Dancing in the Dark
Page 4
says, “I think you like Alice because he’s
got such a big schlong,”
& she laughs, she’s standing here
on the front lawn of her parents’ summer house in Uxbridge
wearing a sleeveless wide-vent pale lemon yellow blouse
& loose floppy plaid shorts. She has great legs, long & tan,
but you can’t see much above her knees
one of which has a grass stain. I’m leaning over Alice
who has come out to meet me with my hands flat on his shoulders
his big head is almost up to my waist
he’s huge and he’s 3 years old & still acts like a puppy.
There is nothing sexually weird going on here. All the tragedy
in the world is in New York City. They have a monopoly. This is
like west Massachusetts. Sort of, as the garage mechanic says.
The ½ ton pick-up has at least 80 or 90,000 kilometres left.
Kilometres are Canadian miles. I laugh. We have tuna salad for supper
& whole wheat bread.
WHAT IS SIGNIFICANT ABOUT THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL?
“What is significant
about the Contemporary Novel?”
Those moments when we see
one of the characters we met in Chapter 1 do something
unusual,
something that moves the character,
let’s call him Tad,
& the novel as well for a few pages
out of the general coherent OldAmericanNovel sludge
of Dick worrying about his marriage
& Caroline inviting people
for dinner
& Hal & Mark travelling to Thailand
[which by itself sounds interesting, perhaps]
into
a specific module of experience we can identify with
as something interesting – Tom & the Bouncer at the Edgewater
Hotel
down by west Sunnyside; Whitney picking up the cowboy
at Pearson Int’l Airport as she comes back from Germany;
Carol destroying Frank’s total Mac filing system; Carter
shooting his neighbour’s pitbull right through the head
with one clean shot. Sort of like Hamlet, sort of like Port
of Saints, sort of like The Beggar’s Opera. The rest is boring.
MOMENTS OF SUSPENDED BELIEF IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
Novels like The Great Gatsby
cf
the life & times of Jay Gatsby
in the context of American capitalism
do give you
a clear feeling of participating in a sincere & descriptive
essay about financial blood stains on the white table
cloth of our national lives;
but all these chic slim novels
set over a weekend in Mexico
or 2 or 3 months
in the south of France
or some indeterminate period of time
in Berlin –
Berlin without, as far as we can see,
the almost dizzying hugeness, conflagration of odd scraps
of diverse dispossessed humanity,
the darkness of Berlin
at night, the other-planet sense of far off lights red yellow
white blue winking at you from different boundary lines. Other
questions come up – is Sarah really a woman just because
the novel is written by a woman? Is her husband Gerald an engineer
or was this just a fancy on the part of the novelist. What most
of these novelists are doing is merely suggestive. The blond
husband with a large moustache
who is supposed to be an engineer sounds like a carpenter
or an office manager.
The landscape of Mexico never appears.
BLUE SKIES, 78°
When he was 12, Tomaszo Garrone, Tom, The Stick, because he is tall and thin with a big sad irregular face that breaks into unexpected smiles at the drop of a hat, had a bizarre encounter. It wasn’t his first bizarre incident, but perhaps the first involving extreme heights. The incident will mark him in various ways for the next 20 years of his life. Although later on, age 27, in Texas, where he has landed, his sexy, angsty friend Whitney, genus female, species angel, will suggest that there may be some relevance to this early experience; and Tom will get indignant, red-faced even, and deny her assertion outright. Almost as if she had criticized his intelligence, or suggested that he only loved her because she kept rejecting him, or she had said that he wanted sex with his mother. Surely for an Italian boy, or an American boy, probably the worst of calamitous venial sins.
Toronto is different from the rest of Canada, something like a northern Chicago without as many steel mills. Tom is living on Grace Street with his parents in the large sprawling Italian sector of Toronto, and attending Michael Of All Angels public school on Dovercourt Road. He is fluent in English, speaking it from childhood although he was not born in Canada, he came here, at 6 months, not in his mother’s but in his father’s, Giuseppe’s, arms; Tom even speaks a little Latin, tall for his age, which seems oddly indeterminate, freckles, dark, sort of handsome for an awkward boy, with a very determined chin, a polpaccio, a calf, pale. But the calf loves Toronto more than Orillia, which was Stephen Leacock’s summer home; Toronto is larger, bustling, sprawling, full of new sights, smells, people, streetcars, things to look at.
(He doesn’t know the city very well yet, but is hotly, moistly interested in everything about Toronto. They, the Garrones, including Tom’s sister, Fran, and his younger brother Paolo, have moved from Orillia, where Tom’s father was employed as a day labourer in the Caterpillar factory. Tom hasn’t really settled in yet. It takes time to settle into a new school, and time is an infinite, and infinitely fine, white elastic band that stretches somehow in the upper strata of blue air between southern Calabria, where a man will take a loaf of bread in one hand and a knife in the other and sit down to have lunch. Tom has 2 or 3 friends at school, a mixed school, some Italian, no one from his region, several Romans as a matter of fact, a beautiful angelic girl from Turin, a lot of Anglos, all indiscriminately dismissed as Anglos, some Polish kids, one Jewish boy who wears a yarmulka to school on Fridays, which is their Sabbath, apparently. There are 2 Chinese boys, brothers, the older one is George, the younger is also called Tom.)
So anyway, the encounter, which will eventually be reflected in Tom’s life after college, and in various songs he will write during that intense concentrated period at age 27 when he does pretty well almost nothing except write songs.
Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice, as per usual. It is October, Indian summer month in southern Ontario, when everything is crisp and pleasant and sunny; and it is still 1972, it will be for at least another 6 weeks. Not the year of the first dizzying dizzy dean erections, that was last year, before March, sometime before spring, when the sap began bursting in the Orillia maple and elm and evergreen trees; Nixon and America are still in Vietnam. American television and the CBC are still observing the landscape, usually showing rice paddies, not napalm.
Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice at a local church, big for his age but fairly innocent, innocente, and he runs into 2 new school acquaintances, Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty. They talk bicycles and fart around and jam a bit at the corner of Ossington and Bloor; and Tom winds up being talked into a quick subway visit to the much-publicized CN Tower south of downtown on the Lakeshore.
Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty, an Irish kid, take Tom up to the top level of the newly built CN Tower south of King Street and, as a joke, a yoick, a kibitz, harmless, nothing serious, 465’ above street level, despite the fact that he is tall for his age but also skinny and ambivalently bold and shy, they hang him out by his heels over the 5 ½’ glass-bricked – from Pilkington & Co., world famous for the best glass bricks in the world – guard rail, holding h
im there above the city, his huge dark grey eyes full of traffic, streets, and a confused image of the infinite blue lake, for a full 5 minutes until a redhaired young 25-year-old security kid originally from St. John’s, Nfld., where, listen you miserable fuckers in Mississippi, the most experienced serious drinkers and eschatologically good-hearted barroom brawlers in North America drift around a famous street – it is called Duck Street and has 350 licensed bars and emporia plus a fantastic view of St. John’s Harbour where nobody makes any money, except for the Lundrigans – intervened and stopped them. They would have stopped anyway. Spud and Billy weren’t crazy, probably not even retarded. Billy F eventually went through Meds. Spud Arnetson never got higher than a C-minus in his life. They were both fairly normal kids. But Tom was eternally grateful to the redhaired security guy, subconsciously, that is, for the rest of his life.
Life goes on. Tom is still friends with Billy Flaherty several years later around college, but is never friends again with Spud Arnetson. Spud becomes a goof and a car thief, other boys are big on sports, as is Tom, basketball at least, and Tom and Billy both tend to be A students. Tom fits into Michael Of All Angels with a sudden classroom flair. He performs when the priest’s back is turned. At home, he eats his mother’s pasta with great gusto. He has erections, hard-ons, boners, because of his sister Francesca, often known simply as Fran to friends later on in high school. He gets surprisingly good marks in English (Italian he speaks at home, French he finds boring, Latin seems to amuse him, as if filling him with some enormous private joke: in fact, he and Billy F will often greet each other in the corridors of Bloor Collegiate years later or in the washrooms or the gym with various select and quite complicated Latin phrases, sometimes added to or stretched with phrases in Toronto pig-latin, sometimes just by themselves, sui generis, pure as the driven rain, etc.).
Billy Flaherty isn’t the only close friend Tom makes as high school advances. There are other boys. Francesco, Frank, Abalone, also Italian, becomes a close associate. They are both interested in science. Abalone has a remarkably beautiful older sister, Dolores, who is lush and sardonic and precocious compared to Fran who is simply a very attractive “good girl.” Martin Kemmel becomes a close friend. He lives over by Dovercourt Road. They play baseball together at Christie Pits in the summer. Tom hasn’t focused on basketball yet. He hasn’t come into the last 4 inches of his height. The four of them plus several other boys, several girls: Knish, because she kisses like a potato, but who is attractive and lets him feel her breasts, bare, from swell to nipple, feeling swell, nipped indeed, in the Alhambra theatre; Bonny Rattigan, who is a tomboy but terrific, and goes everywhere by bicycle. The boys love seeing her approach, of course this isn’t a winter memory, it’s what will become a summer memory, but they also love watching her disappear, blond head down, bluejeaned buttocks a work of art oscillating above the blurred CCM spinning spokes. Who became a surgeon out of St. Michael’s Hospital at the age of 26. Who masturbated Tom to orgasm in the tree house behind his friend Kemmel’s. Who took him in her mouth. Who collected stamps, and prized the large triangular Ukrainian stamps because her first boyfriend in high school was of Ukrainian descent, dark, and name of William.
When Tom gets in trouble with Mr. Robertson over the burning textbooks question, it is Kemmel who comes to his aid and provides a foolproof alibi for him. When he fights Jake Dentner out in the schoolyard back in Grade 11 one afternoon out at the wide back of the school, hot sunsoaked gravel looking south over Dufferin Race Track, it is Billy F and Frank who move in and push Dentner’s bulky older friends Bob Stewart and Al Kochins out of the way, saying, “Com’on, they can handle it. Mind your ass.” And Kochins and Stewart had done exactly that. Minded their big asses.
Tom likes to have fun, likes to make his moves, is not conceited, not entirely inconsiderate, but he is fun-loving to excess and is always conscious of perfection. Perfection is a rising exhilaration like the red mercury in a barometer, which is another tower image perhaps. As an image perfection is always part of a juxtaposition that involves status, a form of height, after all. In other words, he is lazy in a sense, but is also competitive. Given to daydreaming, but not always sure of what to do when he is completely on his own. So it came to be said at Bloor Collegiate after Tom left, that for Tom Garrone perfection was something that came out of free flow, free fall, perhaps out of an almost oblivious intelligence, hitting and missing and then hitting again, hopefully to score a bullseye, gold ring, or whatever, but always striking out in the blue air as if to achieve something.
Another experience that happens to prevent Tom from simply evolving as a perfectly normal, slightly tall for his age high school student, is Cesar Pavese. Cesar Pavese is the great Italian writer of the late ’30s and 1940s, a handsome, slightly weathered, slightly sardonic man with dark hair pushed back from his forehead and steel-rimmed glasses. He is a poet and a novelist. He isn’t a Marxist, but he has basic political attitudes not that far from Marxism. He is a good writer and a compelling figure. Pavese comes to Tom in the form of a vision, or, to be fashionable, a sort of brief hallucination one afternoon while Tom is reading in the Gladstone Public Library.
Tom is walking over to the geography section to pull down a book on Africa, and he suddenly has an intense graphic sense of Pavese, whom his uncle has mentioned once or twice, whom his mother had seen at a cafe when she was in Rome for some reason, and whom Tom has read a couple of stories by; Pavese is in the library, standing between Tom and the shelves, hands in pockets, slightly rumpled, casual, an attractive man with a touch of bitterness emanating from the corners of his shapely mouth. Tom stands there in the library, transfixed, for at least 5 minutes. 5 minutes is a long time. It is to become one of the important recurring measures of time in Tom’s life. 5 minutes is the length, before cutting down and arranging, of the first draft of the songs Tom will start writing at approximately age 27. It is also the maximum amount of time that he can devote to thinking about something that has nothing to do with himself.
What the Pavese incident means is that Tom suddenly decides he wants to be, eventually, when all the high school and basketball and immediate circumstances are over, a writer. Not like Pavese exactly, but a writer. Something, like Pavese.
This is a serious question because he knows even before he begins to read everything Pavese has written, including some work in Italian which he struggles through, it isn’t available in English, that Pavese has committed suicide, not like his father who dies in an “industrial accident,” and has therefore broken the Church’s most serious taboo.
The Church, although Tom wasn’t intensely religious, he was more religious, if anything, about the exact layout of the slam-dunk, could not denounce anything more severely. This is serious, sure, but it does not dim Tom’s intense admiration for everything that Pavese has written in his short but brilliant life, or, for that matter, Tom’s interest in the women, photographs even, who had loved Pavese.
Fools that they were.
So what did the bizarre incident described here with Spud and Billy Flaherty have to do with various other parts of Tom’s developing life?
Girls, for example, food, surely it didn’t change his appetite, or cars which he later collected, potency, planes, trains, ambition, his idea of history and incident, perhaps, or his enormous surge of feeling for that moment in Mahler’s 1st when the horns begin to brood with sexual joy, like swans?
Girls were not Tom’s problem in life. “Women,” his uncle Giacomo once said to him “are like the flowers of the field.” Tom thought this was pretentious. Giacomo smoked his cigar on the front porch at 246 Grace Street, although older Italian men don’t usually smoke cigars. Giacomo was in business. Tom thought his uncle’s view of women sounded like an older man who wants to look at a lot of girls on the street and admire their legs or their backs or their dresses. The girls Tom knew, and he thought largely in terms of the girls he actually knew, as well as the women he read about in books or magazines, were not ver
y much like the flowers of the field. What field? What he knew was school. They were wild, shy, irascible, horny, hornier even than Tom at times, committed, uncommitted, vengeful, vivacious, exuberant, self-determined, but always attractive. They were challenging, some of them even talked about feminism. Sure, he thought sometimes, more jobs for women. How about for women like my aunt?
But they were not achievers in the sense that Tom, with his big DC 10 (forget the DC 10, if it’s a Delta, it’s a problem), with his big 727 Al Italia ego, was an achiever.
When he jumped for the basket and got the slam-dunk to break a tie in the middle of a game between Bloor and Riverdale, arch rivals, arch maniacs, for example, or when he got 99 in Geography which was a subject that fascinated him as literature, in its literary form, but bored him to tears as a classroom subject – then he was at the centre of a sort of blue sky where the sun seemed to be perpetually shining. The Spud Arnetsons of the world, or whoever it was at the back of his head, could not touch him. He lashed out with one large Nike-shod foot and Arnetson plummeted.
Tom loved Wendy Taylor, Bonny Armstrong, Helen Hrtanak, Joanna Murphy, Grace Solipstano, and Maria Gevalado. Loved them at various times wildly, into a confusion of sheets which slowly became an intense, almost white world of night and day combined.
Tom’s view of himself as an athletic but fundamentally literary type will change, although naturally he can’t foresee this as yet, probably after he meets the Desperados for the first time in a little bar down on the lower East Side in New York the Bad; but his interest in achievement and his inability to deal with it will continue. His desire to write great stories, about Life, his life in Toronto, the Italian community, Frank Alberfetti’s vegetable store, Paolo Strematti cheating on his wife. That will change, that’ll change.
But his confusion about women will probably remain the same. There will always be two of them. One fairly traditional, the other more postmodern than Gucci. Tom will romanticize both because they are women, because they were not at the Tower on the day of his mishap, but they were, in a sense, at home at 246 Grace Street when he arrived that day. So. He will romanticize both of them, and will often lie awake at night, his long body stretched out like an awkward swimmer, kicking the cool sheets into a world of white confusion.