The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But if he were, I don’t much think he’d serve.”

  That, in fact, I knew absolutely. No number of U.S. eagles chewing away at his entrails would ever make Spurgeon say yes to President Johnson.

  “Where’d you get that car, Spur?” Marlin asked.

  From the monologue that followed, whirred around us like chips of cuneiform scattered in the sands of Mesopotamia by a crazed archaeologist, we glued this story together. Spur had left the Starks’ home on the evening of July 3rd. After that useless scene with that cretinous madman living with Leila, he had advised himself to get the fuck out of this plastic-fucking middleclass pig hole in order to preserve his goddamn integrity. He had, therefore, split. The Chrysler, which he was now disemboweling with the jack, he had purchased for his last $120 (earned by the prostitution of bauble-vending to plastic cunts). He had bought it from a baboon whose baboonery consisted for one thing in his ever having owned the vehicle, and for another, in his selling such a metal coffin to a human being.

  Spur then headed west to the desert, where he could fill his lungs with something clean for a change. Besides, he had a mission to perform in the City of Syphilis and Gonorrhea summed up as Los Angeles. With the help of certain cats and chicks who comprised the Anti-All Living Theatre of Topanga Canyon, he would produce his masterpiece, Napalm U.S.A., there on the steps of the Wilshire Boulevard branch of the Bank of America.

  But like modern Eumenides, the locusts of General Motors had pursued him even down the pure flat stretches of the Mojave Desert. They gnawed holes in the radiator, they gobbled the rear axle off, threw a rod, sucked out the pistons. So in the dry noon dust, Spurgeon stood, his vision in overdrive, his Chrysler driven over into a sand rut. Elijah in a chariot with the wheels gone.

  Did a single lousy church-going Babbittrabbit stop to help a poor one-armed son of a bitch?

  NO.

  And so alone, he himself pushed that Symbol of America, that iron heap of shit, 250 miles to the Half-Ass Garage, where they charged him the other arm and a half to half-ass fix it. Collect, he called the Living Theatre of Topanga Canyon and learned that it was dead, for certain of the cats and chicks no longer comprised it. Two had been busted for not sucking up. Two had damned themselves by going back to college.

  So the apocalypse was postponed.

  And why had he returned to Floren Park carrying that car strapped on his blistered back? Only to shove every jagged piece of Chrysler Inc. up the fat pink ass of the baboon who had sold it to him.

  “Hell, that’s hard luck,” Grange said when, after what felt like forty-five minutes, Spur paused in his outburst. We were all still standing around the Chrysler watching him break off the windshield wipers.

  “Hard luck? LUCK?” Spur rolled his prophet eyes over Calhoun. “There’s no luck, you dumb shitkicker. There’s EVIL. THERE IS TOTAL EVIL. Cheap, dirty, hairy evil, and it’s sitting with its white ass in big leather chairs, and it’s punching metal buttons with its big hairy fingers, and it’s running this fucking country. And if there’s a God, he’s the Chairman of the Board of Dow Chemical. He’s a S.S. fucking Pentagon Nazi five stars in his rear Admiral cocksucking Commander in Chief. I HATE GOD, and if I ever get my hands around his fat oily neck, I’ll pull out his jugular vein and choke the pig with it. I hate him now, and when I’m dead I’ll keep on hating him!”

  “Hey, hold on there, buster,” Calhoun stretched his mouth to show just a flicker of perfect teeth. Perhaps a personal, a patriotic, or a religious affront that stirred him.

  I imagined the movie, as Cal would push his chair slowly back from his table in the saloon, slowly stand and walk to the bar, place one boot on the rail, never taking his eyes off Spurgeon, never blinking, his gaze steady with the serenity of knowing that in his personhood resided perfect rightness.

  “He’s nuts, Cal. He ought to be in an institution,” Joely told him.

  “Oh,” Grange nodded slowly, kindly. It was a different movie if the man were crazy.

  Uninterested in the world’s diagnosis, Spurgeon had reached that pitch in his panegyric when words are puny. Unzipping, he urinated on the hood of the Chrysler. The high, steaming arch of his contempt spewed out splashing the headlights.

  We left him there. I walked back to the bar.

  Chapter 15

  I Am Involved in Mystery

  In a back room of the Red Lagoon, couples danced now. They jerked in a sputter of strobe light, bodies projected at the wrong speed, screened in awkward tableaux by the red, white, red, white flicker.

  Recently Lady Red Menelade had built a discotheque, and some thought a brothel, behind the original barroom. Her husband, the manager, had not objected as she proceeded to take possession of the property. Had he not predicted her victory, down to the saltshaker, even before her arrival? Now validated in his fatalism, he gave his time to summer reruns of daytime quiz shows, watching them from his stool by the cash register on a small gray television, games played months earlier so that the deal had long since been made, the password guessed, the final jeopardy wagered. Yet each chance won or lost was here again on the screen, capable of endless repetition. It pleased him to watch the working out of destinies already foreknown and resolved, months, years earlier, as he knew his own had been. He almost never talked with the customers any more the way he used to.

  The discotheque was large, dark, and hot. Lady Red had crowded a wide four-sided balcony with cheap tables from which drinkers could look down at dancers. Below were more tables ringing the dance floor, and at either end, a dais—one for the band, one for the two girls, the “go-go” girls, instructresses in gyring: illusions of a partner for those without one. They wore red bikinis splotched with sweat stains, spangled with fringe that had been carelessly, unevenly sewn on, or maybe it had frayed, or maybe night after night, anonymous hands had reached up and stolen a memento of the illusion.

  I found an empty table next to the balcony rail, where I could look down on the girls and the customers. I saw Leila and Jennifer Thatcher sitting together. Jennifer was crying and shaking her head. Leila pulled her chair over, put her arm around Jennifer, stroked her hair, stroked her hand, kept nodding as Jennifer talked.

  I watched the performers. One was a soiled blonde with too much flesh that was too soft now, even for her big frame, flesh that shook loosely without effort or interest as she moved bored muscles through the jerk, the pony, the monkey, the slide. Her muscles had memorized how to give the semblance, if not of energy, at least of life. When the red filter blinked off, her skin was that chalk white of someone who for years wakes up only when the sun is setting, whose shades may be taped to their runners and are never pulled up. Her eyes stared just above the heads of her customers. They were eyes an indifferent maker of mannequins might have painted on, and nobody was in them. I saw stretch marks on her stomach, and a long green bruise on the inside of her thigh. Joely told me later that she called herself Kim, that she was from somewhere in Arkansas, was thirty-two and divorced twice, and had a seven-year-old boy named Cary. He said she wanted to get to California like Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, but after watching her a while, I didn’t think she was going to make it.

  The other girl was younger, black-haired and thin, and her eyes deliberately did not look at anyone in the room, but instead studied some self-realization that her dancing there either confirmed or demeaned, I wasn’t sure which. She reminded me of someone. Suzanne Steinitz?

  No. Jardin. She looked in the strobe light like slides of Jardin changed too quickly. Jardin superimposed over the dancer. I pressed my drink glass against my forehead, stared through it. The dancer blurred, dissolved, merged with Jardin. A black moth with white and silver eyes, Jardin in jagged webs of black silk floated at me in a forest twisted full of black branches and black sky. Small white stars cut into the sky. The moon made a narrow strip of light, and she moved down it. I made a wh
ite stone god with a statue’s sightless eyes step out of shadows. He gathered her into him, her black moth wings folded in his white arms. They floated backward silently into the shadows.

  “Devin! Hey, Devin! Look who I’ve got here.”

  The thin girl snapped her head back and forth. Her hair twisted around her neck, uncoiled like a black lace fan. I jerked away, shaded my eyes, squinted down into shafts of smoke to locate the voice. At a table just beneath me, Ashton Krinkle in his black turtleneck sat with two other men—one of them young and languidly postured, the other much older. I stood up to lean over the balcony and saw the familiar linen suit, the gray hair that needed a cut. He twisted a strand of it against the back of his neck with his forefinger.

  “Professor Aubrey!” I called. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”

  He waved his hand at me, but with a funny motion, as if he were trying to push me away. He raised himself in his chair. “Hello, Devin, hello. It’s good to see you again. Like all the best literature, the similitudes of life, don’t you think? How have you been?” The voice had its old sure warmth; it floated over the noise of the room and over the embarrassment that pulled at the corners of his mouth.

  Ashton smiled at me, “When he said he taught English at Harvard, I told him you were here. And he verified you, Donahue, so I guess you really did go there.”

  And I guessed so, really, for the same reason. After I had decided to write poetry, I had become one of a group of students who, in new collections every fall, drew up beside his fire and grew in love with learning what he knew. He wrote thick books of criticism and thin books of poems, and we all had copies of both. In his gold-brown rooms at Pinckney House, we listened to music by men with Italian names, and the fire shine gleamed on rows and rows of books. He had saved me from suspension, too, and warned me against political involvements. Now I wished Verl were there so I could introduce them. How incredible that my past should come to me out here in this citadel of mountains to which I had escaped.

  The young man with him crossed, recrossed his legs, smoothed the fold of his trousers. His face was carefully set in petulant ennui. Then I recognized him. Randolph something or other, who was never called that at Harvard anyhow, but referred to as Oscar’s Folly, and at the English Club as Belphoebe, and at the dining hall as the Queen of the Yard. We had never liked each other. And now he was sitting here, incomprehensibly, with my teacher. Why? I didn’t remember that he had been in any of Mr. Aubrey’s classes.

  “How are you enjoying your summer in the theater?” Aubrey asked me.

  “Very well, sir. It’s a new experience. And you? Are you vacationing? With Randolph Wheeling?”

  “Ah,” he smiled in that voice that held for us in each slow syllable all the wise humor we hoped for our own maturities, “a long car trip across my native land. Something I’m ashamed to say I’ve never done before. We New Englanders tend to a defensive insularity, don’t we? So proudly attached to our discomforts.” He tapped the tight noose of his tie. “And then down into Mexico to research some folklore. Perhaps I can rifle a bit of poetry from their past. Plumed serpents in my infirmity instead of one more birch tree sagging with tradition. Rather late in life to be developing a Lawrencian streak, wouldn’t you say?”

  I smiled.

  “I think,” he had to say, “you might have met Randolph Wheeling in Cambridge?” Randolph acknowledged me with one eyebrow. “He speaks Spanish quite well and kindly offered to help me bargain with the natives for a week or so.”

  “I hope it goes well,” I said. “I’ve got a copy of your new book, Fortune and Men’s Eyes. It’s…it’s very fine, sir.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And you? Have you made plans yet for next year? Ah, well, let me know when you do. Please remember I’d be happy to write a letter for you if you wish.” Then all at once he said they had to be leaving. They planned to travel all the next day, and now it was long past midnight. He doubted they would be back through.

  “Good-bye, Devin. Take care.”

  “Yes, sir. And you.”

  Ashton stopped them at Leila’s table, introduced them. Professor Aubrey bowed and took her hand. They went on, passing Dennis Reed, who was entering the bar. He took a seat next to Leila and pressed her hands in his. I didn’t realize he and Leila had met. Maybe Verl had introduced them. Maybe me. I had forgotten.

  “I’m trying to attract your attention,” a voice murmured. I looked up. It was the black-haired dancer. “You were watching me,” she said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. The strobe light flashed red on the loop of a silver earring.

  “I’m sorry,” I said standing up. Now I couldn’t decide whether she looked like Jardin or not.

  “Why?” she asked. “Sit down.” And she sat down too.

  “Devin Donahue,” I told her.

  “My name’s Tanya.”

  Tanya told me that she would like a scotch and water, and that she would like me to tell her all about myself.

  An hour later, Joely came to offer me a ride home; Leila and Jennifer had already left. “I hope I’ll see you again,” Tanya smiled.

  “I’m sure you will,” I smiled back.

  “Smooth,” Joely lisped through puckered lips. Then thumping me on the back, he aped a sick look. “What a pity you’re already in mourning for another maid, Donahue. That’s right, isn’t it? Aren’t you already bespoken to your brother’s wife? What a pity.”

  Why had I ever shared my secret feelings with such a clod? I didn’t bother to answer him.

  Chapter 16

  A Dissolution of Partnership

  Not everyone wanted to wait around to see what Bruno Stark was going to do with his son’s company. The next morning, Ashton, leaving a note that forfeited Mittie’s tuition deposit, drove off to Mexico with Professor Aubrey and Randolph Wheeling. Word of his break-out buzzed through the company, but only as a minor accompaniment to the noisier departure of Calhoun Grange that afternoon. Mr. Ed Hade, owner of the largest car dealership in the state, had offered a car and driver to carry the star to the airport; he reminded us all that he had had the honor of introducing Cal at the Nixon picnic and that he was proud to be of help.

  And so that evening at sunset, a white Cadillac convertible brought Grange from his hotel to the theater, where his crowded leave-taking left Sabby Norah tearful, many of us drunk, and Floren Park eclipsed. Having invited evuhbody to be sure and come on out to live with him in Hollywood, he left us in order to put in an appearance being seen with a starlet at a table in Las Vegas before his agent fried his ass. Wolfstein stayed at home.

  And bright as sunlight on ski snow in his pure white perfect suit, white boots, white belt with golden buckle, white teeth, he kissed Leila good-bye, looping the treasure of his gold scarf with easy grace around her neck. Leila looked upset—whether because of Wolfstein and Cal or her and Cal, I didn’t know.

  Sliding into the car with a last grin, a last wave, Grange drove off. Through an amber spin of dust, we saw his long legs swing up, cross; his immaculate boots come to rest on the front seat, just beside the driver’s head. We saw his long arm drape over his authentic totem pole, gift of a grateful town. Silent under a starless sky, we carried on without him. That night Leila took Wolfstein all the way to Central City for dinner; no one else was invited.

  The next day she revived The Fantastiks for our dwindled audience. Wolfstein wanted no further new productions; there was no word from Mr. Stark, and we couldn’t survive forever on our Calhoun Grange profits. In the next weeks, Wolfstein began more and more to sit in his gloom and drink. And so Leila began more and more to assume full management of the Red Lagoon Theatre, calling rehearsals, casting, supervising set construction, soliciting advertisements to pay the bills. And she assumed an authoritative tone that startled the cast into obedience She made Ronny Tiorino recite his lines to her at dinner until he had successfull
y memorized them, rather than continuing to rely on the inspiration of improvisation as he used to; she made Marlin help Pete Barney sweep the stage, even though Marlin was second year; she made Suzanne help Sabby wash the costumes; she made Jennifer Thatcher work on stage crew duties; she made me rebuild three flats and work the box office, so there was no time to hang around the Red Lagoon Bar where I might run into the girl who called herself Tanya. Leila called meetings after performances so we could “analyze our mistakes,” a privilege nobody particularly wanted. Rebellion began to mumble.

  And a week after Ashton, Jennifer left. She left because she was homesick for Alabama, and because the food at the boarding house was ruining her complexion, and because she didn’t like being a stagehand, and because she thought she would after all marry the guy who hadn’t wanted her to be an actress in the first place. Mrs. Thurston told us that she herself should leave, but added immediately that she was staying, as she was needed. Needed to pull the shades of her respectable motherhood over the windows of our home. For otherwise, it appeared that what she had been obliged to define as the lunacy of Leila’s actions would be horrifically silhouetted for every stranger in town to see.

  For, without bothering to consult the household, Leila had moved Spurgeon Debson in. And now, to our amazement, his cot was set up on the front porch. His careful rags of clothes hung on the chain in Leila’s bedroom. And Spur hung on the kitchen table, pounding vengefully throughout the day at an ancient typewriter that rumbled and shook the walls so that cups trembled in their saucers and lampshades quivered.

  Spurgeon’s endurance was remorseless. Pausing only to relieve himself, he beat out hour after hour of Dachau, District of Columbia on his faded keys. Occasionally he broke off to slam out a letter of blunt outrage to the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the IRS, the Santa Fe, to the Writers’ Guild, the Chrysler Corporation, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to William Buckley, and to Sara Lee. Each he threatened to line up against a wall, to burn, blast, bludgeon, belch on.