all there was to it. This was one of those women.
I looked up from my drink as if it didn’t matter and as if she was just anybody, and as if I was a pretty jaded type (which, to tell the truth, I was) and said, “How you been doin’, with the ponies, I mean?”
“All right,” she said.
I’d expected something else. I don’t know what. But the “all right” sounded good enough.
I was about half-gone on the liquor and felt I owned the world, including the blonde.
“I used to be a jockey,” I told her.
“You’re pretty big for a jock.”
“210, solid muscle,” I said.
“And belly,” she said, looking right above my belt.
We both kind of laughed and I move closer.
“You want the winner of the first race? To kinda start you off right?”
“Sure,” she said, “sure,” and I felt that big hip-flank touch the side of my leg and I felt like I was on fire.
I smelled perfume, and imagined waterfalls and forests and throwing scraps of venison to fine dogs, and furniture soft as clouds and never again awakening to an alarm clock.
I drained my drink. “Try six,” I said. “Number six: Cat’s Head.”
“Cat’s Head?”
Just then somebody tapped me, I should say—rapped me hard on one of my shoulder blades.
“Boy,” the voice said, “get lost!”
I stared down into my drink waiting for her to send this stranger away.
“I said,” the voice got a little louder, “run along and play with your marbles!”
As I stared down into my drink I realized the glass was empty.
“I don’t like to play marbles,” I told the voice.
I motioned to the bartender. “Two more—for the lady and myself.”
I felt it in my back then: what seemed to be the sure, superior nudge of a no doubt highly efficient switchblade.
“Learn,” said the voice, “learn to like to play marbles!”
“I’m going right away,” I said. “I brought my agate. I hear there’s a big game under the grandstand.”
I turned and caught a look at him as he slid into my seat. And I’d always thought I was the meanest-looking-son-of-a-bitch in the world.
“Tommy,” I heard her tell him, “I want you to play a hundred on the nose for me.”
“Sure. On who?”
“Number six.”
“Number SIX?”
“Yes, six.”
“But that stiff is 10 to 1!”
“Play it.”
“O.K., baby, O.K. but…”
“Play it.”
“Can I finish my drink?”
“Sure.”
After a while I walked over to the two dollar window.
“Number six,” I said, “once.”
It was my last two dollars.
Number six paid $23.40.
I watched my horse go down into the Winner’s Circle like I do all my winners, and I felt as proud of him as if I had ridden him or raised him. I felt like cheering and telling everybody he was the greatest horse that had ever lived, and I felt like reaching out and hugging him around the neck, even though I was two or three hundred feet away.
Instead I lit my cigarette and pretended I was bored.
Then I headed back to the bar, kind of to see how she took it, intending to stay pretty far away. But they weren’t there.
I ordered a double backed by a beer, drank both, ordered up again and drank at my leisure, studying the next race. When the 5 minute warning blew, they still hadn’t shown up and I went off to place my bet.
I blew it. I blew them all. And the woman and her boyfriend never showed. At the end of the last race I had 35 cents, a 1958 Ford, about two gallons of gas and one night’s rent left.
I went into the men’s room and stared in the mirror at my face in disgust. I looked like I knew something, but it was a lie, I was a fake and there’s nothing worse in the world than when a man suddenly realizes and admits to himself that he’s a phoney, after spending all his time up to then trying to convince himself that he wasn’t. I stared at all the sinks and pipes and bowls and I felt like them, worse than them: I’d rather be them.
I swung out the door and stood there feeling like a hare or a tortoise or somebody needing a good bath, and then I felt her pressing against me like the good part of myself suddenly coming back with a rush. I noticed how green her dress was, and I didn’t care what happened next: seeing her again had made it O.K.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked hurriedly. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
What the hell is this? I started to say, you’ve been looking for me?
“Here comes Tommy!” She hesitated, and I felt her push something into my hand. Then she walked out, carefully, slowly to meet him. I jammed whatever it was into my pocket and walked out to the parking lot. I got into my car, lit my next-to-last cigarette, leaned back and dropped my hand into my pocket.
I unfolded 5 one hundred dollar bills, one fifty, 2 tens and a five. “Your half,” the note said, “with thanks. Nicki.” And then I saw the phone number.
I sat there and watched all the cars leave; I sat there and watched the sun completely disappear; I sat there and watched a man change a flat tire; and then I drove out of there slowly, like an old man, letting it hit me, little by little, and scared to death I’d run somebody over or be unable to stop for a red light. Then I thought about the nickel I’d thrown away and I started to laugh like crazy. I laughed so hard I had to park the car. And when the guy who’d changed his flat passed me and I saw his white blob of a face staring back I had to laugh all over again. I even honked my horn and hollered at him.
Poor devil: he had no soul.
nature poem
running through my brain in
tracksuits or
you are like sitting in a bar
with enough money
with a good drink
and looking through the window
at the snow
you are the dead fish of miracle
moving
you are the love-god of ice cream
phantasy
you have diminished the screaming of
children as they drink my
blood
I think that you have killed landlords
wanting rent
and also bad
tigers
there is a white flower laying against
my screen
like a whore
like a cat
like a white flower
I could not go to work
tonight because I could not
stop living
and now I am lying in bed
looking at the white flower.
warning
upon your darkened red mouth wild birds scream
and bowls of fish swim their jungles,
a China morning, a withered noon of axes and
witches;
you desire a man-plagued sun and strands of
fiber calling my name;
beware, I am not your silly husband,
I am your silly lover
and of all your silly lovers,
the last one here.
answer to a note on the dresser:
the price of the sun is the tulip rotting black
and the prince on his knees
Betting on the Muse Page 6