“I’m Chuck,” said the man. “I heard someone was looking for a guy named Chuck, and then I heard it was you, so I thought I’d see what you wanted.”
“No one admits to your existence,” said Harold.
“My real name’s Walter. Walter Friedricksen. That’s a kind of dumb name. But I use it for work.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I didn’t really want you for anything, to be honest. I just wondered who you were. Eddie said you worked here. You don’t happen to know a phone number at which he could be reached, do you?”
“I wish I did,” said Chuck, standing on one leg, then the other. “I don’t get to see him as often as I like.”
“Is he a great friend of yours?”
“Oh, sure,” said Chuck. “Hey, look, do you mind, I feel kind of awkward talking to you like this. I don’t want to lose a job fraternizing with the guests. The manager doesn’t like that too much. He says we should be friendly without being insinuating. If you know what that means.”
“Quite right,” said Harold. “Sorry you’ve been bothered. You showed a great deal of tact the other day about my hangover. The manager should be proud of you.”
“Oh, Eddie asked me to keep an eye on you,” said Chuck. “He said he didn’t want you getting into bad company. He’s real fond of you, I guess.”
“Well, I don’t think he actually dislikes you, come to that. We’re going to see the Watts Towers tomorrow. Have you ever been there?”
“Nope. Eddie talks about them. He wrote a poem about them. It’s kind of good in a funny way.” He shifted his weight again and said, “Look, I gotta go.”
“O.K. Good night. Sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience. I didn’t really want to see you at all.”
“That’s all right.” He went to the door, then he said, without turning round, “If you see Eddie, tell him I can’t get off tomorrow night. I have to be on call all night.”
“Certainly,” said Harold. “I’ll tell him when he comes tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” said Chuck, and left.
Harold thought about Chuck and Eddie for a minute or two, but it wasn’t his business, and he didn’t really want to know about it. It did, though, solve the problem of how Eddie ate. Chuck obviously ransacked the kitchen before he went off duty.
He yawned and went to bed.
Six
THE WATTS TOWERS were everything Eddie had said, and more. Made out of junk and rubble and seashells and steel, they rose high above the surrounding frame houses, which sagged and needed paint. They were multicoloured, decorated with pieces of coloured glass and anything their builder, Simon Rodia, had been able to lay hands on. They were open conical spirals, crazy and beautiful, absolutely without purpose, wholly engaging.
Harold gaped at them for a while, as Eddie pointed out various things to him, the heart motif, the builder’s initials, the great variety of materials. There was a wall round them, and beside them ran a railroad. They were at the end of a road, anonymous 107th Street. They were as gay as butterflies and as solemn as public fountains. They were absurd and poetic, they had no business in a run-down area of the city. They were freaks, sports, uncompromisingly there, soaring into the blue sky with as little sense of self-importance as of function.
They went in, paying at the gate, where a young negro was reading a textbook. He smiled at them, and sold them a guide-book, though Eddie said he didn’t want one. Then he went back to Principles of Solid Geometry.
Harold read in the guide-book that the Towers had been built by an immigrant Italian tile-setter. He was still alive, but had moved away to somewhere in the northern part of the state, apparently. He was over forty when he began his construction, and it took him thirty-three years, working entirely alone. Then he packed up and went away. It really was most extraordinary. He was quoted by the guide-book as saying: “I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised here, you understand? I wanted to do something for the United States because there are nice people in this country.” But that didn’t sound enough: you didn’t go and build a working model of the roof-tops of Samarkand (because that’s what the Towers looked like) just because you liked the country you happened to have been brought to when you were a child. No, there was a compulsive feeling about the structures, a sense that the man who built them was obsessed by some private imaginary heaven, and when you knew it had taken him thirty-three years, without any help from anyone, then you knew that Simon Rodia couldn’t have been altogether normal, altogether sane, or, come to that, altogether crazy. The guide-book quoted him again: “I had in mind to do something big, and I did.”
His neighbours had been Spanish-speaking, the guide-book said. To live alone in a community where you didn’t speak the language, to work out your extraordinary fantasies where practically no one could see them, this was, surely, what people meant by art for art’s sake. Yet there was no sense of conscious art about the Towers. They twined and twisted their elaborate open-work forms into the air without regard for proportion or form or volume or any of those things. And then he had just gone away, disappeared, when he was finished. The guide-book was rather coy about this: it said that some people thought that Rodia’s artistic needs were served in the act of building the Towers, and once they were built he no longer needed them. Others felt he went away because of some strong disappointment. “Discovered living in Martinez, California, in 1959, Simon was reluctant even to talk about the Towers. ‘If your mother dies and you have loved her very much,’ he said, ‘maybe you don’t speak of her.’” That wasn’t very helpful.
Harold looked up from the base of one of the two taller towers and thought that maybe that was the answer, though. If there was one thing you could see at a glance, it was that the Towers were phallic imagery of a very refined order. “Nuestro Pueblo” was carved here and there, and the hearts flowed all over the structure, like a carpet, or rather, like a delicate net. So maybe it was deep mother-love: that could cause all sorts of things. But whatever it was didn’t explain the Towers, nor did it even matter. They were there, and they were the work of one man, and whatever reason he gave for building them, it was irrelevant now.
Harold then read about an attempt by the city council to have the Towers destroyed. Incredulously, he discovered that officialdom considered them dangerous: they were “unsafe structures built without a permit, using junk and inferior construction methods”. The same, no doubt, could be said for the Parthenon. There had been a legal battle, and then a test of the Towers’ strength, and the Towers had won. It was all rather inspiring for liberals.
Besides the two main towers, there was one smaller one, joined to them by curved bars, themselves linked by a single vertical bar, elaborated with hearts and other designs. Then there was a sort of garden made of stone and junk and bottle-tops and other material, with a tracery over it, like a pergola. The actual ground area was quite small, and at one end of it stood the remains of Rodia’s house that had burned down after he left, having deeded the lot to a neighbour.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Harold.
“It’s kind of crazy, right?” said Eddie. He stood hunched in his jacket, squinting through his dark glasses at the pinnacles above them. The tallest tower must be at least a hundred feet high. “I guess this is the kind of art I like,” he went on. “Stuff a man’s done for himself first, and the hell with anyone who wants to look, they don’t matter.”
“It’s beautiful and wild and—far out, I’d say.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie. “You want to read my poem about it? It’s the only poem I ever wrote. It doesn’t rhyme or anything. I just sort of scribbled it down after someone brought me here one day, a couple of weeks back. I’ve been back a couple of times to look at it again. I feel all right here.”
Harold took the crumpled sheets of paper which Eddie offered him. His handwriting was surprisingly neat. Harold had expected it to be a scrawl.
The poem was headed “My first and only poem
by EDDIE JACKSON.” It went:
*
Take a rainbow and stretch it, make it soar straight up, up, into a Babel of blue. Now coil it, like a sailor coiling a rope, make it pliable, bend it a bit, then coil it again, as though you were coiling a spring, spiralling up to the top. Put a little conical hat on it. That’s the Watts Towers.
Or, if you like, make a wizard’s hat, one hundred feet high, but before you put on the covering, the black stuff for the night, and the gold stuff for the sun and the stars—stop. Leave just the framework of the hat, the wire and the spirals. Then cover them with shells, pieces of broken plate, smashed Seven-Up bottles, splinters of stained glass. That’s the Watts Towers, too.
The Watts Towers are not the Towers of Watts, they are the Towers of Simon Rodia, who left Rome at ten or so, and later, after he’d bummed around a bit, he came to L.A., to Watts, a neat white slum where the Mexicans live, where the negroes live, where the poor live. And he lived there for thirty years and more, and built his Towers behind a wall, as gay and crazy as the Towers themselves, and he lived alone in his house, with his Towers beside him, building in his spare time. And all over his Towers he wrote “Nuestro Pueblo”, and he covered it with hearts.
And when he had finished he went away, he gave the land to a neighbour, and later the house burned down, but the Towers stayed straight, right by the railroad, and engines whistled as they passed.
And then the kids broke in, kids from the block, and they smashed whatever they could reach, the creation of fractured things, of pots broken and glasses cracked, old shoes, and tin-cans and twists of wire and seashells. But they couldn’t smash much, because the Towers stood so high above them, and the kids were scared to climb.
And then the City looked in, and the City was shocked out of its mind, and it said, These are dangerous slums, the kids might break their little necks, playing around them, and anyway we don’t like rainbows, not in our neat little, white little, goddam slum. Those Towers have got to come down, they said. All the wizards are dead, anyway, and no one wears a hat in the grave. Those Towers have got to come down.
And then people got mad, and said, The hell with the City, and Art is very important, and the Towers are Art.
And the City said, The hell with Art, kids are more important than Art, those Towers had better come down before we do it ourselves.
And then everyone got excited, and people wrote things in magazines, and experts said Art was Art and other experts said Art was not Art, but Simon Rodia, he didn’t care, he was away up in the northern part of the state, and he didn’t want to be bothered.
And then people got the idea they might ask Simon what he thought about things like art and kids and life and all that jazz, and they tooled around and they found him, and asked him for interviews, and wrote down what he said.
And he didn’t say very much, he said the Towers were finished and he was old, and screw the Towers. I built them because, he said. I wanted to do something big, something to show my country how much I loved her, and everyone thought I was mad, but I’m not mad, and now scram. The Towers aren’t mine any longer, he said, I gave them away, and I don’t care what happens, so get out of here.
And the City and these other guys, the ones who didn’t want anyone pulling the Towers down, they went to court, but Simon didn’t give a damn, the Towers were finished, and when he was finished Simon Rodia was finished. And they yammered a lot, and got paid for it, too, some of them, and then they agreed the Towers must stand up for themselves. They agreed to send a bulldozer down to test them, and if they could stand it, the strain, then O.K., otherwise not.
And they agreed that if the Towers looked like falling down, then they’d stop the strain, and think about it some more. And everyone argued, but now they agreed, the Towers must stand up for themselves.
And they all trooped off and went to see the Towers tested, and TV people were there, and all the rest of that crowd, but Simon, he didn’t go, he didn’t care what happened. He had done something big, and the hell with them all, and screw the Towers.
And chains were tested and put in place, and levers arranged and the bulldozer put in its place, and the signal was given.
And slowly the strain came on, and the chains grew taut, and the people watched, all the TV people and the rest of that crowd, and the neighbours, they all watched. And then the test strain was reached, and the Towers gave a shrug, like a man that’s busy, who feels a fly on his nose, the Towers just twitched.
And a seashell fell, a single shell from the beaches of L.A. where Simon had gone to collect them, bucket on bucket, and brought them home, and cemented them in—one miserable shell fell off, and the Towers were saved, and the bulldozer grumbled back home.
And that is the story of Simon Rodia and the Towers of Watts, Simon Rodia from Rome, who started out life setting tiles, and set them the rest of his life, and built his Towers, and then went away.
It’s something to write a poem about, the way he built the Towers, so I’m writing a poem, a poem for him, and I’d like to meet him one day, but I guess I never will.
And say a kind word for California that Simon Rodia came here, and liked it enough to stay, and to build here, and to love it enough to build his love out of fragments, by the railroad tracks in Watts, for which thank God.
I come here often and think of that man.
I guess there aren’t many like him.
I think that his Towers are like a cathedral.
And his God is good enough for me.
Harold looked up from the last sheet of the poem and saw that Eddie was gazing still at the pinnacles, head tilted back, a straight white smile on his face.
“Shouldn’t you take your glasses off in church?” said Harold. He didn’t know what to say about the poem.
“Did you like it?” said Eddie.
“Yes, yes. Very much. I think it’s very good indeed. Have you shown it to anyone else? Any editors or anything?”
“Jesus, no,” said Eddie. “It’s for Chuck. I wouldn’t want anyone to see it. I guess I feel like Simon. I did it for myself, and then I wanted to give it away to someone. I thought I’d give it to Chuck. But if you like it, you have it.”
“Do you have another copy?”
“Is there another copy of this?” said Eddie, waving his hand at the Towers. “No, I guess that a poem is meant to be written, and then you give it away, and if anyone wants it, they can have it. Don’t you want it?”
“Yes, of course I do.” Harold felt very embarrassed. Poets, real poets, at least the ones he knew, were always congratulating themselves on the amount of money they got for their poems. But then Eddie was a natural. As he folded the paper and put it in his pocket, Harold hoped Eddie would always stay that way. He was touched that Eddie should have wanted him to see the Towers, even more touched that he wanted to give him his only poem.
“I’ll tell you something, Harold,” said Eddie. “I wouldn’t give just anyone that poem. I kind of like you. And another thing, you’re English. I guess the English understand about poetry. I felt all shaken up writing that. I don’t know. I guess it isn’t something I’d show to anyone I saw every day.”
“You see me quite often,” said Harold.
“Yeah. But you won’t be around much longer, I guess. I feel kind of good, giving it to a foreigner. You know, I bitch a lot, and I don’t care where I live, but I always feel best when I’m in California. On the west coast, anyway. I guess I must be beginning to get old, sentimental, all that crap. I’d’ve hated for you to leave without seeing this place. It’s got something. It’s real. It’s what I like about the world. It’s what I like about America. It makes L.A. a good place to live, a crazy thing like this.”
He stared up at the Towers, the sky shining through their involuted curls and spirals. Then he said abruptly, “Let’s go.”
On the way back Eddie didn’t say very much. He sat hunched against the door of the car and fiddled with the radio. He said he was trying to get
a particular pop-song, but Harold thought they must have heard every song even remotely popular by the time they got to Venice and Eddie still hadn’t found the one he was looking for. He dropped him off at Lou’s, and Eddie said “Thanks”.
“Thank you, Eddie. I wouldn’t have missed the Towers for anything. And if it hadn’t been for you I would never even have known about them.”
“Oh, that’s O.K.”
“And the poem. I feel terribly—I don’t know. Proud. I think it’s extremely good.”
“It’s finished,” said Eddie. “I’m like Rodia. When I’ve finished, I’ve finished, I guess. You be around for a few days more?”
“Yes. I don’t know how long. It depends on Diane. I may stay for ever, you can’t tell.”
“I guess you won’t,” said Eddie. “I’ll call you at the hotel. It was a good trip, too. See ya.”
He slouched off into the apartment building. The Pirates didn’t seem to be around, for which Harold was grateful. There was no sign of life at all.
He had half an hour before he met Diane, and he went straight to Beverly Hills and to the drugstore she had named. He had a sandwich and a coke and looked at the magazine and book rack. The Elvis Presley Story was next to Adolphe, and he bought both on a sudden impulse, trying not to think the obvious thoughts about the effect of paper-backed books on modern cultural life. Modern cultural life was a subject that didn’t interest him as such, and anyway, he’d spent the morning looking at Rodia’s Towers.
While he was waiting he thought about Eddie. There was no question but that he was, to use his own term, “invisible”, he was so far out. Yet, whatever his faults, and they were many, he had a nose for the rare and exciting, for the places where the suppressed feelings of a nation came boiling to the surface, for that curious underground life which is a defiance of the ordinary life of the earth’s surface. The Towers, for instance—they were something that seemed to have roots far below the foundations of the houses that surrounded them, deep in some primitive human feeling that owed nothing to Christ or Mahomet or any of the modern religious leaders. Yet they were, in a sense, religious buildings, or at least one felt that they were, and Eddie himself had remarked that they were like a cathedral in that poem of his. And the extraordinary dance in the bar on the beach at Venice, that was like some very primitive religious dance—something long before the Greeks or Romans or even the Egyptians rationalized their gods into systems. Which showed, as far as Harold was concerned, that there were no gods, only human feelings that needed rituals or cathedrals or the Watts Towers to express them. Eddie had talked about the religion he wanted to found, with underground church services which would be little more than orgies. There had been a heresy like that, Harold remembered. Something to do with Hieronymus Bosch: Adamites, they were called. There were always these underground sexual religions wherever you looked, and they were usually called paganism or pantheism or something, and were always persecuted like mad, as though the established church was frightened to death by them. And why not? Harold was frightened himself. It was the fierce sexuality, the uncompromising refusal to accept the social and religious norms, that made these obscure movements feared and persecuted. If they were allowed to get out of hand, the whole fabric of society would crumple like a piece of paper thrown on a fire, holding its shape but losing its meaning, losing the words written on it. The very idea was frightening. Not because there was anything in the magic or black magic attributed to the movements, but because they seemed to exist without any relationship to ordinary life. You could make them mysterious and silly, like D. H. Lawrence, or you could accuse them of being evil, but the real point about them was that they were against—against normality, against the necessary inhibitions and prohibitions that made society possible. They were anarchy in practice. And if they did throw up a Bosch or a Simon Rodia, so much the better: without a few anarchists life would become very dull. It was pretty stimulating to have Eddie around, for instance.
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