What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  They’d had their wedding reception there, unusual Japanese and Okinawan dishes made special for the feast in the tatami room upstairs. Lots of the guests got drunk on shochu and high-grade sake illegally flown in that week from Tokyo through the owner’s secret contacts at JAL; most of the other guests got stoned on Israeli hashish smoked in the spray-deodorized johns. Irises, cherry blossoms, rose incense, paper slippers, friends’ children sitting on the foot-high tables and guzzling from sake carafes filled with soda, handfuls of cold cooked rice thrown at the couple as they left. Later, he picked rice out of her hair; together, they painted “peace” in fluorescent acrylics on their bedroom window overlooking the beach at Santa Cruz; in bed, she said how life was best when she had the sun, health, loving man and a backward and upside-down view of “peace” from a comfy new mattress all at the same time; but where, she wanted to know, will they go from here?

  A card, hooked over his front doorknob, read that he hadn’t been home to receive a telegram; and penciled on the other side was the deliverer’s personal message: The gram’s been slipped under your door.”

  “If you have no objections,” Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, “I’ll be driving up for weekend with two girls.”

  Chrisie’s younger daughter, Sophie, was genetically his. He’d met Chrisie at a New York party three summers ago, he in the city to be with his dying sister and grieving folks, she on a week’s vacation from the man who was still her adoring hot-tempered husband; and minutes after their orgasm, when he was squirming out from under her to breathe, she said she was convinced she conceived. “Preposterous, granted, but I felt it, just as I felt it with Caroline three years ago, their infinitesimal gametic coupling before, as explosive as our own.”

  He rolled up the canvas he’d been painting on the floor, put away his income-tax statements and forms—Federal, state, New York City, six jobs in one year and once three part-time jobs a day, and he was going to be penalized for filing late—shampooed his rug with laundry detergent, washed down the baseboards with diluted ammonia, dusted every object in the place a two-and five-year-old could touch or climb up on a chair and reach; on his knees, scoured the bathroom tub and tiles and soaped the linoleum floors with the now ammonia-maimed sponge.

  He left the door unlocked and hauled two bags of linens and clothes to the laundromat down the hill. A girl was in front, her smock cut from the same inexpensive Indian bedspread he used to cover the mattress on his floor. “Spare change?” she said. He never gave, but today handed her a quarter. Thanks loads,” and “Spare change?” to a man approaching the laundromat with a box filled with laundry, detergent, starch and magazines. He said “I work for my money.” She said “I work for it too, by asking for spare change.” He said “Dumb begging kid,” and she said “Dear beautiful man.” And he: “You ought to be thrown into Santa Rita with the rest of your crazy friends,” and she: “And you ought to drop some acid.” He: “And you ought to poison yourself also.” She: “I wasn’t referring to poison.” “Well, I was.” “Spare change? Spare a dime, a nickel, a penny, a smile?” “Out of my way, pig,” and he shoved her aside with the box and went into the laundromat.

  Dirk read while his laundry was being washed. His were the most colorful clothes in the machines. A few minutes before the cycles finished, he got up to stick a dime in the one free drier, but a woman beat him to it by a couple of seconds. “You got to be fast, not slow,” she said, and stuck three dimes into the coin slot.

  “Spare change?” the girl said outside.

  A man set down four shopping bags of laundry and opened his change purse. “Oh, no,” and he snapped the purse shut, “I forgot. I’ll need all the change for the machines. The coin changers have been vandalized so often this month the owner’s had to seal them up, and now she’s got to take them out, as they’re still being forced open. People are violent and nuts.”

  One of the driers stopped. A woman sitting under a hair drier and another unwrapping a candy bar signaled with their hands and eyes and candy bar that the machine wasn’t theirs. Dirk touched the arm of a man on a bench with a hat over his face, who was the only other person in the room the drier might belong to, but the man still slept. Dirk removed the warm clothes from the drier, folded them neatly and stacked them in a basket cart. He was throwing his wet clothes into the drier when the man who’d been sleeping before squeezed Dirk’s wrist and said “Don’t any of you people have the decency to wait?”

  The telegram read: The girls and I won’t arrive till tomorrow. Husband, parents, complications, love.” Dirk drank a few vodka and tonics and fell asleep, awoke in the dark with the radio on and went outside. He had a Moroccan tea at a Haight Street coffeehouse, where many young people were drawing, writing, playing checkers and chess, talking about police harassment, pot planting, Hippie Hill freedom, the Bach cantata being played, democracy now but total revolution, if that’s what it’s going to have to come to, tonight’s rock concerts at the Fillmore, Avalon, Winterland, Straight. A man sat beside him, pulled on the long hairs of his unbrushed beard and braided matted hair and said “Hey there, joint’s getting real artsy. Very beautiful old North Beach days. Culture with a Das Kapital K. Loonies just doing their dovey ding, am I tight?” Dirk shrugged, the man laughed and patted Dirk’s shoulder consolingly. A girl at the next table shrugged and the man said “Yeah, North Beach si and now the Haight. You’re all gonna burn out famous,” he announced to the house. “Like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, me boys, me best, me fine old friendlies who bade it ballsy and big. So try and refudiate me in five years, fiends, that all of you who pluck to it haven’t made buns of bread,” and he finished his coffee, chugalugged down all the milk in the table’s cream pitcher and left.

  Dirk was on his way home when a girl stopped him on the street and said “Can I crash your pad? I’m alone, in real trouble, it’s just me and I won’t be any bother, I swear. The pad I was supposed to flop at won’t let me in. These four guys I was living with there all of a sudden split for Los Angeles—ran off with my records and clothes while I was sitting it out in jail. Look at this. The creepy keeper gave it to me this morning as a sort of graduation diploma and safe-conduct visa out of Nevada.” She showed him a paper that said she’d been arrested and released after five days for vagrancy, loitering, wayward minor, accessory to crime, resisting arrest. “Resisting arrest, bullshit. They just clamped on the cuffs, felt my tits and dumped me in a smelly van. We were selling speed, made our contact, two cats and myself in Carson City—America’s worst dump. Ever been there? Don’t ever go. The creepy keeper said ‘Now I’m warning you, sis, don’t be turning back.’ And when we left the diner with our contact, twenty Feds jumped out of the shadows with guns cocked like puny movie gangsters and threw us against our truck, arrested us all.”

  While they walked to his place, she told him she thought she was pregnant again. “I had a kid in Hartford last year, gave it away. My rich German-Jewish father told me the baby was very ugly after he told me how much he was forking over for my bills. Best of hospital service, never had it so good. And he was kind of sweet too, like an overconcerned expectant father expecting his first child, and then, with my society-minded momma, had me committed. But the state released me after four months, though my folks wanted me in for at least a year but were too cheap to pay for a private crazyhouse, when they found I was still getting pills and grass and was caught balling one of Connecticut’s prize mental deficients behind a bandstand during a Saturday-afternoon dance. Ever been to Hartford? Don’t ever go there, either. That’s what they told me in Carson City. Said ‘Don’t come back for six months minimum,’ and I said ‘Six months my ass, I’m never coming back, none of my friends will ever come back, you lost a good tourist trade with us when you locked me up, and this giant Swedish matron, she was very congenial when she wasn’t forcing my box open every ten minutes to see if I was stashing anything inside, she just laughed, laughed and laughed.”

  Dirk gave her one of the two tuna
fish salad sandwiches he made. She said “It looks so pretty and sweet, lettuce flouncing out of it like a dress, and sourdough’s my favorite of all nonmacrobiotic breads, but no, thanks. With the last kid I gained 46 pounds, I’m ten pounds overweight as it is, so I’m only going to start eating again when and if I find I’m not pregnant. Look at that view. Golden Gate from your own place. Do you ever really look outside—I mean, really? Too much. You ought to raise your mattress to window height, make it with a groovy chick while you’re both stoned on hash and eye-popping the moon. You do all these paintings? Do them on pills? Well, don’t ever get on them, don’t even hold them, they’re worse than anything besides junkie’s junk, which can actually be a good trip the first time but the shits when you have to start paying forty bells a high. You’re a real housekeeper. Just look how clean this place is. You ought to wear an apron—a clean flowery one. I’ll make you one, if you get me some thread things and paint and an old clean sheet. Floor recently mopped, books in place, bed made, not even a curly body hair on the rug, and pardon me for all my luggage”—she lifted her average-sized pocketbook with her pinkie and reset it on the floor—“but I feel utterly helpless if I have to travel light.”

  They drank tea, she showered and said she was sorry, but she had soaked his bathroom floor and then drenched a few towels in trying to wipe it up. “When I was living in Hartford, I wasn’t such a slob. In fact, I was a real housekeeper then, also: cooked, cleaned, deveined the shrimp and cracked the crabs, just obsessed with ridding my place of flecks and specks, as my mother is and you must be. But now I haven’t made a bed in eight months, no, nine, except for the five days in Caron City’s most depressing jail. You have kids? You look like you have a half dozen. That you and your boy in the sailboat? Is your wife as blonde as he? I never want kids, never want to get hitched. Marriage is for con men who give charm for money and that Mongoloid I balled who’ll always need lots of help and love. For everyone else, it’s me me me me. My childhood was the worst. My mother’s a hysterical bitch and shrew. My dad’s got a gripe against because he always wanted to screw me and now because he bought me a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes to keep me in Hartford just two days before I split for the Coast. Two cats came by the place I was staying at and said ‘Let’s take you away from all this,’ meaning my apron and housekeeping chores, and I said sure, anything; there wasn’t anything happening in Hartford since I gave that ugly baby away. So I packed those clothes in two valises I stole from the college boys I was living with—they did much worse to me in the past, so don’t even begin to twinge and twist—and we made it across country without a bit of flak, never for a moment being anything but high. I’ve now been in every state but Alaska and Hawaii—Carson City, Nevada, my forty-eighth. And I have no clothes, maybe two dimes in my wallet, my father would just piss if he knew and my mother’s aching to put me away for life. And most everyone who knows me says I’m wasting my time. That I’ve more than a one-forty I.Q. and ought to use that natural intelligence in writing about all I’ve seen and done, but with a humorous aspect to it, as there’s far too much sad seriousness in literature and the world as it is. And one day I will. Just as soon as I land a pad of my own.”

  He offered her a sleeping bag on the floor and she said that was exactly what she needed for her rotten back. They went to bed. “Hey, look,” she screamed, “I can see the moon. It’s getting a little past the half stage. My God, it’s being eclipsed by the earth—our earth. What do astrologers say about eclipses of the moon? Are they special nights, do any of the signs undergo any change? I bet you’re a Gemini. Geminis are the worst. Yes, I’m sure you’re a Gemini. Well, I’m a Taurus, we’d never get along, and my name’s Cynthia Devine.”

  The room was very dark when he awoke a few hours later to Cynthia talking about her magnificent view of the totally eclipsed moon. He put his hand on her knee and she felt his chest. “You have a very interesting heartbeat. I’ve never slept with a man with such a rapping heart.” Her hand moved down his body and she said “Ooooh, now I know why it’s rapping so fast. But stop, will you, because then I can say tomorrow that it was a lot better sleeping here than in jail. There I got a crummy mattress on a wooden plank with no privacy. I wasn’t even allowed to see daylight till they traipsed me across the yard for a health exam. The doctor gave me these pretty blue antibiotic pills and blood-red capsules for what he said was my venereal disease. I told him ‘Vaginal infection, Doc, not V.D. A vaginal infection I’ve had for a month,’ and which I still have now, till he finally apologized. Prison doctors are always trying to stick you with the worst. But he was fairly nice, all told. And Sheila, the matron, wasn’t half bad, either, when she wasn’t trying to get into my pants.”

  Someone knocked on the door. “You get your share of telegrams,” the deliverer said. “When this one came this morning, I was sure it was my fault because you didn’t get the two I slipped under the door and this one was trying to find out what was wrong.”

  “I started out this evening,” Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, “and then returned home. Let me know if you think I should really come. Call. Love.” And her phone number.

  He walked Cynthia down the hill, to show her where the public phone booth was and to cash a check at the drugstore for himself. “Goodbye,” she said, shaking his hand. “I think we—no, I’m glad we didn’t—oh, maybe it would’ve been fun if we had, as it’s always a crazy farce with somebody new, though it’s also nice sleeping peacefully, for a change, without someone’s hands tearing into me. I’ve got to call some guys I know. They were staying at a flat around here before I got busted, and if they’ve already split, then I’m truly screwed. Maybe I could phone my dad for cash. I can get him at business now, just after he’s returned from a three-martini lunch. He’s really quite beautiful when he’s smashed, and thanks.”

  The druggist smiled. “You made the year 1968 on your check instead of 1969.”

  His 85-year-old landlord was pulling out weeds from around one of the fifty or so signs he’d painted and then erected in the front yard. The sign read: Stop Being An Accessory To The Crime Of Fratricide—Don’t You Know All Wars Are Silly? “I’ve just come from distributing my peace pamphlets downtown,” Mamblin said, “and you wouldn’t believe the wonderful reception I received from so many of our courageous lads. ‘Peace first,’ I told them—‘love, learn and grow. Jewish and Christian wars must end,’ I said—‘gardens, not battlefields. A mental revolution, not a physical one.’ One young man from Santa Monica, of all places, said that after listening to me, he would think about resisting the draft. He said I was a man of God, which I disproved scientifically—a walking institution to peace, he tried to make me, which was nearer the truth. But I’ve unfortunate news for you also, Dirk. Mrs. Diboneck dropped by much too early this morning and complained that you’ve been coming in at all hours of the day—playing the radio too loud, waking her. Having wild parties, orgies, she said, and that you’re also running a hippie haven in your apartment downstairs. She’s old, a good woman, knew my wife, been here close to twenty years. And you know I had trouble with the tenant before you, he being a bit queer with men in a sexual manner and shooting out all my lovely leaded-glass windows and causing a mild heart attack for Mrs. D. But what do you think of my latest sign?” He pointed past a couple dozen older ones to a new one with gold-painted letters bordered by red; I Have Arisen From The Dead. “Did it yesterday, after a long stimulating conversation with a young Welsh lady who happened by while I was weeding. It has no Christian significance, of course, other than its possible mockery of mythological Christian belief—but the symbolism’s what I like. I have arisen from ignorance, mediocrity, mindlessness, myths, lies, half-truths, superstitions—I have arisen from the deaf, dumb, blind and spiritually dead. And being you’re one of the truly good people in this city and a disciple of mine, I think—I don’t precisely know what to make of you yet, though you’re being carefully studied, Dirk, phrenologically and every other way, so be
on your guard—why don’t you work matters out with Mrs. D. yourself? I only don’t want her waking me up again before nine.”

  Mrs. Diboneck’s typewritten note in his mailbox read: “I would appreciate if you would not slam the door so vigorous. It shakes everything and scares me to death. I accomodated your wish last week ago by using my T.V. and Radio allmost never. So be a Gentleman and hang on to the doors!! Thank You.”

  Using Magic Markers, he made a quick small drawing of the view from his room. Red towers of Golden Gate Bridge, gold spires of St. Ignatius Church, green park, blue bay, yellow ocean, purple sky, brown, black, orange and pink hills and mountains of Marin County, and rolled it up and was about to stick it into Mrs. Diboneck’s mailbox when he saw her watching him through one of her lower door panes. She stepped onto the sidewalk, clutching her house dress together at the chest. “I’m sorry I complained to Mr. Mamblin before, Mr.—but what is your name? But the noise, dear Lord, one would think a children school down there directly below with what I hear and you make. Why, why? I ask myself an old woman without any answers, and the radio, so loud I can’t hear myself phone talking when it isn’t waking me out of sleeps and naps I need and all such things, or is it your TV you own? But is it not possible, may I ask, that people live in this building, too? I don’t want to speak about it more than now and never again to Mr. Mamblin if I must, so be reasonable, please, a nice young man and your blond boy so sweet, and we will remain kind friends. Otherwise, I must one day call the police if Mr. Mamblin does not, which to me even with my illness seems cruel but no matter can I help taking this being forced by you,” and she dropped a small bag of trash into the garbage can standing between then and returned to her apartment. He put the drawing into his billfold and went to the post office.