“Fuck me!”
Jesus Christ, that’s the limit! Here I am worrying about that animal Beelzebub who reduces sexuality to the animal level and all the time he was just screaming out loud what Miz Literature always wanted to say.
“You’re my man!”
I turn her over on her back. She is laid out as soft and pliable as a ragdoll. Her eyes sightless.
“Wait,” she breathes.
“Is everything all right?”
“You’re the first man I’ve ever said that to.”
“Huh?”
“I want to be yours.”
We made love again. Miz Literature got up an hour later and went to take a shower. She’s an hour and a half late for her class. She has to go back home first, change, then hurry to McGill. I stay in bed. No showers for me after love-making. I keep the smells. I open Bukowski’s book. Miz Literature kisses me chastely on the forehead then leaves with a final, astonished glance at the couch where Bouba still sleeps, mouth wide open and arms crossed over his chest.
Miz Afternoon on
Her Radiant Bicycle
WITH GREAT ceremony, I remove the dust cover from the old Remington 22. The machine gives me a nasty look. We haven’t seen each other for a long time. The machine is sulking. I had it in pawn for a while. To cheer it up (there’s nothing worse than working on a depressed typewriter), I give it a good cleaning. I oil it with petroleum jelly. The Remington shines like a wild rosebush in the rain. My work table (which is also the dining room table, the spare chair and a makeshift bed when the desire arises) faces a narrow partition, away from the window. Behind the wall across the way is the room of a professional cyclist who spends night and day polishing his heap. Slowly, daylight enters the room. I flip open the Remington’s top and replace the ribbon. The cursor moves as smooth as silk. I slip a white sheet of paper in the roller, move my chair in front of the machine, settle in with a bottle of cheap wine at my feet and, once the ritual is over, I put my chin on my palm, dreaming as we all do of being Ernest Hemingway.
THREE HOURS LATER, the page as white as ever, I decide to clean house (sweeping, cleaning, the dishes) as proof that genius can express itself in a variety of ways. Waves of heat flood in through the window. I pile the books in a corner under the table and stow the typewriter under the bed.
The room is a pigsty. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I sweep up wherever the broom will reach and take down the trash. You could bake in this room. The room smells of sulfur and the whole place could burst into flames at any minute. I pick up bottles from under the table, the bed and the couch. I go down to Pellatt’s and get ten cents each from the guy behind the counter. Ah, America, America, America! (“On the day we call a witness from every nation, their pleas shall not avail the unbelievers, nor shall they be allowed to make amends.” Sura XVI, 85.) Nothing like routine to get you back in shape. I decide to do my change of address at the post office on St. Catherine Street. I go down St. Denis to St. Catherine and turn towards Radio-Québec. The air is quivering with heat. Strike a match and all Montreal will go up. I walk slowly. Just ahead of me, a girl comes out of Hachette with Miller under her arm and almost nothing on her back. My temperature shoots up to 120. It’s 90 degrees in the shade. The slightest spark and I’ll blaze like a slum on a Rio hillside. I warned myself to be careful. Every summer I go crazy like this, and a girl eating ice cream is always to blame. Miz Bookstore’s flavor is raspberry. In the final analysis, what’s a girl with ice cream except someone who is hungry or thirsty? But in the summertime it’s more than that. Just as I was about to fall in love with Miz Bookstore, I see another girl gliding down the street on her radiant bicycle, whistling. I stop breathing. She brakes and stops at the corner. Red light: her left foot on the pavement, her back bent gracefully, the nape of her neck exposed. Girls like to keep their hair short in the summer. Her body like a bent bow. Green light: she shoves off with her right foot on the pedal. Her body like the arrow that flies. Last image: her back a pure line, the graceful movement of her hips, her slender, adolescent thighs. The emotion: the pain of losing someone forever whom you’ve loved totally, if only for twelve and three-tenths seconds.
THERE’S A LONG line at the post office. We’re packed in like sardines. I check out the sardine in front of me. She’s reading a book. This particular sardine is book-crazy. Whenever I see someone reading, I have to know what book, if it’s good, what it’s about.
“What’s it about?’ ”
“What’s what about?”
“Your book.”
“It’s a novel.”
“What kind?”
“Science fiction.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
She brushes aside her red hair. Some women’s eyes scare you. She’s been over-cruised and she’s sick of it.
“What do you want anyway?”
She’s talking loud.
“Nothing, nothing.”
”Leave me alone, all right?”
“Forget it,” I stammer.
Most of the people in line have turned around to watch the spectacle of the Negro attacking the white woman. One girl with a shaved head up towards the front of the line wheels around, rage in her breast. She raises her voice to tell everyone how we’re all maniacs, psychopaths and hassle-artists who are always coming on to women. “They’re never around in winter but when summer comes they crawl out of their holes, whole bunches of them, to hassle people with their scarves and drums and bracelets and bells. The hell with their folklore! And it’s not just the niggers! Now we’ve got the Latinos with their chains around their necks, their necklaces, their rings, their broaches, pushing baubles on us in the cafés. If it’s not a fake Mayan jewel, it’s their body. That’s all those Latins think about.” At first the audience agrees with the shaved-head girl; who among them hasn’t been importuned by a folkloric cruise? But to attack the trade of those poor South Americans and the tradition of the Negroes is going too far.
A man in his forties jumps in. Your typical union man. Worn face. “You can’t be prejudiced,” he says, “lots of guys hassle women and not all of them are black. If you think that about blacks, what do you think they think about us? We colonized them! Sure, coming onto a woman is degrading for her, but it’s an innocent game compared to the slave trade.” For a moment everyone is too shocked by the perversity of the argument to react. Once they get over it, the shaved-head girl counterattacks. “Tell me about it! The colonizers played out their phallic domination fantasies by crushing other people and now that the time’s come to pay the bill, this bastard is offering our women for the niggers to fuck.” Our women! She said our women. Everyone must think she’s a lesbian defending her territory.
Finally, I manage to change my address. I stroll down St. Catherine. The heat is intolerable. I go into a bank building, cool with air conditioning, and guess who I see: Miz Shaved Head with the girl from the post office. She got her. Cruising is practically impossible with that kind of unfair competition.
A Remington 22 That
Belonged to Chester Himes
BOUBA CAME BACK from the store. Except for some dehydrated potatoes and rotten onions, we had run out of provisions. Bouba fell for the Pellatt’s special: a pork shoulder at $1.09 a pound, fresh green onions at $2.39, six boxes of Campbell’s Soup at 29 cents each, dish soap (we were in dire need) for $1.87, a carton of creamy margarine (disgusting) for 59 cents and, at the regular price, a kilo of iodized salt, a 25-pound sack of Uncle Ben’s rice and three cans of spaghetti.
Bouba is making chicken and rice with peanut sauce. The smell is inspirational. I sit down at the typewriter in hopes of forcing something out of a Remington 22 that actually saw Joan Baez in the flesh. I bought the machine at a junkshop on Ontario Street that sells pedigreed typewriters. Old machines. The guy sells them to young write
rs. Who else but a young writer would be foolish enough to go for such an obviously commercial ploy? Who else would consider himself a writer just because he owned a machine that belonged to Chester Himes, James Baldwin or Henry Miller? This guy pitches his machines according to the kind of book you want to write. If it’s a paranoid book, he’ll sell you the schizophrenic machine that belonged to Tennessee Williams. If you’re looking for a suicide machine, there’s Mishima’s old model. For those in the family saga game, Joyce Carol Oates’s Olivetti will do the trick. Want to write a bestseller? Step right up and purchase the solid gold heap that Puzo owned. And if you’re interested in the tangled destinies of a young Southerner and his neighbors (a Jewish genius and a disturbed young Polish girl), take Bill Styron’s Corona. How can one choose among this embarrassment of riches? It’s like Ali Baba’s cave for a young writer. The junkman’s voice left me no repose, praising Salinger’s discreet machine, Gabrielle Roy’s tin one, the prudish machine of Virginia Woolf, etc. Here’s the terrorist machine that the Black Panthers used to type their communiqués—it’s a portable, of course. The choice boiled down to Hemingway’s old Underwood and the Remington 22 that belonged to Chester Himes. I took Himes.
I’VE ALWAYS HAD this old shoebox full of notebooks, with a journal I’ve kept on and off for three years, and stacks of cards where I note down sentences that come to me, sketches, bits of dialogue overheard in bars, short descriptions of chance encounters, objects and animals, thoughts on jazz, girls, hunger—that sort of thing. A kind of autobiographical grab-bag where the beginning of a novel, an unfinished journal and a missed appointment are all thrown together. What can be saved from this amorphous mass? Burning it is the only reasonable thing to do. I dry out the sink, set the box in it and prepare for immolation. (“Ta ha. It was not to distress you that we revealed the Koran.” Sura XX, 1.)
THE CHICKEN and rice is ready. I set the table. Bouba puts on a Coleman Hawkins record (Blues for Yolande) that he cut with Ben Webster.
“You writing, man?”
“I’m trying.”
“What’s it about?”
Bouba never reads what I write. He likes to talk about it, build a project, discuss a subject, but reading a manuscript—never. He abhors being presented with a fait accompli.
“I think I’m onto something big.”
“Great!” Bouba looks happy. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s a novel.”
“No kidding . . . A novel? A real novel?”
“Well . . . a short novel. Not a real novel—more like fantasies.”
“Knock it off, man. Leave that number to the disabused, used-up critics who don’t have any more juice. A novel’s a novel. Short or long. Tell me about it.”
“There’s nothing to it. It’s about a guy, a black, who lives with a friend who spends all day lying on a couch meditating, reading the Koran, listening to jazz and screwing when it comes along.”
“Does it come along?”
“I suppose it does.”
“Hey, man, I like that, I really do. I like the idea of the guy who doesn’t do fuck-all.”
“Of course you do. You’re my model.”
“Writers! You can’t trust them, they’re all bastards!”
Bouba lets loose a big jazz laugh.
“Then what happens?”
“Nothing in particular.”
Hawkins’s sax plays “Body and Soul” (1939).
Cruising in Place
MIZ LITERATURE arrives just in time with a cheesecake in a white box tied with a pink ribbon. Bouba produces some wine dregs he’s been hiding in one of the folds of the couch. We wash it down. Miz Literature can’t stay too long. She has a class tonight. I like these whirlwind visits.
Miz Literature takes a little wine. Two fingers. She’s one of these giddy drunks. She dances across the room with all the grace of an albatross, running into the couch, the table, the fridge and the Japanese screen. She takes off her shoes and throws them at the ceiling. Then it’s on with the dance, with awkward strength and transparent joy. She is wearing a white dress with a black collar and charcoal tights. The floor is littered with butts and stained with drying puddles of beer. Miz Literature dances on, unaware of the filth. She’s a flower on a dung-heap. Then she slows down and collapses on the couch next to Bouba, with her arms crossed.
“You know what, Bouba,” she says, “I mentioned you to my friend Valery and she doesn’t believe me.”
“What doesn’t she believe?”
“She doesn’t believe you exist.”
Miz Literature looks at Bouba with the eyes of a Bodhisattva.
“I told her you were Montreal’s only living saint. I told her you live like a monk, that you hardly eat and that you only drink tea.”
“Is that the low-down on me?”
“Your life is clarity. You spend it sleeping on this couch when you’re not reading the Koran.”
“Is she ugly at least, this rare pearl of yours?”
“Oh, no! She’s beautiful!”
“Then you might as well forget it.”
MIZ LITERATURE wasn’t expecting that. She stood there open-mouthed a minute. I was busy at my machine, correcting the chapter I had just finished. It was a mild afternoon. The shoebox, belly exposed, was on the table. A fly landed on the cake like a raisin. Miz Literature looked to me for an explanation.
“Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?” she asked.
“Didn’t you know Bouba is scared stiff of Beauty?”
“Oh, God! When Valery hears that she’ll go crazy. She’s always dreamed of meeting someone who cared about more than her looks.”
Miz Literature pours herself more wine. She’s in a great mood today. I love the gaiety of serious girls. There’s a knock on the door. Miz Literature smiles mischievously.
“I asked Valery to pick me up here.”
THREE DISCREET little knocks. McGill code, it would seem. Miz Literature opens the door and a magnificent girl walks in. The kind of girl who leaves you breathless. Her smile is warm. Not that she needed it to set this room on fire. Bouba remains impassive. Miz Literature does the introductions. Bouba looks out the window. The evening shimmers. He takes down his old hunting hat. It’s his day to go out.
I swear by the Exordium (“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation”) that was the most electrifying cruise I have ever witnessed. Once Bouba’s out the door, Valery literally goes into convulsions. She’s one of those girls, not a snob or anything, whom everyone cruises but who refuses to go out with anyone. I’m sure McGill is full of very rich, very handsome and very intelligent fools whose only dream is to marry her. To meet Valery is to understand the dilemma: she despises herself, her beauty, wealth and intelligence—the classic situation! Her beauty stands between her and Truth, so she thinks. When you come down to it, Valery is looking for a guru. Bouba the Guru. Wouldn’t you know it: to get the most beautiful girl at McGill, you have to stay at home and do nothing. Cruising in place.
Miz Suicide on the Couch
BOUBA IS sitting on the couch like an ancient bhikkhu deciphering Li Po ideograms, with Miz Suicide at his feet, drinking in his words. Behold Miz Suicide: a tall stringy girl with dishwater hair and eyes that are always open a little too wide. Bouba is her suicide consultant. Suicide is her only interest. And the world returns the favor, with the exception of Bouba, who receives her every Tuesday and Thursday, from 4:00 to 4:45 p.m., which makes for three teas at fifteen minutes each.
Miz Suicide brews her own tea in an old samovar, heating up the water on an alcohol lamp. Miz Suicide, you guessed it, journeys through life with a pack of Camels, dirty fingernails and a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. Bouba unearthed her at the Esoteric Bookstore on St. Denis, across from the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Seated on the couch like a diva in endless improvisation on the phrases of the old Zen master, Bouba creates a singular atmosphere without even trying. In his guttural, mystic voice, he reads the slende
r, precious book by the bearded poet Li Po on the correct manner of drinking tea.
“First you must learn.” Bouba explains, “how to breathe the tea before proceeding to drink it.”
Miz Suicide listens with the inner concentration of a true bodhisattva.
“Like this?”
“No. Let the bouquet of the tea slowly flow into you.”
Conscientiously, Miz Suicide sticks her nose into the teacup. When she comes up for air, her steamy nose is a horrible sight to see, as if she had just escaped drowning.
“Now,” Bouba instructs her, “you may take the first sip.”
“Not yet,” she says, more fanatic than her master, “I want to breathe it some more.”
I LIE back on the bed, trying to clear the thoughts from my head. Coleman is playing “Blues Connotation.” Bouba speaks in low tones. Miz Suicide drinks her tea with ecstatic expression. I open the window. Down below in the alley, some kids are playing hockey. Six boys, three girls. From up here they look short and squat. The biggest girl is strong but the little one is not really old enough to play. She is too busy hanging onto her dog so he won’t disturb the game. The dog is stronger than she is and he drags her into the fray. She pulls back on the leash, then gives up and drops it. The dog rushes into the melee and grabs the puck from off a stick. Then, according to a well-rehearsed ritual the dog comes back and drops the puck on the girl’s lap. He lays his head in her lap and whimpers. The angry players recover the puck. The girl reprimands the whimpering dog. She pets him. The dog lets himself be petted for a minute or two, then rushes off to disrupt the game again. Darkness settles. The game slows down. The players are tired. The Cross on the Mountain is phosphorescent.
COLEMAN, SIDE B. I’ve been sitting in front of this machine for ten minutes, trying to coax something out of a Remington that belonged to Chester Himes. Bouba and Miz Suicide continue their timeless dialogue. I seek inspiration from the struggles of a cockroach in the sink. (“No mortal eyes can see Him, though he sees all eyes. He is benignant and all-knowing.”) Coleman’s jazz ushers the insect into death. Upstairs, Beelzebub will not forgive us for this latest murder. Miz Suicide gets up for more tea and turns on the water. The Angel of Death.
How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired Page 4