As Tripp surveyed the arrival of my friends, he stood by the side, smirking at my characterization of Josey as a witch. “She’s a sweet, tubby Jewish girl from New York; that’s what she is,” he whispered, but once I led them to the basement she did paint a beautiful abstract Moon on a square slab of pine, vibration-like Hebrew letters rising from crayfish in a pool to form the pulsating lunar node.
The outcome was totally up for grabs as we marched to the Glen. But Nelson came through! He had arranged our mandalas amidst ten torches, placed five long candles and two squat ones on an altar, and set metal railroad poles pointing into the heavens. Marty had hung speakers in the trees, so Polachek’s bells and flutes filled the universe with its music of the spheres.
I carried an extension cord and boxes of slides I had culled from the Astronomy, Biology, and Geology Departments to the mystification of professors eager though to encourage extracurricular appreciation of their topics. We set the projector going in a loop—galaxies, flowers, amoebas, rivers, volcanos, craters of the moon, mountains, birds, the planet Jupiter, glaciers—one after another, enormous and rippling on the bedsheets strung among the trees. On the grass, torches made our mandalas shimmer and come alive. Meanwhile the real sky above was full of constellations. From the darkness came the notes of an Oriental temple. Then Nelson read the first of Nine Tales of bright-eyed Coyote, his journey to the Upper World via the tallest tree in Idaho Country, whereby he met his Spider ancestors who warned him that the human race was coming.
“Now this is a real party, Grossinger,” Tripp exulted, collapsing back on the grass with an appreciative sigh. I had bored him in the past by bringing Grossinger’s steaks, barbecuing in the fireplace, and declaring it a banquet.
After a while I moved into the candlelight of the altar. “Why are we out here?” I asked. And I offered glimpses of archetypes, science-fiction realms, and trick-or-treat Halloweens. “We have come,” I concluded, “finally to what we are. Through this ceremony we deny the false carnival colors and adolescent rituals of America, the neon and gloss that douse our lives with fake significance and blind us to our true natures.” I was channeling Jung, Olson, the tarot, Robert Penn Warren, and maybe Zest soap:
It is a belief that we are something more rather than something less, that we are being robbed of that something more, that belief, if any, that should make us listen more closely tonight. Not that we will find it, certainly not in one casual evening among friends, as hardly in one casual life among warmongers. We are merely to be reminded that it is still there, to be stirred again with the haunted fairy tales of a childhood that once seemed filled with a secret and a majesty that the world never became….
That was the overture. Then I reeled in a giant fish I had been trolling for years:
What bothers us are the forces that pretend to know something they don’t. What bothers us about the too-blue Sunoco sign or the over-ripe can of red paint is that they are filled with energy but sourceless…. They are as bright and sparkly as anything lit before our eyes, yet directionless, lacking any sense of the ghosts that fill each of our daily existences.
And there is a source, a great pull of mind-stuff, resting in electric calm out in the bends of the universe, the stars, Orion, Sirius, Vega, Alpha Centauri, cutting loose forces that fill the forces within us….
You are the stuff that the stars are made of; all is not bleak existentialism; there is a temple, a sanctuary…. There is a second self in you like an eagle locked in the belly of a pigeon—and it is incredible if you have not noticed him kicking to be free, to be off and back to the sky….
In truth, we are all like the earth goddess Demeter, searching for the lost Persephone; she is held captive beneath the earth. Our fields; they will not flower. Man has failed where he has not realized that it takes evil as well as good to drag the soul up from the depths, it takes the black temple as well as the white one, the dead baby on the cover of the “National Enquirer” as well as the infinitely more terrible white star that can consume into dust and energy a thousand such sacks of lifeless bones….
I reached my crescendo:
And every black-eyed susan man has worshipped has grown an ugly weed he has tried to cut away, not realizing that it is the balance between the two and the tension formed by the balance that weights and sashes the scale, and the scale holds up the earth on its giant back….
Soon enough we too will be gone and others will take command, expecting from us a Bible and a Holy Grail, and still we may write a chapter of one, and still they may say our prayers before a burning Orion Sinai, and still they may quiz them as forgotten Easter Island gods….
This is our chance to be immortal, the stars overhead our legacy, our eternal to-be. We are stopping tonight to acknowledge these facts, to pause in the middle of a noisy nowhere and reflect on the everywhere all about us, to dance for a second the dance we are dancing every second anyway.
Having delivered my speech I fell silent. Then others read poems and Indian myths and offered blessings, after which we sat watching the slide loop with its billowing images while listening to temple bells. Nelson served cider and cookies.
Harvey was visibly moved. “I want a copy of that talk,” he declared back in the House. “There are people at Bard who will be very interested. Very interested!”
On Sunday night Lindy called to find out how the “great event” had gone. I talked a blue streak … incident after incident, trying to make my speech again to her … until she told me to stop because she wanted to say something. “I had a terrible weekend. I don’t know what I ever saw in him. Outside the city room and Denver he lost all his luster. It was a fantasy, I guess. Will you forgive me for all I’ve put you through, kiddo?”
Three days later on my twentieth birthday I received a pair of communications in the mail. They fit together magically. Aunt Bunny was out of the hospital and her friends were holding a celebration in Manhattan. I also got a packet from Harvey’s teacher at Bard, the poet Robert Kelly; he enclosed a mimeographed batch of his recent work called “Weeks” while indicating that he would like to meet “the author of that wonderful Halloween prayer.” Kelly was a well-known hermetic writer in the lineage of Charles Olson.
The entire universe seemed to be wheeling around me and changing course. I felt a rush of infinite possibility. I called Lindy and suggested that we could manage both events, the party and visiting Kelly, by staying at the Hotel, a perfect median point. That way she could meet Aunt Bunny, see Grossinger’s, and come with me to Bard. Then I held my breath. Her response: “What a delightful idea and invitation!”
Waves of awe and gratitude spilled over me, the precise obverse of panic. The future seemed open-ended, ransomed at last.
On November 5th I drove to Smith lightheaded, an old vigilance taunting me with the dread that she wouldn’t be there. But she was standing outside Laura Scales in her down jacket with her suitcase; she looked at me with her wise gray eyes, hugged me, and handed me a package and a card with a poem, saying, “Belated happy birthday, honey.” The package had a cotton dress shirt, and the poem began:
Who is the spooked left-over wind scaring
on this third day of November?
It’s only herding stray leaves—they keep close
to one another in circling, then open out for
the long stretch down the lawn….
She started to get in the passenger side, but I handed her the keys. She splashed along the snowmelt highway, down Massachusetts into Connecticut while we talked about a hundred things—her break-up with Jim, Aunt Bunny’s homecoming, Kelly’s poems, Jung, Crowley, her terrible teachers at Smith.
My own class there had become a travesty. Stanley Elkin, a thickset, sarcastic man, told us at the first meeting he could never get dates with Smith girls when he was in college so he was going to take his revenge. It was a joke, of course, but it became the effective reality. The seminar consisted of little more than his thespian parodies and denigrations of our w
ork.
He claimed that all stories were about obsessions—no exceptions—and he dared us to prove otherwise. That seemed a cheap gimmick, so I took him up on it. The first piece I wrote was in the style of Beckett, about a man walking down a hall, which was on the Earth, which was in the Solar System, which was in the Milky Way. I described the hall in great detail, but nothing happened:
“Hiya,” said a man on his left.
“Good day. Bad day tomorrow, though,” said a woman on his left.
“Hello,” said a woman on his right.
“Pleased to see you again,” said a woman on his left.
Elkin called it a fake.
“I guess the obsession is my trying to fool you,” I offered.
He barked in the affirmative.
The day before in class, I told Lindy, Elkin had been tearing down a girl’s story. I jumped to her defense. When he said, “You have an antiquated view of literature,” I began to quote out loud from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of William Faulkner, an author I knew he admired.
Lindy and I both knew that sermon well—an artist at the apex of public honor proclaiming that our work was a statement of undying faith against atomic holocaust. At first Elkin tried to shout me (and Faulkner) down, but when I kept going, he conceded, “So the man was a promoter. He had a fine sense of theater. Give him a platform, and he knew what to do. But don’t believe a word of it. He didn’t.”
“Why,” I declaimed, “is it such a crime in these institutions to claim that a work has meaning and touches the soul? Why is there an almost pathological denial of emotion and spirit? These things aren’t the enemy. They’re the source of everything that matters. Yet our teachers mock us as if they were naïve and puerile indulgences.”
We were beginning to see, and tell each other, that we had been taught nihilistically. Witty progressive liberalism was the sole acceptable mode of discourse—a tyranny of fashion that Lindy, with her deep sense of humanity and associative mind, suffered more than I.
We bonded over such conversation and our spirits lifted. As we neared New York at dusk, the years rushed through me like alighting birds. Road signs proclaimed the Westchester towns from which Rodney, Jake, and Keith once commuted: Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Scarsdale, Yonkers…. Across the fields I saw a lit subway, the train I had ridden, its unknowing passengers looking out toward the highway at unknown cars. Despite everything, this was the egg in which I was hatched.
I took over driving and wove through a familiar maze of streets to a midtown apartment. We parked in an underground garage and rode the elevator up.
It was a fashionable affair: people standing around with drinks, Bunny in the center, her attention splintered a dozen ways. She seemed as I remembered her, perhaps a bit subdued. She acknowledged our arrival with a beaming smile. Later she joined us, and she and Lindy talked about her illness, then Smith. I stood beside them, delighted at bringing two great women together. When Lindy went to get her coat, Bunny used almost the words Lindy had written during the summer when talking about herself and Steve, “I hope you haven’t found her too soon.”
A month later she was back in the hospital. I would not see her again for more than a year.
I drove the old trail: up the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge. New York drifted against the River, a galaxy of fixed and moving stars. We whizzed into the uncluttered woodlands of the Palisades, then onto the Thruway, fifteen miles to Route 17 and the Catskills. Lindy handled the final fifty miles, her breezy Colorado eighty. A familiar cluster of Tudor villas appeared over the hill at Exit 101. Suddenly the intervening years seemed an illusion, all disparagements and reproaches gone. I once again viewed the glowing gingerbread kingdom to which a child had come as a waif.
We parked in front of my father’s house, beside the otherwise NO PARKING sign and walked to the indoor-pool building. It was past midnight and the coffee shop was closed, but I scaled the glass partition and opened it from inside. I made us Milty-Stackel milk shakes, mostly ice cream (six different flavors), malt, vanilla syrup. The machine beat them into froth, and we sat on the counter, drinking straight from frosted metal cups with straws, feeling foolish and delighted. Then I gave her a quick tour of the nightclub, the empty kitchens and dining room, and the lobbies.
Emma had left the house unlocked, so we went upstairs to the guest room and lay on the bed quietly kissing. Her whole being was so lovely and sweet I could not imagine stopping, but then she asked me to show her to her room. “Honey, this is not the time. We’re both exhausted. We’ve had a wonderful glittery day; let’s not force the fates.”
She was right. It was only desire that held me to her body, whereas necessity bound me to her friendship and protection. I gave her my room from the summer and took the large guest room with the double closets. She returned in a nightgown, hugged me in bed, then slipped away in the dark.
3
KELLY
It was a bright autumn day, November 6, 1964. Lindy and I walked to the main building, grabbed a Times at the service desk, and headed down the aisle of a crowded dining room. Grossinger’s regulars waved at me as though nothing were unusual. I was with a girl. I had been with a girl before. That was how it must have looked. But Lindy was a girl found elsewhere and she represented everything about me that had nothing to do with the Hotel.
After breakfast we walked the grounds in chill morning, across the golf course to the Lake, back past the skating rink and greenhouses along the ballfields, leaves ochre and burgundy on the trees of eternal return. Afterwards I led her on a tour of the kitchen, past steaming grills and lines of waiters and waitresses; in the process we collected fruit and cookies for the road. We came back to the car and filled it at the Hotel pump.
“The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” I joked. “The next stop, Annandale-on-Hudson.”
She zoomed out the gate and turned left on 52; it was a sixty-mile trip, picking up Route 209 at Ellenville, crossing the Hudson at Kingston. As she opened a window and lit a cigarette, I got out “Weeks” and began reading aloud:
Raven in Chiapas….
wings tensed back
it has swallowed its tongue
in hunger to eat
hunger to cry out loud into the sky I am here
feed me unmerciful gods
who made us feed on shit
feed me because I cry louder….
because I can crack the cheap bowl of your cry with my shriek….
“He is amazing,” she said. “It’s hard to believe we’re really going to see him.”
Robert Kelly lived on the Bard campus. When we inquired for his whereabouts, we were directed to a small parking lot, its driveway ending in a cluster of barracks-like apartments. As instructed, we knocked on the last door. A woman answered. Stocky, garbed in shawl and robes, she could have been a large dwarf out of Norse mythology. She stared back and forth at each of us intently enough to be rude. After taking stock of the ingénue college students, she proclaimed, “You must be Richard Grossinger and friend. Come in. Robert has been waiting for you.”
Already I could hear his voice bellowing from the back rooms: “Joby, is it Richard Grossinger?”
We stepped into another reality, a den packed floor to ceiling with every imaginable size, shape, and age of book and manuscript, some lying open, others with feathers and paperweights marking places. Encyclopedia-like tomes and black binders rested on tables along with unfinished cups of coffee and overflowing ashtrays. Books and papers were scattered all over the faded Turkish carpet. Occult icons, alchemical posters, tarot cards, tankgas, and horoscopes were attached to the walls. It was how I would have pictured Merlin’s lair: a Mediaeval flat that had been inhabited by the same two immortals for centuries.
There was no heat; the apartment was stone-cold. An ancient furnace-like unit with a pipe through the ceiling was either inoperable or, more likely, set at fifty. Across the archway leading to the entrance from which Robert Kelly was about to loom, judging
by the sound, was a hand-made sign with the words: TOMORROW POSSIBLE BECAUSE IT IS.
Though we had been forewarned about his appearance, nothing could have prepared us for a giant or his manner of entering. Well over three hundred pounds and six feet, an unkempt red mane, he transformed scale itself, inhabiting the room by gasping between breaths. He continued to alter space as he walked, like a boulder coming through water.
“Yes, yes, Richard Grossinger—wonderful speech you gave—and—” He turned to Lindy, whom I quickly introduced. Then he scurried us to chairs like a man feeding pigeons. “Is there anything happening these days at Amherst and Smith? I had thought not. And then Harvey Bialy returns with a story of an unlikely ceremony and carrying this magnificent piece of sacred oratory.” He grabbed my carbon from one of the tabletops and shook the daylights out of it.
Collaborating on our response, Lindy and I explained how there was little going on at Amherst and Smith. As we enumerated the courses we were taking and what we were reading, he listened patiently, then indicated he would soon supply the remedy.
He began his discourse in the middle of nowhere, an impromptu sermon on a form of Sufi music he had recently discovered, its relation to cosmic vibrations, citing texts he presumed (quite wrongly) we knew. In fact, for the whole of the visit he seemed to gloss over the gulf between our spheres of learning as if it didn’t exist or, in any case, needn’t deter him from fulsome testimony. His grandiloquence recalled the high language of gospel but, like Olson, a vernacular version with shifts into hip pidgin. As he spoke, Joby interrupted constantly with emendations I didn’t follow, as if everything required her exactitude and footnotes. I had to pay close attention not to lose track or slight either of them.
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