“I’m a bondffi-i-er—” I shout: you can’t shout bonfire and expect to be understood: it’s too unlikely, unless you’ve been shouting about fires.
“Whun—di—(y)u???uh?”
He’s, oh, thirty yards away, uphill, half erased in glare.
We are so suburban, he and I, that we would not really shout even for a murder without blushing and other forms of embarrassment. We have been bribed (and browbeaten) into the low-voiced, self-important, figged-over, spear-pointing phalanx: we consider this the highest form of human manners and probably always will.
He is talking to me at a level almost of side-yard conversation, across the air, down the road, in this light, and with embarrassment because of the pretensions of the houses along this road, and because of the women in them, mothers, watching us, maybe, judging us, judging our manners.
I say, “I’m waiting to see what I want to do.…”
What I said had a friendly charm, local but real; by local, I mean the way it was said, the way it was pronounced: to a friend. I assume he hears charm—male charm, likability. He’ll hear me the way he hears his brother, say; his brother is a well-known lecher in the local metropolitan suburban area. Jimmy’s drawn to that stuff; so am I. He feels that such “charm”—if it works, of course—is power: you can always mock and try to blunt it or twist it away; or oppose to it your own charm, of whatever kind.
I sit down—lowering my bicycle as I go—and then I lie down, pretty much in the center of the road.
Now it is partly charm; like someone in a movie or a popular song demonstrating his freedom, and partly it is the gloomy act of God it was in my head to start with: prone—and in despair—and palpitating with nerves and a kind of anguished belief in a number of things, and willing to accept meaninglessness-and-accident as final terms, sort of, out of an abundance of youthful kinds of strength, but still despairing, or, at any rate, with a dark, even blackish hollowness inside me, a sense of palpitant emptiness, which is what I think other people mean when they say they are in despair.
So, then, here I am, with some carefully printed loose sheets in my head about what I think I’m doing and why, with a basilica’s nave of clarity of memory of me saying I am waiting to see what I am going to do, I am waiting to see what I want to do, and wanting turned out to be both a bleak and a nervously crowded thing and it all ended up here. Maybe it will turn into a joke, me lying in the suburban road, holding my bicycle in one hand by the handlebars, male in a so far spindly way.
I did not want to lie in the road. It’s corny, it’s dirty. I am fastidious and have intellectual pretensions (Middle Western, middle class).
I reach over and unfasten my T-shirt from the bar.
Jimmy is a horrible person in a lot of ways—a lot of ways. Notice that he doesn’t come rushing to see if I’m O.K.; he suspects a trap. He is buried in his own life; he has a lot of rebellious self-love. He sees me lying down and having a death stroke or recovering or having a nervous breakdown; but he waits to see if it’s safe to feel concern or even curiosity: will he be a fool if he offers to help, if he shows solicitude—am I ribbing him?
I mind that, because it interrupts the nobility of my effort to enact freedom and heartfeltness or something. Also, worship of something—goodness, probably. Part of my purpose was that, and also to belong to the devil rather than to hypocritical pieties on this suburban road, et cetera. I think about Jimmy in a spasm of irritation and sadness: Why are middle-class kids so canny? The road stink rises around me; the tar gulpingly pushes against my knobby back. He doesn’t trust me—my moods, my ideas and logics, arguments and beliefs. He lives with safe statements. He has only so many acceptable signals of peace and aid in his active intelligence. He is about as much a romantic adventurer in thoughts and words about love and help as your average Boy Scout troopmaster.
I loathe lying in the road. I loathe most of the would-be important acts and big-time gestures I make. I loathe being imprisoned in things I start. So I sit up and put on my shirt and I fold my legs in a lotus posture: then I unfold them and sit like that on the tarry surface.
The nine-year-old girl and her shrewd- and good-looking, slim-titted and cretinously sweet and suspicious mother are holding each other’s hands and watching me.
Maybe they’re worried about me, both ways, as a possible menace and as someone who is to be worried about because he has to be helped soon if you want to be a nice person about it.
Jimmy coasts crossways across the road and down a bluff.
My mood is an encampment of an army. He’s a mere Carthaginian—no: Gaul.
“Jimmy, where are we headed?” I say. “What does my life mean?” He ignores that, or I say it too blurredly and he can’t figure it out; it’s too unfocused.
He is nearer but still cautiously yards away. He glides on his bike, mostly backward, brakes with his feet, looks at me, looks at the sky, hesitates. How does someone who is not a truth-teller recognize a truth? He never knows why I’m irritable. He thinks I’m strange.
My sense of action, me being a man(ettino) of action, that fades, and my mind resumes its privacy because Jimmy is so suspicious of me. My images are resummoned; they return mostly as fumes of will, they never stay the same for long, but outdoors that changeability is worse, is even foul—although beautiful. To claim otherwise is to lie. To be an invalid and kept indoors is intellectually more honorable. For example, the reasons and mood I had are gone, and I don’t any longer know why I’m sitting on this macadam in humid, smoggy sunlight, in my shorts and T-shirt. I am now martyred by carrying on an act of will that once had a war-bonneted ferocity (and freshness) to it; I have compromised it a dozen times by now; the whole thing is dull and stinking; it’s time to give up, stand up, but that idea (of standing up) becomes sad, an infliction. The macadam stinks and sticks; pebbles gnaw into my thin-muscled butt and the skimpy calves of my legs; the idea of freedom has turned into an outline, penciled and geometrical, that may be colored in, or painted and then seen as containing life—that’s a symbol. Mostly. My existence plunges and filters and buzzes along meanwhile; but I am a prisoner of the drawing, and my life is, too. I mean, I believe in freedom even if it’s only the posture one takes for the fall.
He’s looking at me: I have the sense, maybe wrong, that he’s amused. Charmed, in a way. That’s not O.K. It’s distracting. The landscape, the slope, the wall and tree, the staring women, James, my companion, up to a point, everything is sun-caped above abysses of the hardly seen truth of a gesture, let alone of my works and days. This matches, or simulates, the visual truth, which is that what I see flimmers over or at the rim of abysses: the hardly seen by me—literally, half seen. I see in fits and starts, with emphasis here and there—near abysses of shadows and subsidiary glimmers. The periphery. The at-the-moment Minor Stuff—in which truth might be found. It is the case that I see one thing—Jimmy’s mouth, let’s say—and I hope the rest is there.
I now rise and am half on one knee, undecided about everything; one hand is on the tarmac.
My mouth feels like a salmon, muscular, tugged; Jimmy’s mouth, now seen in this light and at a distance when he turns his head to me, I see as a large dot, or maybe big dash, on his face, but it is remembered, imagined as a mouth, with shapes and colors seen in another light and at different angles; it is as free as a particle in the wind, it seems.
I lay my bike on the macadam: it had no kickstand, and I still held its handlebars. I ganglingly collapse backward, because freedom also means not caring if I break my back or my neck, sort of. I lie panting. Jimmy is now nearer, near enough that I am released from the Roman camp of a kind of solitude; I am unlocked from my head and am aware, or even oppressed, by him, his presence; I can see that he glimpses me and disbelieves: that is, he only partly believes I am doing what I am doing. He now coasts backward some more, on the diagonal, back down the slope, toward me, to the body of glimmer and shadows and odd behavior that is me. Who is me. Whatever. He halts, his legs spread, the
bike heroically between his thighs. On my shirted back, the tar is a bed of cupping, sucking, semimelted octopus tentacles, fatally attached.
I am in a sort of rage of thwarted gesture and I want him to “love” and admire me. To love and to admire are so overlapping, they are just about the same emotion in me, separated by one or two seconds of mental time, seconds in which I blink and compete and do my best with the pain of admiration and try to fit in. I am heartsick but stubborn inside my lying here, and I am lonely because this thing I’m doing seems like metaphysical brattishness pretty much—not entirely—but I want him somehow to help this stuff along until it’s O.K. It occurs to me that one has to devote almost a lifetime to this kind of act (and thought) to make it grown up and really good (valid). I ought to go limp now and be married to this and really suffer. Only pain can validate this, can validate me, and this is hell to know, to guess at, I mean, and to live out. It is bratty, therefore, even if it’s honest of me, to want Jimmy to help—but I insist on being happy sometimes. And Jimmy can make me happy(er). But it is facile and glib not to suffer in one’s truths; they are real acts, and strain the shit out of you in your real moments, and it’s dumb not to recognize that they are true. But it’s facile and glib to suffer all the time; things can turn good without warning, without any warning at all.
I said, moist-eyed, “I am a free man—boy—man.” Then I said, in a very well-educated way but mumbling and local, “It is one of my privileges not to have to be careful to make sense by your standards when I speak.”
I want him to remember that I’m a smart kid and can be—well, trusted, you know. So I had spoken in a really careful sentence. To show I could be trusted—this was out of loneliness, and folly, a cheating on myself, to explain myself as if in a footnote in school. I mean, I heard dialogue in my head—him saying, Wiley, what are you doing? What are you saying? Why are you showing off? Are you being a jackass? I saw this on his face—in his eyes, outlined and bowed and pointy, and in the set of his mouth, and I answered it in the long and careful sentence that he hardly heard. He thought about it and then dropped the effort of remembering and figuring out so many words.
“Wiley, what is it?” he said—as if I’d groaned and not spoken.
It was much more tender than I had expected.
I’d finessed him into it, I’d willed it, but part of the point was also what he decided on when he came near me.
Then he said, “Are you all right?”
“I am—a—free—man.”
“Did you have an asthma attack?”
He wasn’t being pleasant. I mean, who wants medical attention?
He wasn’t being derisive—just bored and standoffish and self-enraptured in his concern.
“Listen, jackass, I don’t believe in manliness,” I said.
Of course, he didn’t know the context, so that didn’t make too much sense.
Jimmy blinked. “Why are you attacking me now?”
“Oh, cut the innocent-bystander crap.” Then I said, “You exist, you do things for people, jackass: my feelings about human freedom don’t make me a jackass, Setchell, whatever you want to think—for your own purposes.”
I add metaphysical overtones to his sense of his own day while he gets along in his canny goings-on.
When I talk, the stuff I’m saying grinds into me as failure and loneliness.
I am falling, in a state of off-again, on-again, blurred, low-key rage for freedom, or whatever it is; and his looking at me in whatever degree of affection or mix-up or incuriosity or desire, or whatever state and mixtures of things he’s in, doesn’t help—the light is behind him, the pale sky; and he’s like the dark nucleus at the center.
We are shirtless again, and bare-legged, bare-ankled: I’m in torn sneakers; he has bicycle shoes.
I can understand his not understanding me when I talk. I’m not a clear person.
He twitches; he isn’t calm; and so, when I see that, I get ashamed, in case I’ve been a show-off and have upset him; but really, you know, I don’t know why he twitches, and, in a way, I am too cowardly to ask, but his life is attached to mine today, for these hours: I’m immune to nothing.
I am not tough—merely mean at times. I stand up in quick stages, segments. I haul my bike upright.
Then he reached over, and I was careful not to stiffen, and he touched me with two fingers on the back of my neck where my hair started and he picked off a piece of tar. The tar was stuck to me, and then it whistled free; and behind it, on my skin, was a burning sensation, insecurely placed, but it did abut on an emotion.
His fingers moved in what I considered to be a Jimmy-like way, like the words in a first-grade reader, careful and clear, so that you don’t get startled by meanings.
But I get startled by them anyway. I am a glorious mirror for other people in some ways, unfortunately—for their heroisms of existing in the real world. I often feel I don’t exist physically, in the inherited world of parents and the like. Sometimes it’s O.K. I stood still, and he went after some of the pebbles that were stuck to my back under the loose T-shirt; I have a skinny back. It’s odd not to be someone worthless. I grew stilled inwardly, pondlike, girlish—I mean with guilt and responsiveness. I really mean with greed and also with a kind of suspicion, and then with stiff gratitude, stiff with resistance because of the suspicion, and then not, but kind of wildly generous, like a kid, but one my size—me, I guess. His fingers are small, considering his size. I’m six one and he’s six two. His fingers taper down and are kidlike in the last joints. “You’re being so goddam tender I can’t stand it,” I said, and he gasped, or groaned, like my dad—as my dad used to, wanting me not to talk. I would guess the tenderness was real, but it’s his and I don’t know what it means in relation to who I am and what I do and what I have just done. I was overborne by the mysterious chemical fires he lit with his acting like this and his continuing to act—with tenderness—while currying me of dirt after my dumb gesture, or whatever I should call it. What I’m trying to get to is to say that this stuff with the fingers, the tender-fingers business, occurs along the lines of the irrevocable, too—the masculine irrevocable.
If he likes me this much, why didn’t he lie down beside me?
Why didn’t he say, Jesus, God, Jesus, God?
How come he’s so stubbornly set on doing things his way, inside his own way, inside his own life?
Why didn’t he give up his own will and his own speech? Look, he’s being so—nice. Medically generous. In each touch, in each movement of his fingers are inspired little puffs of soul-deeps and absentminded-ness, like birds in dust or leaves, forgetting themselves and leaning or fluffing and being almost still: stilled birds in very early morning sunlight. Something like that.
How can I live up to his silly goddam fingers?
How do you live up to anything halfway decent?
How do you live with anything that’s really just about entirely decent?
People don’t stay decent. This is a trap, what he’s doing.
It’s so terrible to be irritated by people. How do you live with people?
The tenderness was already turning nasty. His fingers were getting sharp and quick and gougey. Of course, it wouldn’t stay like that, either, but now his touches were rough and rebuking.
Then he began doing it as if I were inanimate, and my back was his teddy bear or his bike tire; that was O.K., but then it’s not O.K. Frankly, I am not usually in love with him—only a few moments here and there—but I had been for a few seconds: paralyzed, frozen, stilled, or whatever, for a moment there.
If he’d been knowingly physical, limitlessly sexual by a sort of nostalgic implication back toward childhood but with self-conscious purposes and within virginal limits and virginal and whorey knowledges, like a smart kid, it would have been easier. Different. Well, to tell the truth, he was like that, too, but slyly, and with more vanity than confidence. Second by second, he changed, or I saw or imagined a change. Some of what he did was derisory.
Also, I hate being touched.
Finally, I pulled away from him, glanced at him. I suppose he thought it was all nuts, but I kept thinking I was being obvious and that he understood everything—every single thing. And he did, in his way. After all, I am obvious in what I do, and very, very logical.
All over my back and my mind—my consciousness, my feelings—are his fingers, and the tones and senses of possibility and of other stuff, little raw, alive places, not necessarily sane stuff—maybe just kid stuff. I put my bike’s handlebar in his hand—a sort of comic act, a sort of Here’s a toy for you. Isn’t life disgusting? And I glanced at him knowingly, with rebuke. But he’s not likely to get it; he didn’t remember he’d been rebuking; he never did remember things like that. And then, because I didn’t want to do what I did next—that’s first; and second, because the comic thing drove me now, and all the wounded or whispery places, which are growing shabby and vague mostly, but are also burning brighter; and third, because I did love him, maybe, and didn’t love myself yet in my rather handsome adolescence but was learning to by using him, and his feelings about me; and fourth, because it excited me not to understand this stuff, I lay down in the road again.
Now he and I could observe the act of a free man—so to speak—a second time, and maybe it had gone null and wasn’t dangerous anymore, unless, of course, he did understand and would somehow prop me up in being me and doing this, and then it would blaze up, the act and us, masculinity and meaning, maybe men in love, who knows what.
So I did it.
So I am supine and I say, “See—I am a free man—boy—man.”
The last part was just an automatic memory thing.
He said, “You want me to take the pebbles off—or not(tt)?” He was still in the earlier phase, his feelings were still back there; I guess I can say that—and my being supine on the tar now, again, was more an interruption than the next step along the line of irrevocability—and whatnot. The multiple t when he ended not made his mouth into an ugly grimace: this means he is irked, bored, not watching me now, not going along with it—whatever it was.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 63