Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  And this is the dame I’ve been worrying about hurting? Christ! Maxwell’s Silver Hammer couldn’t faze her.

  As for Hank Glyczwycz: All I see is a schoolteacher who’s such a flop his students are trying to get him canned. And why shouldn’t they? He’s morbid. He’s bitter. He’s angry. And he’s probably suicidal.

  Tough Ka-shit-ski, says the Polish-Jewish-Irish bitch, Gloria Glyczwycz. It’s time to save yourself, doll-baby. You’ve been doing okay so far. You’ve been keeping your head reasonably straight for an ex-WASP semi-bastard from Belle Woods, Plastic County, Michigan, in the heart of Amerika. Now is no time to get sucked back into the old blood-ties-are-strongest fairytale. Your fascist mother and your Communist father are nothing but two spooky profiles of the same old head, a pair of matching relics from another age, the Piscean age of super-materialism, when everybody was a producer and a consumer and if he wasn’t goddam good at both, he got bumped off the merry-go-round because he wasn’t good enough to play with.

  Bye-bye, you hideous wretches. Gloria doesn’t live here any more. The pair of you can fuck off!

  Chock Full O’ Nuts, five minutes later

  I’ve just reread the last three pages as if they were the work of some other person altogether. The verdict isn’t nice. Whoever she is, I loathe her guts. Furthermore, I don’t think she makes much sense.

  QUESTION: If her father is such a pain in the ass, why is she always trotting uptown wagging her tail in his face?

  QUESTION: If she lived in the same house with her own mother for 17 years and then writes in her precious notebook that she doesn’t know who her mother is—and means it—what makes her think she’s so bright?

  QUESTION: If both her parents are nothing but worthless poops from a diseased bygone age, what does that make her? Heaven with whipped cream on it?

  And, is this the same darling little lovepuff who thinks she knows how to make over the world? How does she propose to do it? In her own image?

  If my mother and father are only my mother and father—and blood doesn’t really matter any more—aren’t they at least my brother and sister? Aren’t all men brothers? They must be! Because if they’re not, then all the things Roy and I believe in really are false, and if that’s the case

  Leaning on the window at Barricini’s

  Well, I blew it at Chock Full O’ Nuts. Had to leave because I was crying. Been walking all over the Village for 15 minutes, bawling like a baby. Lost, too. Haven’t the faintest idea where I am.

  IN MY ALCOVE AT CANAL STREET, BEDTIME, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1969

  Yesterday morning I told Doris about my constipation and she stewed some prunes for me. I ate about a dozen of them and this morning I actually got a little high from the relief they gave me. After work I took my poor little head up to Will’s greenhouse and spent the afternoon writing pornography, which I later tore up because it was so disgusting.

  In Chapter One, I had this family of scientists trying to colonize the moon. For the first few days everything’s cool, but gradually they begin to discover that outer space is all charged up with these funky rays that work like an aphrodisiac. It creeps up on you until pretty soon your feet are practically cloven hoofs. In Chapter Two, the head scientist and his wife, his virgin daughter, and his adolescent son are all smeared with honey. Then they release the laboratory animals, white mice, guinea pigs, etc., who haven’t been fed for three days and—well, there’s no reason to go into it all over again. The point is that it brought me down from my teensy-weensy high, and left me feeling worse than ever. So I mentioned it at dinner just in case anyone here had any thoughts about what I was doing wrong.

  Cary asked me why I was trying to write pornography in the first place, and I said I’d hoped it might be a groovy way to make some money and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t.

  Nyoom said hard-core stuff like mine wasn’t groovy because it wasn’t art. If it were art, it’d make you high. Art always does that, he claimed, and that’s how you could tell good art from bad. Sally Sunflower said she didn’t believe there was any such thing as bad art; there were just people doing art, and each one’s work showed where his head was at. If your head was in the same place as the artist’s, you’d call his work good. I said, Okay then, how come I don’t like this stuff that’s coming out of my own head?

  Cary said, “We know, don’t we, Peter?”

  “The Integrated Man?” Peter said.

  “Yeah. Tell it.”

  “You tell it.”

  “Okay.” Cary gets a certain glow when he’s about to divulge a spiritual secret. “Peter and I got stoned on grass one night—not stoned, just nice and high—and we came up with this fabulous book that we decided not to write. We were going to call it The Integrated Man, and later I’ll tell you why we didn’t write it. But here’s how it was: In this rap, we decided that people were divided into three parts. There was a lover, a thinker, and a doer. If you had all these parts going full steam at the exact same moment, you’d be at your most beautiful. Because you’d be together. That’s why, in head language, we’re always talking about Getting It Together. We want to have the lover and the thinker and the doer operating simultaneously, because that’s when a person feels the greatest. And the longer you can maintain that state of being together, the more beautiful you get.”

  “And the increase is permanently yours,” Peter said.

  “Right! Because every single second of being together that you have in your life increases the beauty and power of your soul! That’s it. That’s The Integrated Man.”

  Peter said, “Great. Now show Witch how this applies to pornography.”

  “Oh! Okay! It’s like this. Pornography tends to be ungroovy because it puts the whole burden of sex onto your thinker. It gets over-amped, and the doer just sits there panting and slavering. I mean nothing’s happening to your body! You’re not kissing or petting or fucking or sucking or anything. And of course the lover is completely idle, too. He just has to check out, because he’s got nobody to love. I mean, it’s not Rosemary Christ or George Christ or Frieda Christ you’re digging in a dirty book, it’s just these characters using their genitals, right? So! What’s happening is this: Your mind’s getting all these multimegaton blasts of sex, but your body and spirit aren’t helping you assimilate the impact. Am I saying this okay, Peter?”

  “Fantastic. Press on.”

  “Um. What else? Didn’t we decide that masturbating might help a little?”

  “Well, we thought it would at least help keep your thinker from blowing a fuse. But the lover would still be getting short shrift.”

  “Right, right! Have I left anything else out?”

  “We talked about vice and virtue, didn’t we?” Peter said. “About how vice, down the ages, has always been thought to bring about disintegration? So we thought maybe you could define virtue as anything that makes you feel together. And vice as anything that makes you feel untogether.”

  Roy piped up and said, “What about dope? Smack and speed make you feel like you’re together.”

  “Yeah,” Cary said, “but they both lead to bummers. And you know that when you take it. You know heroin and amphetamine and all hard stuff are going to hang you up.”

  “Okay,” Roy said, “but then you can’t really say virtue is anything that makes you feel together, can you?”

  “Well, I suppose not strictly,” Cary said. “I mean if a person digs jumping off cliffs, it’s only a virtue till he hits bottom.”

  “And that,” Peter said, “is why we didn’t write the book. Books on topics like this tend to throw you into think gear. And our book in particular would do something even worse. It’d make you see yourself as all divided up into parts.”

  I could see Nyoom frowning with frustration. He thought he had a new theory for his hungry mind to munch on, and now Peter was snatching it away from him. “Isn’t that your entire thesis, for Christ sake?” he said.

  “That’s the thesis,” Peter said, “and i
t sounded pretty good to us. It still sounds okay. And maybe it is. But I smell some bullshit on it, don’t you, Cary?”

  “Yeah, kind of. It’s too slick. Nobody knows what makes a person tick, not really.”

  “All we know about man,” said Peter, “is that he won’t fit into any system of thought. And if you know that, you don’t go rushing to the typewriter to fit him into one. Unless of course you’re trying to make a career out of snowing people.”

  There was more talk but I don’t feel like writing it down. The point is that I’ve decided to retire from my career as a pornographer.

  A few minutes later

  Wide awake again.

  Jeanette said something during the Integrated Man rap that I’m afraid of losing. She said there were three English words that shared the same Greek roots. (Or was it Latin?) Anyway, the words are heal, whole, and holy, and ever since I turned out the light, they’ve been banging around in my head like silver pinballs in a slot machine.

  When I am whole I am holy.

  Wholeness heals me.

  Health is wholeness is holiness.

  Wow.

  THE SHEEP MEADOW, CENTRAL PARK, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1969— MORATORIUM DAY

  Something superoverwhehninglyfantastic-plus has happened! The entire city of New York has turned on to love and peace. Businessmen, old ladies, longhairs and short-hairs, no-hairs, secretaries, bums, children, even soldiers and sailors. Everyone is wandering around in a spell, as if they can’t believe what’s taking place. I feel I’m participating in an occasion so momentous it would make dancing on the moon seem like a great big so-what. Peter’s at home glued to the TV set. Nyoom talked with him by phone a few minutes ago, and he says the entire country has stepped down out of the skyscrapers to reclaim the earth and return it to the people.

  I’m with Nyoom and his girl, Mary. We’re resting on the grass in Central Park. It’s cold, but the sun is shining. Nyoom is beautiful today in his African shirt, and Mary’s blond head is like a sunburst on his shoulder. I’ve never seen him in such a sweet, open mood. His mind seems to have been blown out of orbit by all the things we’ve seen. He’s not even making any pronouncements, but once in a while he exclaims. A minute ago, for instance, just after we sat down and got comfortable here, he looked around at this enormous crowd, a staggering mixture of types and sizes and colors, and he said, “America is blessed! Why is America so blessed?” And it’s true, it must be. People are still dying, thousands every week, because of us—and yet we’re given a day like today. Fifth Avenue is one long church. Ordinary people smiling at strangers and carrying lighted tapers. But they’re not ordinary. Nobody is. And nobody’s a stranger either. Sally Sunflower is absolutely right when she says everybody in the world is high and beautiful—when they’re given a chance to be. We left her a couple of hours ago at Bryant Park. She and Roy and Cary Colorado are passing out black armbands. She’s been concentrating on the police and so far she’s got three of them wearing the bands right over their uniforms. She says we mustn’t call them fuzz or pigs any more, and I promised I wouldn’t. And I’m not spelling Amerika with a k any more either.

  It’s terrific to be thinking about the world again, instead of myself, and to realize I’ve got my high back without smoking pot. Now I can smoke it again if I want to, and it won’t matter. Last night at dinner I told Peter what I’d been going through—no details, just that I’d been depressed and was seeing it through without dope, and wondered what he thought about it. I set off quite a discussion, and in the end everybody was in agreement. Each of us feels marijuana has helped him become a better person. More open and honest and gentle, freer and kinder and stronger, more forgiving, more peaceful, more optimistic. Deeper. Happier. But the whole point of smoking it is to use less and less, not more and more. Then Peter said something that amazed Doris. He said if pot was legalized, he might be tempted to go back to work again, and use it in therapy. But when he saw Doris’s mouth hanging open, he said, “No, I wouldn’t. I’m just talking. If you know what love is, you don’t go making a profession of it.”

  The irony of it is fantastic. The thing that really qualifies Peter to help others is the very thing that made him stop. And yet, Roy’s father, who hasn’t the vaguest

  WILL’S GREENHOUSE, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1969

  It’s been a week since I started that unfinished sentence, but it feels more like six months. These few days have been the most important days of my life, not only for me but for Roy. And maybe for my father, too—but that’s only a guess. The notes I took are so messy they’re almost incoherent, so I’ve decided to come here each afternoon, after work and lunch are out of the way, and work at least three hours a day until I’ve reconstructed all the things that have happened.

  Thank you, dear brother Will, for providing such a beautiful place for me to work. Your banana tree is having a new leaf. It’s unfolding like a scroll, and it’s the tenderest green I’ve ever seen. The weather’s cooler today, so I’m wearing your blue denim jacket again.

  I hereby dedicate this task to my soul. Each word I write will be a prayer, a prayer that by the time this notebook is up to date, I’ll know what to do next. Amen.

  As I was sitting in the Park with Nyoom and Mary, writing that unfinished sentence, I became aware of a man’s legs a few feet away. And in the next split second several things seemed to flash through my mind at once. I knew those legs were both familiar and terribly important, and that the person who owned them was looking at me, and had been looking at me for a long time.

  It was my father, Hank Glyczwycz. He was standing there alone (is he always alone?), wearing the same old brown knit tie, slightly askew, the top two buttons of his tan shirt undone, his hands in the side pockets of the same old dark brown corduroy jacket, legs wide apart, looking at me. No, not looking. Studying.

  I don’t think just seeing someone has ever made me feel such a wave of truly ecstatic happiness. It was as if God and all the angels and saints got together to give me the Super Zap of my entire life.

  And all I said was hello.

  He wrinkled one cheek into a kind of token smile, nodded at me, and kept right on studying me. Even at the time, I was amazed that being studied by your father could give you such a beautiful feeling. Maybe it was because he liked me, and I could tell it, even though he didn’t say a word and hardly moved a muscle.

  I went over to him and offered my hand. He looked at it for a few seconds before he shook it, and when my hand was in his I had the feeling he wasn’t exactly greeting me, but continuing his study of me. I don’t mind being studied when I’m feeling good about myself, as I was Wednesday in the park. In fact, I enjoyed it. Hank Glyczwycz couldn’t be more different in every way from Edward, the world’s greatest cosmetician, but he did make me feel like a star, radiant and beautiful and unique. I told him I was surprised to see him there. He shrugged and said, “I’m just looking it over.”

  I said, “It’s a great day, isn’t it?”

  But he wasn’t committing himself to any such extravagance. “It’s a day,” he said.

  “You don’t have an armband. Would you like one?”

  “That’s going to stop the war?”

  “If enough of us wear them, it might help.”

  “Okay, I wear an armband.”

  While I was getting one out of my bag for him, I introduced him to Nyoom and Mary. Hank doesn’t have any small talk, and he doesn’t seem to care whether or not he’s being friendly. Chances are he’d like to be, but doesn’t know how. Nyoom and Mary were pretty much wrapped up in one another anyway, so the moment was actually more empty than awkward. I suggested to Hank that we walk around and see what was happening.

  So we left Nyoom and Mary sitting on the grass and wandered off together through the afternoon. I don’t want to describe the whole thing. Going through it once was enough. For me, the whole trek was uphill and the climbing didn’t seem to get us anywhere, certainly not up. Hank automatically takes the negat
ive view of everything he sees. His eyes and his voice always seem to have in them the unspoken comment that all enthusiasm springs from a shortage of intelligence, and of course high spirits are just plain silly. If you think something is beautiful—anything at all—you’re just being duped by appearances.

  But I didn’t give up. I had a tremendous urge to show him the day through my eyes. I guess I wanted to convert him. Down heads often make me feel like this—challenged. I want to make them high. And with Hank I tried harder than I ever had with anyone. I gave it everything I had. I pumped and pumped and pumped. I overlooked his rudeness. I radiated. I smiled. I worked like a stevedore. No, I can be more accurate than that. I worked like my mother works at a cocktail party.

  And the worst of it is that, at the time, I didn’t know why I was doing it. I was just too busy to give it a thought. Too driven even to consider what it was that was driving me. And now I wonder whether or not, if I’d stopped long enough to ask myself, some little voice inside might have told me what was happening to me?