Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  That was nice and then someone asked one of the other poets there to recite some of his new poems. It was his girlfriend. Who asked him.

  Mulligan turned the music off and this young guy, with a big swatch of blond hair that he kept brushing back off his eyes, recited some of his poems. When he recited, his voice changed, but then Gene found that all the poets’ voices changed when they recited, even Mulligan’s.

  Besides his voice changing, this young guy stomped one foot as he recited, like he was playing the rhythm to it.

  Gene didn’t dig the poems. They seemed very angry, like the poet, and full of pictures that didn’t go together. When the guy finished reciting he gave a little lecture about how all poetry written before the last five years was archaic, and that the poets who still wrote the way poems were written five years ago were dead.

  “Did they all die at once?” Lizzie asked.

  There were some snickers, but the young poet managed a sneer in return.

  Lizzie asked Mulligan to say one of his poems, and named one she especially liked.

  Mulligan had his poetry-reciting voice too, like they all did, but at least he didn’t stomp his foot or keep brushing his hair back all the time he was saying it. He sat there like a regular person would, and even though his poetry voice was different it was quiet and perfectly pleasant.

  Gene liked the way Mulligan said his poem, and he liked the poem a lot, too. It was about an ordinary day, at Mulligan’s place that was formerly a farm but now a poet’s house; it was about Mulligan trying to write a particular poem but being distracted by looking out the window and seeing his wife and children. Without saying so, it was about how he loved them. It was also about how he didn’t want his poetry life and his family life to be separated, and the last line was:

  “Mama, come into my poem.”

  Gene liked it a lot. He liked Mulligan and “Mama,” and they visited back and forth. Gene called sometimes and if Mulligan wasn’t wrapped up in a poem he might fall over and drink or get high with Gene.

  At first Mulligan’s setup struck Gene kind of funny—a farm with a poet on it instead of a farmer. But then he began to see others like it and see how it made sense around there.

  Some of the farms still operated as working farms but a lot of them were rented out or the people had retired and sold the place, it was harder all the time to run a little farm and make it pay. But people from the cities liked the farmhouses and the land around them that provided space if not crops and that had become valuable now, the space itself. Poets seemed to prize it more than ordinary people. There were four or five poets anyway living on farms within a ten or so mile radius of Gene.

  Instead of producing food anymore, the farms produced poems. Food production was mainly done now in huge scientific operations. Gene never saw one but felt the food in super markets didn’t grow like it used to, that now lima beans and corn and spinach came out of the ground in cans with appropriate labels, or in giant freezing chambers the boxes of Brussels sprouts and broccoli and peas grew from tiny cardboard seeds, nourished by infrared rays till they got to be just the right size for scientific sealing and selling.

  So what better use for the old small idle farms than to let the poets work on them, sowing their words out there in the necessary silence, nurturing rhymes with the help of nature and reaping at harvest whole sonnets, odes, ballads, books of poems?

  Mulligan said it was happening not just here but in former farms in Michigan and Oregon, Vermont and New Hampshire. Poets were raising their rhymes and sending them off to market in New York, or some of the smaller new local markets. There wasn’t too big a demand yet, that was the problem, the supply was so huge and the demand so small, but the poets hoped the public might develop more of a taste for their crop, get used to having this other kind of nourishment on their tables, find it good, and get hungry for more.

  Gene liked the poets, and it was good he had some people he could be with if Lizzie wasn’t around, sometimes she liked to be with people her own age, that was cool too. Sometimes she probably went out with those other guys in town she mentioned she liked, and that was fine with Gene. He just didn’t think about it.

  Only once did she mention the other guy, the one she was waiting for.

  Staring out the window at the farmhouse, the fog rolling up, she looked suddenly sad. Her eyes got a little moist, but she didn’t cry.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Him,” she said. “Wherever he is now. Things.”

  “Cry,” he said.

  She shook her head. Blew her nose. Took a tiny white pill from a little tin she kept in her pocket. Swallowed.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “A White Cross.”

  “What’s that?”

  She shrugged.

  “Just your ordinary garden-variety speed.”

  In a little while she was fine.

  That was the only time she ever mentioned him. Except for the last time, when she had to.

  Till then it was beautiful.

  Headlights of Lizzie’s truck on the rutted roads going back in the black nights from Mulligan’s farmhouse, the bumping up and down part of the pleasure, the giggling and gasps, then up the hill to Gene’s, getting out and looking up to see a brilliance of stars, the same old patterns since childhood but closer seeming, more part of the landscape, the land, the personal weather. Cracking up wood for a fire in the kitchen stove, and then to burrow under the old piled quilts and blankets of the ancient bed.

  Him and Lizzie up till dawn talking to Mulligan and Mama, all the old tired stuff new in this new place these new people, sex and childraising, religion and politics. And no one getting mad!

  Gene was surprised to learn about 4:00 A.M. one fine high morning that Mulligan and Mama were both Catholics even though they didn’t go anymore, that in fact there were lots of Catholics in Iowa, unlike most of the rest of the Midwest.

  “Hell, Iowa was started by Catholics,” Mulligan said.

  “Not started, darling, settled,” Mama corrected him.

  “OK, I guess the Indians started it, if you wanna get technical. Anyway they both blew it. The Indians and the Catholics.”

  Mulligan said he and Mama didn’t go to mass anymore since they started having it in English instead of Latin.

  Gene asked why.

  “The last time we went to mass,” Mulligan said, “they sang folk songs. Might as well have gone to a Joan Baez concert. The hell of it is they wanted to appeal to the young, and they did just the wrong thing.”

  Mama nodded.

  “They took the magic out,” she said.

  A new kind of magic had come to town. It was all over Iowa City, posters announcing lectures about it, training programs, initiations.

  The new magic was TM.

  Transcendental Meditation.

  As taught by the Maharishi. Or his Iowa disciples who had learned the magic from him in India and taken it back to spread among the magic-hungry youth of America.

  Some people said it was just another rip-off. Some people said it had changed their whole lives for the better, that because of how they taught you to meditate just twice a day for three or four minutes apiece, you breathed easier, thought more clearly, digestion improved, and you just felt better all around. They even said when you got into doing the meditation you could stop drinking or doing any drugs. The meditating didn’t make you stop, it just made you feel so damned terrific all the time you didn’t have any desire to get high.

  Gene found it hard to imagine such a state unless there was some hitch to it. Maybe they hypnotized you or the meditating itself was a sort of hypnosis that whacked out your mind and made it placid.

  Still, for thirty-five bucks, learning how to whack out your mind like that was a bargain. If you got yourself in some spot where you couldn’t get a hold of any booze or dope you could just squat down and blow your mind through meditation.

  He was tempted, but he didn’t want to do it alone, the initi
ation and all. He wasn’t scared, just embarrassed. He asked Lizzie if she’d do it with him. But Lizzie had already done it. Last year.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t very good at meditating,” she said. “I kept seeing trucks when I closed my eyes.”

  She told him he ought to try it, though, she knew some people who still were doing it and thought it was swell.

  Gene went to a lecture about it. The lecturer told all the wonderful things it did for you, but he said there was no way to explain how to learn it without being initiated, it was one of those experiences that couldn’t be described by words. But he swore it was strictly scientific, there wasn’t any mystical religious stuff to it.

  What the hell. Gene figured it couldn’t hurt.

  The hard part was that even though the lecturer said there wasn’t anything religious about it, that the whole thing was purely scientific, when you went to get initiated you had to bring with you six fresh-cut flowers, a piece of fresh fruit, and a white handkerchief.

  Gene slunk around Iowa City trying to get the stuff real casual-like so no one would know what he was up to. He hoped to hell he didn’t run into Mulligan, or anyone else he knew. He bought a package of three white handkerchiefs at the dime store, opened the package, and blew his nose on one so the salesgirl would figure he was buying them for ordinary purposes, not for anything weird. He got an orange at a little market without any trouble and tossed it a little way up in the air, just like a guy who felt like having himself an orange to eat later on. In the flower shop he pointed to a bunch of some rather anonymous-looking flowers and said to the lady, “I think I’ll have some of those. Make it about six of those.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I see. Getting initiated.”

  “What?” Gene said, feeling the blush come.

  “Oh, we’ve had a stream of people in all morning getting their six flowers. We always know when there’s an initiation coming up, we sell ever so many bunches of six flowers.”

  Gene mumbled something and got out of there as quick as he could, looking at the floor.

  The initiation was held at an ordinary-looking white frame house on a little street in Iowa City.

  When you went inside you had to take your shoes off. Gene hoped that was because it was raining, but it was because of the initiation rites. He wondered if the lecturer was on the level about it not being religious.

  He wondered even more when he went into a little bedroom where a teacher was to give him his mantra, the word he would meditate with. On a dressing table was a little shrine sort of thing with a picture of the Maharishi. The teacher, a regular-looking guy in a tweed suit and tie—but no shoes—knelt down in front of the little shrine and said Gene had to do the same.

  “I thought it wasn’t religious,” Gene said.

  “It’s not,” the teacher said, folding his hands in the attitude of prayer and launching into a chant or prayer or something in Swahili or some damn thing. Gene was kind of pissed, for all he knew, the guy was selling his soul to some foreign devil. He could have just got up and left but then he’d have blown the thirty-five bucks.

  Sha-bas.

  That was his mantra, specially designed for his personal needs. That’s how you got it on with the meditation, concentrating everything on your mantra.

  Gene tried like hell, he did it just like you were supposed to, twice a day.

  He wasn’t any good at it. Instead of concentrating on the mantra, after twenty seconds or so he’d think of all kinds of stuff he didn’t want to think about. Lou. His old man. Dying. He pictured primitive tribesmen in awful-looking masks. He came out of the three-minute meditation periods sweating and needing a stiff drink. After about a week or so he gave it up. He wasn’t pissed at the meditation people, he figured this just wasn’t his kind of magic.

  He asked Lizzie what her mantra had been, the one suited specially for her own psychic needs.

  “Sha-bas,” she said.

  “Shit, that was mine. Maybe they recycled the dude.”

  “No. I think there’s just two. That and one other one. I think they alternate them, as the people come in. But I guess people like to think their mantra is just made for them special, so they tell em that.”

  “Maybe that’s how come I couldn’t get it on,” said Gene. “Maybe they gave me the wrong fuckin mantra. Maybe if they gave me ‘Shazam’ I’d have blown my mind by now and been a regular guru.”

  “Maybe,” said Lizzie. She rolled them a joint.

  After a great Thanksgiving dinner at the Mulligans’, Gene and Lizzie back at the farm groaning fondly with glazed ham, succotash, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and knowing the whole thing was done with Food Stamps somehow made it even more of a marvel, an extra magical feast. Gene said they’d been to such great parties they ought to have one of their own, not just the Mulligans but others, too, Richie and Marian, some of the regulars from Donnelly’s, people from the other poetry farms around. Gene would construct a giant stew with a beef and apple base, and provide plenty of Wild Irish Rose. You always should go with the wine of the country. Lizzie would buy some good hash and whip up a batch of Fruit-N-Crunch specials, a ready-mix she’d found that hash worked best in of all the ones she’d tried.

  Mulligan brought some of his fifties jazz which was good with dinner, sitting on the living room floor with the bowls of stew and then the brownies, but then Gene put “Anticipation” on and they danced with it, everyone, on the slanting farmhouse living room floor, warm, well-fed, friends, flying everyone feeling it, no one denying These are the good old days.

  Gene thought, this is what Home should be like. But it isn’t. Or anyway this one. Isn’t mine.

  The next morning Lizzie had to get in for a class and Gene was still drinking tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce and popping Excedrins when all of the sudden she was back, her eyes large and shocked.

  “You forget something?” Gene asked.

  “He called,” she said.

  Him.

  The He.

  Gene was suddenly sober. They sat down on the sway-back living room couch. His first impulse was take her upstairs, at least once more. But he knew it would be no good, she was sitting there still but she was already gone.

  She rolled a joint and said, “Don’t say anything.”

  He nodded.

  They smoked, looking straight ahead.

  Gene’s ribs hurt.

  When the joint was done she put her arms around him and they hugged. Then she stood up and he went to the door with her.

  “Hey, Lizzie,” he said, “it was good.”

  She nodded, gravely, then turned away, going to the truck.

  He stood on the porch in just his jeans and a half-buttoned shirt, barefoot, not noticing the five-above-zero wind, watching the battered blue pickup start, back out, roar off, to the highway, leaving a cloud.

  Aloud, Gene said, “There went the good old days.”

  He shivered, hurried inside, and retched.

  That night he stayed at Mulligan’s house, and Mulligan said of course he’d drive him to the highway tomorrow if he really was sure …

  “This part is over now,” Gene explained. “Not just Lizzie. Living here.”

  They got drunk on Wild Irish Rose and Gene told Mulligan he had to keep moving now he knew it was right but he sure hoped sometime he’d find a place to light.

  Mulligan cleared his throat and in his poetry voice recited the well-known lines in “Little Gidding” from “Four Quartets” about never stopping our exploring and finally getting back to the beginning and being able to dig the motherin’ place for the first time.

  They both were quiet for a while and then Gene said, “Heavy, man. Did you make that up?”

  “No,” said Mulligan. “T. S. Eliot made it up.”

  “Far out,” said Gene.

  V

  Mulligan gave him an old suitcase, the kind with straps around it, a hug, and a ride to Interstate 80. The sky was flat gray, snowf
lakes stirring. Gene grinned and stuck out his thumb. He thought of the Nilsson traveling song and started singing it, loud, his cold breath coming out in puffs as he sang about the sun coming out through the rain, and his clothes bein’ fine for rain or shine.

  Only a few minutes later a pale blue Chevy skidded to a stop on the gravel bank of the road ahead, raising a halo of dust. Gene ran to it, lugging the big strapped suitcase.

  He crossed the Rockies with a frail-looking girl behind the wheel of a battered Jag, smoking a flat green hash pipe she kept passing to Gene to light again. On high hairpin curves she’d be fiddling with the pipe and a match, sort of steering with her elbows, saying, “That’s the hang-up with hash. Keeping the damn stuff lit.” Gene did not allow himself to look at the speedometer. When they came down out of the mountains he figured he might make the Coast after all.

  At a truck stop in Nevada he picked up a newspaper someone had left on the counter and looked for the date. It was December 2. Hot damn. He would make California for Christmas.

  If they had it there.

  They did.

  There were already big tall Christmas trees lined along Sunset Boulevard. The only difference was, they weren’t green. They were colored a kind of peroxide blonde. A Hollywood Christmas! Gene dug it.

  He also dug the place where Barnes was living. The Château Marmont. Gene had never seen a château before, but this dude looked like a regular castle. Even so, at first he couldn’t find it. It wasn’t on the street, it was stuck in this hillside up above Sunset Boulevard. A sure-as-hell castle with cone-topped towers, like right out of Snow White or Robin Hood. There was even a swimming pool beside it invisible from the street, trees all around so people couldn’t peep in. Barnes was livin.

  His apartment looked out on the hillside in back, so you wouldn’t have any idea you were right above Sunset Boulevard. You might be in fuckin Spain for all you could tell. The main room had a couch and a bed and a table where Barnes had his typewriter and shit laid out. Off it was a kitchenette with a little refrigerator. Barnes got em a couple cold Mexican beers out of it.