And that was the dilemma. Mitchell nailed it: so much feeling, such textures of sadness, such tenderness for Frodo, the cleansing dance of Holst’s Neptune … all beyond remittance or claim.
We reached the last quadrant of August. The Workshop disbanded. Lindy and I were going to drive straight back to Massachusetts, but her mother insisted she come home for the three weeks before school. We packed the car at night, wound down the mountains at dawn, Frodo in a cage, Welton and Elsie in the back seat, their luggage tied to a rack. They would share the driving east with me. Frodo would stay in Denver and come to Phi Psi with Lindy on the plane.
We set her down in the sunshine of Lindy’s backyard. She bounded across the grass and stopped at the fence, sniffing, considering the new setting. No aspen bark, no chipmunks, no porch. She charged through the glass door, reentering the dining room as she had our cabin hundreds of times, like a bull in the ring. It was excruciating to watch. There was nothing I could do. Summer was over.
Lindy’s parents were visibly uncomfortable with our presence so, past three p.m., Welton, Elsie, and I retreated to the car. “Drive carefully,” Lindy said, “and I’ll see you back at school” She gave me a parting hug and kiss.
My heart sank as the bigness of the highway and flatlands east of Denver met us. It’d been so much easier to drive West with a tailwind of hope than to return East against a headwind of qualms. Something deep and hollow was sucking me in. In fact, a purplish black disturbance arose in the distance as we approached, gusting against the car. The blankets covering the luggage began to flap, the vehicle veering from their unintended sail. I pulled over onto the dirt. We stood outside, getting drenched, tightening buckles, retrieving odds and ends to inside, tying the rest back down. The moon was out by the time we began looking for a place to eat—McCook, Nebraska, 260 miles east of Denver.
“I’m not hopeful, but we’ll take our chances,” Welton announced, as we pulled into the first viable restaurant and ordered hamburgers. We were exhausted and disoriented, having been up since sunrise. Before we realized it, a bunch of townies had surrounded our table.
“Who are you all?” they asked. “Where’re going?”
They didn’t overtly threaten. In fact, they invited us into the back room for “the show.” We followed, Welton remarking, “Just a little bit now ’cause we gotta get on the road.”
The makeshift theater had an audience of about two dozen people, young farmer boys and their mates. On a small stage a guitar player, visibly drunk, struggled through a song.
“He used to be with the New Christy Minstrels,” someone told us. “How do you like him?”
“A whole lot,” Welton said.
Then he flashed Elsie and me a sign. Five minutes later he tapped my knee; I tapped hers. We stood and marched out of the room, quickly through the restaurant, the guys breathing down our necks.
“Hey, the show’s just starting. You haven’t seen the best part. Don’t you like it?”
We scampered into the car. I turned the key at once. As we hit the highway Welton sighed, “Guess seeing a nigger’s ’bout as much recreation as they’ve had for a while. But I didn’t want to entertain ’em anymore. It could get nasty fast, I’ve been there.”
He told me not to stop unless I got too tired. “Or you hit Iowa City,” he added with a laugh. He was afraid the guy who had sublet their apartment was going to sneak off without paying, so he wanted to arrive early and unannounced. He also wanted to put a few hundred miles between himself and McCook.
I had the energy of the summer behind me, and night was friendlier than day. I drove until the sun wrote its signature over cornfields. In the rear view I caught a glimpse of the stranger I had become, how the summer had begun to shape a man who might yet exist. I had always feared looking like this—wild-eyed, unshaven—but I had waited, mostly without hope, for such a self to be born. Exiting as requested, I pulled into a parking space and announced, “Iowa City!”
“You must be kidding,” Welton coughed, rubbing his eyes. I had driven for eight hours and covered 535 miles. He had a friend there, a black professor who taught “the Bard of Avon, of all things,” he scoffed. We spent much of the day with the guy, took his tour of the town, then lay by the river, subletter temporarily out of mind
“It’s fine, man,” Welton told him as we shook hands after dinner, “but you gotta lose that cat Shakespeare.”
Now Welton was driving. I collapsed on the back seat, having been up more than twenty-four hours. I didn’t wake until Indiana.
We sped through Ohio into Pennsylvania. The land got greener, more familiar to East Coasters, what we had known before we dwelled near timberline. The songs were “The Eve of Destruction”; The Toys’ “A Lovers’ Concerto,” “How gentle is the rain…. ”; The Four Seasons: “Let’s hang on to what we’ve got…. ”
We were suddenly in New Jersey, approaching the City at light speed. I was wearing jeans and a work-shirt. I was still in Aspen as we pulled up to the first traffic light beyond the Lincoln Tunnel. One thousand miles covered since the Iowa River.
I saw New York from our cabin, through Frodo’s eyes—Frodo the hobbit and Frodo the cat.
Stone and filth. Madness. Claustrophobia. People sitting on ledges outside brick buildings, portable radios blasting, torn billboards. My return was as miniscule as a piece of soot.
“Abandon all hope,” Dante had written, “ye who enter here.” So the City fused and filled my heart with dread, not of the people living there but of what I had been. No sweet nostalgia of origins, it was as anchored and sodden as lead, radiating more malignancy, almost more than I could bear. I shrank into my own tattered ghost.
This was the panic too; it always had been.
I left Welton and Elsie downtown, a day too late: the subletter had flown the coop. Then I drove to Central Park West and 90th, to the people who had once been my family. My mother approached in astonishment; she touched my face, her hand frigid. “What’s happened to you?” she uttered, as though staring into my coffin.
I told her I was fine.
“Look at you. You’re unshaven. You’re pale and gaunt. When did you last have a check-up?”
I stayed overnight and fled a hair’s breadth ahead of Mordor’s shadow.
Grossinger’s was in full flower, buffet tables crammed with cold meats, a Yiddish comedian on the patio prattling through his microphone, a haze of perfume and tanning oil. The same crowds moved from cabanas to coiffeurs in a lobotomized buzz. It may have been paradise once, but George von Hillshimer was right: it was a gaudy and devious hell, especially after my summer in the cabin, Lindy at her typewriter, cups of tea, Frodo bounding across the floor.
Aunt Bunny was gone, and my father wanted no part of me. I figured I’d get a lecture, but I hoped he would at least be glad to see me. He was indifferent; he reprimanded perfunctorily, then stared right through me. I knew there was no way to explain where I had been. He said he would pay my college bills for one more year; that was it. I could do what I wanted with my life. He would have no part of it. I had run away from my mother, now I had run away from him. He would not forgive that.
It was never a matter of two families fighting over me. I was orphaned by both.
All through that week, guests, executives, and assorted relatives told me I looked haggard, like a vagabond, like something that just got off the boat at Ellis Island—but I was alert, I liked the feel of myself. Their real grievance, I knew, was the fierceness with which I guarded my new shape, unshaven, blue work-shirt. I wasn’t confident enough just to relax into it, so I tramped around, bristly and unyielding. I had become Schuyler (or Scotty) at last.
I drove to Woodstock to hear Kelly read and afterwards went to dinner with him and his two “wives” (he was living with a young girlfriend now as well as Joby). He was delighted with my tales of the summer, and he hoped Lindy and I would be by to visit him. As I left he called out, “You are finally beginning to look like who you are.”
&
nbsp; Lindy’s first letter was dated August 30th and came to the Hotel:
Dearest Rich,
Things are okay. I miss you a hell of a lot, more than I thought I would. I am terribly aware of things. I have sat and talked with both of my parents for each night, telling them about Aspen and what’s wrong with it and all the funny stories I can remember. Almost no mention of you by them, but frequent mention of you by me, of course. They are mainly wary and afraid of what they don’t know about you, as they would be with anyone.
I MISS YOU, BABY.
She told me her plans were to head east as soon as possible and join me, and she closed with: “I’ll write again soon. I love you, honey …,” the stick figure of a happy dancer sketched beneath her name.
That letter is now a torn, refolded relic: I carried it in my pocket for weeks, reading it again and again to remind myself that Aspen really happened. A second letter came a few days later. She said that she had to be frank—people who argued as much as we did were not appropriate lovers. She had found Steve again. She was going to be staying on in Denver an extra week.
I drove back to New York, but bad things were happening there too. Welton and Elsie, it turned out, weren’t actually married, and Elsie’s father had come to their apartment and chased Welton into the street with a gun. “A guy from Great Neck in a 1936 Volkswagen would like to murder me,” he announced as he let me in and quickly re-latched the chain. “I can’t feel lonely anymore.”
Elsie was hiding on the upper West Side, and Welton had his TV playing nonstop upside-down. “Maybe you and Mitchell know something,” he explained. “I need that McLuhan magic now.” It was an old Western, horses and riders galloping off the top. He had finished his poem for us and handed it to me:
richard feels angels battling over our heads
discharge the froth that clouds our lives.
the number of conditions, the case, the gender,
are irrelevant….
He left the TV on as we went onto the street, found a beer hall, and ordered a pitcher of draft. The room was so smoky I could see particles shifting. I shared my lamentations while we drank.
the number of conditions required for my murder
is equal to the number of independent constants
remaining at the end of vesper….
“What Lindy is we call ‘Phat!’” he suddenly offered. “Some girls are like that; they got your soul. You don’t see any other girl. You’ve either got to get with her or get your soul back.”
“What if I don’t do either?”
“Then you won’t live.”
The jukebox was “Eve of Destruction.” Barrels of peanuts lined the walls. We ate those for dinner—like everyone else, throwing the shells onto the floor. And Barry McGuire pounded out the theme of the hour:
Don’t you understand
What I’m trying to say!
Don’t you feel the fears
I’m feelin’ today!”
There was a cinematic beauty to my situation, its music a soundtrack of angels, an unborn tree alphabet veering by indirection toward something that could not yet be alive. The words, I thought, must mean exactly the opposite of what they were saying. And they gave me a grim satisfaction, pitched as they were, appropriate at every level—and at last being spoken:
If the button is pushed,
There’ll be no running away.
There’ll be no one to save
With the world in a grave!
Welton peered up and down the street to make sure no Elsie’s fathers were following him. Then we hiked from the bar to a nearby loft where a poetry reading in progress featured Paul Blackburn and two younger writers, Ishmael Reed and Ed Sanders. We sat in the crowd along the wall, taking it in for over an hour. “Enough about the effect of the second crusade on the uses of alliteration and assonance in poetry,” Welton finally snapped. “It’s my turn.” He waved to his friends and, on their acknowledgment, took his place at the pile of coats that passed for a podium:
this
is a note
to an old black couple
in a backwood mississippi church
shouting happy stomping
sending their songs
shining their light …
I could see the fire and hope in his eyes, the desire to establish his legitimacy, to have his moment. His voice danced with jazz and harmony. I thought he was beautiful and proud, a combination of Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, and Ray Charles:
in me
in the san francisco streets
in me
in the new york high glass
in me in my time.
I looked around and so wanted Lindy to see this, to hear Welton come home to New York … be chased out of his home by a honkie with a gun, then appear in a loft and stop the show with his song.
in harlem in black hands
holding red roses
in the fibers
of my hair in my breath
in me flowing
thru the world
in me to another backcountry
child that i see
on the sidewalk
shouting black happy …
I called Lindy afterwards, across the time line, to tell her about Welton and Elsie, Kelly, and the great reading that night. She gave me her flight number and said I could pick her up if I wanted, but—no trips to Kelly’s or Grossinger’s—she was going straight to Smith. She added that Frodo would stay in Denver with her family and have a decent home.
The next morning I drove back to Amherst and moved into Phi Psi. My room was the same single Jon had had sophomore year.
2
ANGELS
I needed two more English courses to compete the requirement for a major, so I signed up for both Romantic and Modern Poetry. Otherwise, I followed Kelly’s injunction to study real things: Biological Anthropology, African Folklore (which convened at Smith), and Attic Greek.
Embarking on a new language, I began by learning its alphabet— alpha, beta, gamma; xi and psi; mu and omega—ancient letters that put me back with the white goddess at the origin of language. Next I memorized basic words: “Logos”: speech; “anthropos”: man; “hodos”: road; “angelos”: messenger; “thalatta, thalattes”: sea; “klopes, klopos”: thief. My Greek declensions and conjugations, though comprised of new hieroglyphs, bore the templates of Latin ones which I had studied for years with Mr. Metcalf.
From Kelly’s reading list I selected The Holy Kabbalah, which resurrected another primeval alphabet with childhood resonance. Hebrew letters, wrote Arthur Edward Waite, emanated from the Mind of God in the Creation of the Universe. Beth, gimmel, and lamed, a church, a camel, and an ox, respectively, were also the flames behind the lights Jonny and I lit on the menorah. They spelled words on one level; on another they embodied the ongoing genesis of matter and spirit into form. As primordial symbols, they continued to spill into the world moment by moment, as wavelengths of light, as molecules, as cells, as tarot keys, as archetypes, as stations on the Tree of Life. Kether, the Crown, was the Apex of Creation, the initial frequency of matter. Yesod formed the base of the autonomic nervous system. Chesed (kindness) fused God’s love for His Creation with Creation’s adoration of Him.
These alphabetic shapes, harbingers of subatomic particles, were originally entrusted to Adam by the angel Raziel. In Eden he probed their mystery as well as their novelty—a forbidden act. When he and Eve were banished for their crime—not the biblical cover story of a snake and an apple but the breach of Pandora’s jar and release of its bottomless darkness into this world of shadows—he smuggled them into their own miasma. He lost them in its wilderness. Then the angel Raphael restored them to him, so he passed them on to his son Seth.
Meanwhile a reality of their making had grown up around his and Eve’s descendants, a universe of stars and planets. A different cosmos issued from the offspring of Adam’s wet dream, his assignation with the night spirit Lilith. It is uncertain whether we are Eve
’s posterity, Lilith’s, or both.
On Mount Sinai, Moses was given two sets of commandments: The External Law and The Secret Doctrine. The first he communicated to the Hebrews. The tablets bearing the latter, in a brouhaha of mock rage at the people’s idolatry of a Golden Calf, he smashed while transmitting their essence to the elders as the Zohar. Waite likewise bequeathed two tarots: the fortune-telling deck Chuck and I used and the more esoteric keys divulged only by Case.
Waite supplied an alternative view of my own situation too. Through the summer Lindy and I had been performing a Qabalistic act, not just as lovers but as adepts forging an angelic shape on another plane: the Shekhinah. Despite our bouts of estrangement and alienation and our current separation, we were still creating that form. It wasn’t a matter of sex or girlfriend/boyfriend; it was whether our subtle bodies were compatible and karmically attuned to the task. If so, we were irrevocably engaged; we could quarrel, be totally at odds, be with other people, while sustaining the sacred exercise.
Love and sex are primordially sorcery and transmutation, rituals with astral implications like Adam’s confusion (or conflation) of Eve and Lilith—that’s why they feel so powerful. If we had planted real seeds, our dyad was alive and matriculating somewhere in the upper spheres. If we hadn’t, the summer in Aspen would wash away and be forgotten by us anyway—a wastrel fantasy and faded dream. We would move on to other lovers and destinies.
That we were secular American kids did not absolve us of witchcraft. Kelly had made that plain: living together was an alchemical act. Any bond of real love, of Soul connection, actuated the Supernal Work, the Union of Jehovah and Elohim. It couldn’t help it. The mystery of Eros reenacted the Divine Mystery of Creation, the Union with God—God the Divine Androgyne. Waite proposed as much in ecclesiastical rhetoric: “When it is said that the Blessed Vision is the sight of Shekhinah and the contemplation of her Divine Face, we are to understand apparently that the union of sister-souls is under her eyes and in her presence.”
New Moon Page 69