Dancing in the Dark
Page 5
But at home, at school where his friendships rapidly expand to include scores of boys his own age and older, sports-interested types and in a few cases, another poet or whatever such as he is himself, with girls, at the local ymca on Dovercourt at College, Tom is a model guy. As he also is if they go out to the country southwest of the city to his cousin’s farm, milking the occasional cow, fairly occasional, Tom is an easygoing guy, restless, smart, but with all this tension, or so it would appear, bottled up inside him somewhere, like a small green bottle, filled with helium perhaps, floating somewhere in the open space at the back of his head, like a small green bottle tossed from a ship in space by a careless astronaut.
He is a bit antsy about some things, occasionally strained by ambition, but the sort of kid who looks as if he may become successful and then fool everybody by suddenly deciding to give it all up. He is like that in school sometimes. He tackles a particular project with incredible deep silent concentration and then, when it is finished and successful he suddenly shows no more interest in the subject, although it is possible that he may think about it as a reference. Basketball is different. Basketball is a continual challenge. There is no limit to how good you can be at basketball.
Albertini Garrone, Tom’s ample traditional mother, occasionally suggests that she can see Tom becoming extremely successful in business, she wants him to be a lawyer; for example she is convinced by the time Tom is in Grade 13 at Bloor Collegiate and thriving like a healthy plant that he should have a great career as a leading lawyer, a senator, even, maybe a member of government. She also sees him, for some obscure reason, as going into the steel business, perhaps in Hamilton. Mrs. Garrone has strange pictures of him in some of the different southern Ontario regions, and doing extremely well, making millions perhaps. Canada needs steel. There are opportunities. Most of the Anglo Canadians don’t know fettuccine or carpaccio about how to make good steel. Simple. Because they don’t have any traditions. This was, of course, because her brother, Hamilcar, had been in the steel business back in Italy, in Turin, as a matter of fact.
But Tom, romping through high school and considering college, finally chooses Harvard, which is impressed with his range of extra-curricular activities, writing, ab-ex painting, well, he did a painting once, not a lot, music, he plays mouth organ but lies and says piano and violin, the violin having of course been his father’s (his father’s passion, almost vocation, and eventual destruction – not of the man, per se, but of his stomach, his sense of frustration, the great Latin word frustrere, the sense of sadness turning black and bopping Giuseppe often on the side of the head like an angry mother as he left for work on cold Toronto winter white snow-swept mornings in the great frozen northern metropolis with his black lunchpail and his great thick chunky Italian rye and mortadella – which means death of woman – and tomato and cheese sandwiches); what else? Tom includes farming, nature walks, and soil analysis, also claims to be interested in becoming an ecological or more precisely pollenological expert on the history of the Scarborough Bluffs, that range of crumbling and rugged cliffs, bluffs, which slopes down from Scarborough at the east end of Toronto into the blue nothingness of Lake Ontario, where Tom sometimes sails with a friend, the son of a family whose father owns a construction equipment company but is rumoured to be cosa nostra. “Who isn’t?” says Tom’s friend bitterly, one afternoon as they eat their hamburgers out in the middle of blue Lake Ontario. “Who isn’t?”
Giuseppe gives Tom 2 main gifts in life, besides love, of course, and besides his death, which hasn’t happened yet, and which, when it does happen, will become a dark spot on Tom’s computer screen in 4th year Harvard.
The first of these 2 gifts is Giuseppe Amadeus’s dislike of music, his feeling that music betrayed him, the way some men are about women, perhaps; music had let him down like a faithless woman, a Strega, in a red dress skittering off along the cobbles leading north from the sunlit piazza cafes of the San Borasino in Rome; as a city, his father’s great love, the city itself, its greatness, its prestige, its history, its why not say it out loud here this afternoon in the bright sunlight, it’s absolute like a Papal decree immortality. And so the father, Giuseppe Amadeus Garrone, had given up music, although he was not that bad a violinist, he just couldn’t find very much in the way of gainful employment, being something of a village boy who had come to Rome from Tuscany in pursuit of love, amor, greatness, and perhaps even money, and had finally taken up the trade of a simple brick layer instead.
The second of these two primary gifts that his father passes on to Thomas Eduardo Garrone, otherwise known as The Stick, because he was so thin, tall, and slim some said; but his mother Mama Garrone said, Like a stick, he’s so tall and thin. The second of these two primary gifts was his father’s passionate belief, especially after they had come to America, well, no, not exactly America, but as his father was fond of saying, “Christopher Columbus, who was ours and who will always be ours, and Italian, so, therefore he’s ours, he’s not George Washington’s, George Washington made the Revolution, but Christopher discovered America, he’s not Thomas Jefferson’s, after whom Tom is named, he’s ours, an Italian, like us, a wop, a dago, a good dago, a great el woppo with a big nose,” Tom’s father had an enormous nose, a real schnauzzo; but, as his father was also fond of saying, “Columbus didn’t really discover what we now call America anyway,” and therefore, as he would point out, holding up the big blue and white with fine yellow and red lines map of North America, “what difference does it make if we’re here, in Toronto, where the majority of the good restaurants and tailor shops and small building companies are Italian anyway, or, for example,” he would beat the table with the big baguette of crusty Calabrese bread they cut slices from on the breadboard in the middle of the table, “if we’re down here in New York, where your cousin Sal and his wife live and those battaschardi they’ve got for children; or, for example,” he would move his big square-bottomed wine glass around the table like a Columbian compass, “if we live over here where the boy’s (the boy was Tom of course) uncle Giambattista lives in New Jersey with that huge fat ugly woman from Lombardy who tricked him into marrying her just because she was 6 months in the family way and her father owns a hardware business and wanted very much, especially when his daughter couldn’t do the family dishes any more because she was as I’ve said 6 months, not 6 weeks, but 6 months, apregnento. Ah. What difference, eh, this is all America.”
And his father, all 6’2” of him with flat sloping chest, the big long arms and that wide sloping but outwards belly sitting there in the kitchen with its bright yellow lights on Grace Street and Tom had been God, Jesus, how old at that time, he must have been 4 or 5 at the most and his father would sigh with pleasure with relief with relaxation at the good spaghetti and vitello that his mother had prepared and fold up the map and put it away and consider the object lesson taught and the matter in general more or less closed and committed to passionate belief.
So Tom had this considerable sense of family, Italian past, close-knit neighbourhood, leafy maple & ash trees background, much more so than he had a very clear concept of anything Canadian.
Of course a lot of different things affected Tom’s development and therefore could be called the “groundwork” of the kaleidoscope of events that happened to him as late as 1978. School, reading Jean-Paul Sartre without wearing tinted glasses, a little trouble at customs one year to do with some hash brownies. Nothing serious.
But probably the biggest thing underlying Tom’s sense of ascent and fear of descent, his vestige of volatility from being at the top of the CN Tower, was his affection for his family and their life, and the enormous influence of his grandfather, Albertini’s father, who can’t be discussed here for various reasons, who spoke to Giuseppe Amadeus the III, and implored him to give his first son a new name, which is why Giuseppe had called Tom “Tomaszo,” just to make a difference in the Garrone family lineage.
Light-hearted and sombre by turns, high school leads to
college, and Tom’s first change of city (since Orillia) is going to be Boston. Boston means Cambridge, Mass., where he has been accepted by Harvard.
Previously, going down to the Canadian East Coast for summer holidays or out to B.C., he has always taken trains. Canadian trains. Those 1940s pale imitations of the first great trains of the Canadian north. No longer kept up. No longer a big investment of government or private industry. He has always taken trains. Written a couple of stories about trains as a matter of fact, unpublished, he remembers, in Grade 12 or maybe 11. Sometime back then. When his uncle suggested Tom come back to Italy with him for June and July one year, Tom was nonplussed. No trains. It seemed to be his one weakness, apart from trig and calculus.
College makes him fly, or something does and it’s easy. As easy as drinking a different kind of orange juice. The bucolic pleasures of high school are over. Tom makes the move to the telephone one afternoon, before going to Harvard for registration, picks it up almost casually, reserves an economy flight one-way to Boston. And that’s that. Tom’s ready for travel. It was simple. After registration and settling in, Tom will get on the basketball team (although he isn’t really more serious about basketball than he is about literature, he just likes to say he is), as 2nd string right forward: the basketball team flies to some of their engagements. There is nothing to it. He suddenly seems to take it all for granted.
The last link or thread to that dark pool of subconsciously compartmentalized terror is neatly broken and tossed away, almost casually, like a used Kleenex.
Tom flies to Boston and flies home at holiday periods, unless he is invited somewhere else. He flies to New York for weekends sometimes, although he usually takes a train for the sake of economy. Mastering trig was, despite his high voltage IQ, fairly difficult for the calf. Abstractions aren’t his piano forte. But flying, flying is even easier than making coffee. He doesn’t have much money at college, not like some of the rich blond boys who buy their boxer shorts at Saks, or whose mothers buy their boxer shorts at Saks, whichever. But he will have money later, as it turns out. Some years later. After he begins writing songs.
Once, quite drunk after a late supper, too much bourbon after the beer and hamhocks they’d had together at an outdoor café on Murphy, west of Jackson, walking down a small side street in Kansas City, Mo., a cathedral of some size and some historic shading came up in front of Tom almost as suddenly as a passerby. “St. James,” he said, out loud to himself, thinking of gothic King Street in Toronto, putting out one hand as if to ward it off, “St. James Cathedral Blues.” Although that isn’t the exact title of the song, at all. But it wasn’t the same cathedral anyway and he was a little drunk that night. He didn’t remember the incident clearly, went back to the hotel and slept till 10 a.m. or so, until several days later at which time it struck him as simply amusing, like an odd postcard, or an anecdote someone had told him about a friend.
September, 1977, Diggers are no longer turning up in San Francisco getting haircuts but keeping their wide-brimmed hats. Tom saw them too. Tom saw them on television, and he saw them in LIFE magazine and in Union Square. “Ah, what would America be without LIFE magazine?” he says to a pustuled blond young customs guy a week later at Boston Airport. “I just watch football,” says the pustuled kid, “how long are you staying in Boston?” “I’m at college,” says Tom, “I’m staying forever, for years, anyway.”
He goes first to New York, and then to Boston to attend Harvard, which he has chosen, partly for its proximity to New York, for its crusty longevity and because of its English Department. He goes expecting beer, skittles, profundity, post-structuralism, uplifted plaid skirts, lampoons, study hours, but also, he hopes, the right beginnings for himself as a writer. Perhaps he may become the Italian Chekhov, he isn’t sure. He is up for it, and anything seems possible.
Tom loves flying. Birds fly. Rickenbacker had flown, and waved to America from the cockpit of a bi-plane as he flew past. Lindbergh had flown and waved to the cold North Atlantic as he flew past, waved to icebergs perhaps. Amelia Earhart had flown and crashed in Nova Scotia once, as a matter of fact. Tom has been to Nova Scotia. Tides and lobsters. He caught fish there. Tom flies. Tom loves flying. He likes the 40,000’ altitudes. It makes him think of Dante, whom Tom loves, although Tom is Canadian, well, from Toronto; he is more at home with Truman Capote and Mark Twain than with William Davis. In the same bed or railway coach, or whatever. He packs 1 suitcase and the 1958 battered Olivetti Underwood office model typewriter, gets on an Air Canada 727 and flies first to New York and then to Boston, home of flags, museums, bluefish, and where you get scrod.
Life is effortless. He even drinks on the plane. Sitting with his long legs crossed awkwardly in the tight space, as comfortable as a big Italian seagull. He feels slightly intimidated, glancing over his magazines, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, that he may have difficulty with some of the pass courses in Harvard English, philosophy, for example. He doesn’t realize, looking down at the enormous expanse of bright sunlit shimmering grey blue Atlantic, that the courses will be a snap, a rooster, a piece of cake. He doesn’t realize, there is some inherent modesty in Tom despite his breeziness, what options will turn out to be difficult. He will probably not become the Italian Chekhov. Chekhov was Russian, after all. Things have their place in the world. Tom’s place in the world is to be a serious and innocent clown, a kind of big and awkward, except on the basketball court, polpaccio. The 727 is something neither Shakespeare nor Ariel could have conceived. Life is effortless. Tom has not yet gone seedy on the lower East Side; and, of course, not even had an intimation of Chuck Berry or a hint of Woody Guthrie. He still hasn’t met up with the Desperados, or with demondrummer Bats, or with Whitney.
STARS
Sean Young’s eyes shine out at you like huge orbs
of light.
She is in a pensive mood this afternoon. You feel
you’ve known her for years,
since college,
maybe since high school. She was in a gleeful mood for several days
after the story about gluing James Woods’ penis to his thigh
with Crazy Glue,
but that’s all stale gossip now,
it probably didn’t happen anyway. What was Woods sleeping
on a bench out in the lot in the nude for anyway? Who knows?
We make up stories so that we can have a map involving people.
There are so many stars in the sky it would take you a lifetime
to memorize their different names. Some are 1000 light years
away, some are 5000 light years away,
they are really just small
bits of rock
like bits of the Rocky Mountains,
bits of the Sierra
Madre
floating grey [black from a distance
& burning with reflected
light] & mysterious in the luminous blue light of outer
space. My friend Virgo’s first name is Sean, no
resemblance
although he does have large blue eyes. Hers are a sort
of golden hazel,
making for various allusions perhaps, reflections
in a golden eye, the golden bowl, put a little sugar [what is that
a reference to? cocaine, come in me, which? are you sure?]
Elizabeth Taylor
has violet eyes & walks nude up the living room staircase in
the Carson McCullers film, Brando playing an army captain
confused & beautiful as usual & having trouble with the horses,
the horses restless as hell.
LESTER YOUNG
One of Lester Young’s most beautiful solos
is
“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” I can’t. Give
you anything.
But love has a way of lifting up
on the soft currents of a summer wind & behaving inappropriately
like a red kite. The cigarette smoke is hazy
to fly right through the timbered ceiling
of this small Pennsylvania road house.
My mother is sitting
at a table about ½ way down the room. It’s hot. My father
has gone to the washroom the MENS to wash his face
& probably give his moustache a quick brush with his hand.
It is 1936
& they are on vacation. Roosevelt has been
in the White House for a long time now. The cars are blunt
& they are mostly dark colours.
Roosevelt’s friend Mackenzie King has been in Ottawa
for years. The unemployed workers move across Ontario
in stained work pants & dark suit jackets
with a scarf, but not in summer when they sleep out in parks
& on the lawns of city halls.
Early morning sunlight
on the Pennsylvania Turnpike all those blunt dark cars
moving in a serious line look ½ surreal. Raymond Chandler
is beginning another novel. There are huge food lines
in Pittsburgh. My mother & father have money but are not
always kind to each other. He winks with one dark eye
jauntily. My mother smiles
unconsciously tapping her thick wedding band on the formica
table top. I can’t give you anything but love.
MY EMMA GOLDMAN T-SHIRT
Do you remember that light beige Emma
Goldman t-shirt you gave me one summer?
My friend Susan
Berlin was married to Jeremy Larner for a while
who wrote “Drive, He Said,” taking his title