My Amputations (Fiction collective ;)

by Clarence Major

  Two days later Mason was back in the city then soon up in Bronxville on the campus of Sarah Lawrence. His audience in the big dining room of an old mansion: three shy boys and fifty brash smart sincere cocky innocent girls, the sons and daughters of New England gentility—the children who'd turned their backs on law, medicine and business. Standing before them Mason felt like da Vinci's Last Supper: peeling, water-stained, “conscious” of his own death, badly faded: like the tunnels in Italy: his last stand. Again: he wanted to talk first, read later. “I want to talk with you about the differences between fiction and reality, real characters and fake people—not because it's cute or literary but because my life depends on it. (For me the most important aspects of a work of fiction are: quality of imagination, uniqueness of the angle of the author's vision, and the degree to which he/she pushes the language for all it's worth.) You see, I'm in the process of inventing myself—in self-defense, of course. Think of me as a character in a book. I have to win my way, prove myself, keep The Narrator on his toes, off my back—treat ’im like a camp dog. No matter how bad, morally, I might be I gotta earn your interest: if not your sympathy and treasured understanding. My quest is not to be Mister Parabola. I needn't tell you I'm not the Invisible Man: yet race—or its absence—remains part of my identity: I am concerned with an encamped deeper sense of who I am, this character that is me. Senghor said: ‘We must move beyond Negritude without disowning it.’ Soyinka reminded us that ‘a tiger does not shout about its tigertude, he jumps.’ So I will jump like a tiger. I am approaching this in a binocular sense. My two eyes see two different things; levels of different things. Along with giving up my illusions and losses I denounce (and make public) any interest in the Cyclopian view of reality. The primary responsibility of literature involves creating truth. The text is not just a pretext. I stand before you. I am not the object of the text . . . ” Well, he'd lost his audience, but soon moved on to the reading anyway:

  “ . . . he was still. Hamburger and flies on the formica counter. Big Trailways mobile-tomb out under tree. Restless folks stretching their cramped limbs. Florence Soukhanov ordered onion rings—only, oh, and a Coke. She was now gazing at the flies. Where were his fries? Oh, never . . . That pile of mashed cars back on the highway: a forced connection there. He picked up the glass salt shaker and sprinkled the white crystals on the grill-fried pattie while holding the top part of the bun—like a coffin-lid—up. Others at the counter focused on their own. Mister Lascar-face with his wife, Mrs. Goby. And two biddies down at the end. And Miss Willow Goose there eating her cottage cheese off the top of her Diet Spree. Vinegar Joe, on the other side of Florence, dumping stale truck-stop mustard on his hot dog. The Oomph Girl; Aze Simmons—with football shoulders; Max Schmeling with the short-order ribs (sucking the bones); Tan Thunderbolt eating a double-burger; Uncle Joe chomping on Heinz Tomato Ketchup-covered fried chops; Dum-Dora and Chollie-my-Boy in a booth facing two bowls of strawberry and chocolate ice cream covered with pecans, walnuts, whipcream and hot fudge. And, pray-tell, who was that old woman back there at the jukebox, with the electric guitar hung from her shoulder? Fishy situation? To refocus, he peeped Florence. She didn't look like, uh, a little hard-back thing with four short legs and a tiny head jutting out. The hamburger was one of Uncle Billy's old boots from his days as a brigadier general in the Civil War. Fake mustard didn't help. He knew he shoulda been a wheelchair racer—life would've been simpler. (Had they reached Pennsylvania yet? Ohio? or could this truck-stop be on some highway up north of, say, Wisconsin?) Florence crunched on her onion rings. He tasted one: making a forced connection between the crispness of the crust and the mushiness of the lily-cute ring ripped from its bulb. Tasted the lard too. ‘Phew! Good!’ Florence spoke: “I'm still curious about, well, your past: tell me more: confession is good for . . . she laughed; shook her noble head. ‘How far—back?’ ‘First thing you remember?’ ‘ . . . first thing so deep now, like fruit on my mother's table: or the certain way chickens stand on one leg. The shock of seeing the dead chicken about to go into the pot. Death, too, in sparrows. Remember their closed eyes. Hardness of the body: death provides us with life. Playing cowboy, too: death there: guns: defined by grandmother as evil! movies, too, were evil. I remember moments, things, The Impostor and that other guy [meaning me] can't touch: a tall neat sky full of sliding birds, for example; I was not exactly a May son, see. I was out of breath, thought. The city stank. I wanted to crash at Roosevelt Road and change my identity: go to Paris, start another life. But I was stuck in wet, dark afternoons full of gas fumes and forced connections. Early on they told me: Don't lose any important papers: gave me a social security card, a draft card. If they couldn't trace you to papers, well . . . Officials discovered not only did I not have the proper papers, I had no arms, no head, no legs. Soldiers waiting to corner black kids dancing in the streets as rioters, laughed at the holes in my Broncusi-head. I was a weird example of Art. Didn't matter. I'd learned that so much depends on four butterflies waiting quietly on a stem, waving their wings slowly. I wanted wings. Sunlight in those days was hazy and if you wanted to feel good you had to make a forced connection between fair weather and the unfair climate, between traffic, sky, birds in formation. I was leery of old men in suspenders: they smoked cigars and listened to Lawrence Welk. I wanted my wings. Wings of dead chickens didn't cut the mustard! I was also impressed by good writing. I learned from it, imitated poets, wrote things like: forgive me dear, I ate the five women you left at the kitchen table. Their clothes were bright. I knew . . . but they were so cool and tasty. Place had no specific meaning. We'd always moved. Nomads, we were. You name the place and we lived there: at least briefly. It was nothing to see somebody shot down in the park and the Peter Pan green grass turning Santa Claus red. Mostly I was running; and reading. Wingless, though I had my muse in my corner, I moved as a plumed serpent—though not accepting Lawrence's snake-definition of dark people—across a landscape of hardhats, hobby-horse-riders, serious writers, sluggish traffic, forced—. They compared me to Trout Fishing in America and Invisible Man: running, wingless, not flying. Nobody knew what would happen next. The white fence was the border between the ghetto and the rest of the world. A broken red wheelbarrow rested against it. I watched a movie of a woman taking a shower: one arm raised above her head: she washed under the raised one. Such big hands she had. No figleaf covered her pubic V. I liked her. She was not one of those dainty ladies in flimsy dresses coming down Robert Penn Warren-steps. They tended to come down too gracefully, heads erect, wearing flat white hats with tiny knots of flowers stuck to their sides. Or am I thinking of Alan Tate or, gosh, James Agee . . . ? Save me! The space behind those ladies was always filled with January blankness. Was it always necessary to make a connection between sky and horizon? On the other hand, scrubwomen wore red headrags and waited in line to vote—sometimes they dropped dead in line: the wait was so long.’ He chuckled. Looked at her elegant face. ‘ . . . Enough? You asked—’ And she shot him a long, clever glance. Then said: ‘You still haven't eaten your hamburger, my onion rings are cold, Miss Goose is in the toilet, Vinegar Joe is back on the bus ready to go, Dum-Dora . . . ’ They went outside under the piss-yellow humid sky. Bus was half loaded. Florence and he were two-dimensional figures against a permanent surface. Be careful in the open. Birds. Space behind them was filled. Clouds: women on bidets cleaning their assholes; guys standing at urinals; Studs Lonigan pulling on his cheap suspenders; Mason himself with drill braced against rubber apron, drilling a hole through connected steel—with shavings spinning out, curling . . . Back on the road: his head contained a sky as clear and blue as a hangover: trees, in there, shook: thin yellow fingers froze in wind. Florence? Light beat his body. They held hands.”

  Next, Brooklyn College: he was speaking in a sterile room in Whitehall. His host, a woman with red hair, had given him a modest, friendly introduction. There was wine and cheese for the students at the back of the room. They were sprawled in comfortable plush chairs and
on puffy armless couches in a chaotic pattern before him. His “lecture” was about “a hypothetical situation—call it a sketch for the novel of my life” and the relation of “theme” to “form.” (He'd taken the BMT over here to Flatbush and written the talk on the subway.) Then, as was his pattern, he ended by reading from published works—this time, poetry, since his host'd told him these students were mostly interested in poetry. At the end one student wanted to know his position on liberation movements in South America, Africa, the Middle East, on “American aggression” in the world, on capitalism generally, on the rights of women. Before Mason could answer another student stood and confronted the string of questions. Would you ask Kinnell or Ashbery those questions?” The audience then broke into factions: about half of them on the side of the first questioner, the rest took the other side. And Mason was sort of left standing speechless before them for a moment. Then he ended the squabble by saying: “Listen: no one has the answer.” One of the two Black students in the room stood. “You notice there're no Black students—except Trixie and myself. It's because The Black Student Union here is staging a protest. We have a long list of objections to the way this university is run. Many Italian and Jewish students have also signed our petitions. We sent word to you last week asking you to join us by not speaking here. But I see you chose—” (Mason hadn't received the message). A thin Jewish girl leaped to her feet. She shook a finger at the black boy—who had a face as innocent as a frog's. “Just wait a minute!” the girl screamed, “I'm sick and tired of this! This man came here as a poet to read his poetry . . . ” and so it went. Finally, the host stopped them, and whispered to Mason, “Thank you for being patient . . . ” Trixie came up and introduced herself. Creamy tan with big dark brown-hazel eyes. “Need a lift back to Manhattan?” Yes and he was grateful. The host thanked her too. In the Renault beside the jean-clad girl, thin as a starving youth in a village in some remote part of India, he asked her if she'd like to stop at a bar he knew on Sheridan Square and have a drink with him. “Just like your generation.” Her tone was one of amused cynicism. She was lighting a joint while waiting for a light to change. Something in his marrow-bones jerked. She dragged then passed it to him. He pulled at it: his head was yanked through a knothole. Grass had never done much for him. She parked on Waverly Place and they walked to the Red Lion. She was tough: had a tomboy walk. On the back of her worn leather jacket this: Bed-Sty Hell Cats. When she saw Mason looking she laughed. “Oh, I've had this jacket since high school.” After the scotches they went over to Perry where her sister had an apartment. Trixie let herself in with her own key. “I stay here sometimes when I'm not getting along with my boyfriend. Right now he's a pain.” The place smelled of catshit. It was dark, even with all the lights on. They undressed without ceremony and got between the crisp greenblue sheets. She stroked his cock to an erection. “I thought you'd have a small one. Is your wife white?” “I'm not married.” She had a noble face, the yellow haze of her right eye was nice contrast to the cynical curve of her thin, smooth lips, the hard clean throat. She made him feel deeply uneasy: something was wrong. Why were they here like this? Inexpertly she sucked him awhile then straddled him, inserting his cock up into her dry, small quim. His vision improved. He decided to call all bets off: just surrender. Yet . . . ? She rode his bone-hard penis with the kicking and yelping of a vaudeville queen in a cheap obscenario. She kept groaning and hissing, “ . . . you like my pussy?” and when they exchanged positions—with him balanced on the balls of his feet, between the fork-spread of her slender thighs, he threw her long, smooth strokes, spiced, vulgar, smutty, sincere ones too. She grinned up at him with that toughness around the eyes and mouth. “Get that pussy, man!” When they finished she, yes, lighted a classic cigarette and turned toward him, resting on one elbow. He looked at her looking at him. He wanted to do the handsome thing. Be a hundred percent. Bed-Sty Hell Cats? Trixie said, “By the way, man, I peeped your act right away: you're an imposter.” She was grinning. “You see, I know because I fucked the real dude once: his cock is bigger.”

  Don't ask me why but it was time to approach the Magnan-Rockford Foundation. Mason wrote John Armegurn, Secretary: “ . . . I am back from abroad and am staying at the Gramercy Park. Give me a call as soon as possible. I'm changing banks and want my monthly check to go to the new one, probably Chase-Manhattan. I hope we can make the necessary adjustments by phone. I won't be in New York long and my schedule is hectic.” He thought his own hokum pretty damn good. Maybe he wouldn't need any further eyewash, jive or stuffing for the goose. Armegurn had a sharp high-pitched voice and a dry chuckle. He clearly didn't know Mason's so-called Impostor too well because he didn't question Mason's voice. But he did insist that Mason come in. “It's easier.” A trap? Ambush? It was Wednesday at three. Mason pretended to check his hectic schedule. “I can see you between ten and eleven tomorrow. How's that for you?” Armegurn stood to shake his head as he approached the desk. His secretary was retreating. “You've changed a bit.” He was a handsome, big man, with ashy skin, ashy hair, freckles on his cheeks, even on his lips, thick red hair on the backs of his huge hands. His shake was more than firm: bone crushing. Armegurn's grin was plastic: fixed. “Yesterday, I didn't recognize your voice. But it happens all the time. People change so fast. Why, just yesterday, I walked by an old friend—I hadn't seen in two years—on Fifth Avenue. I looked right at him and he looked right at me. Of course, moments later, we turned and, well . . . Say, how was France?” And so Mason made small, awkward talk about a France he'd never known. Finally, after watching Mason frantically checking his watch every minute or so, Armegurn said, “I've had Jo Ann type up all the necessary papers for the transfer. All we'll need her to do is insert the bank of your choice and your account number. You sign it then take it out to one of our accounts clerks. They'll probably want to see some I.D. then you're set. Okay?” “Sounds fine.” Jo Ann came back when Armegurn buzzed for her then Mason gave her a piece of paper with his Chase account number and the branch address. He stood up and shook with Armegurn again then went out and had a seat while Jo Ann typed. Mason eyed a “battle axe”—his thought, folks, not mine—waiting to see Armegurn who momentarily came out. “Hi, Miss Bambosh—how are ya?” After she'd followed Armegurn into his office Jo Ann, fiftyish and square as a wooden door, said, “She's also a winner.” At that moment a trampy-looking young man shot into the office. He grabbed Jo Ann's arm and shouted insanely in her face: “Why is charity so fucking good but expecting mercy and begging are horrible?” then ran out before she could recover—let alone answer. Finally she said, “Every week he comes in here like that. He's a poet. Also one of our prize winners.” Her smile was glazed with the pain that comes from being hit below the belt. And she wasn't even an official entry.

  A light drizzle in May: the morning smelled of pine: no Sherwood Anderson sky here over Seattle. Two cheery English professors picked him up in a monkeyshit-green Buick station wagon. The airport was the most untrustworthy he'd seen. Had it been constructed to trap him? And two weird professors? As they tried to engage him in a discussion of swindling in literature all he could think of was the new smackaroos going into his bank account at Chase. The two guys were drinking buddies. Mason agreed to stop with them for a short one. It was one thirty—the lecture wasn't till nine the next morning. That night: they'd take him to dinner at Professor Melvin Lester Bark's, their “most distinguished (ex-CIA) personage of historical literary scholarship.” Bob and Kit, these two, already slightly juiced-eyed, led Mason into a smelly pub on the secret end of North East One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Street, an old neighborhood bar, their favorite, complete with bar flies, stuck fan in ceiling, unearthly sawdust on floor. Good-Time Charlies, they joked about old ex-agent Bark and his fuddy-duddy fraudulent “historical scholarship.” They hadn't been able to get him to even read good Bellow let alone bad Barthelme. On the q.t., his wife was nice though and they were sure the dinner party would go well. Kit, the thinner, darker one, told Ma
son he'd tried to read one of his novels, but got confused. He couldn't tell what was going on. Mason smiled. Bob, with dimples and a twinkle, said, “I tried too, and I think I missed something.” Mason wasn't going to bite. This was a crow-hop. Take me to your leader, boys. That night they picked him up at the campus guest house. He was in the faculty club having a drink. Bark lived on Mercer Island so it would take awhile in the rush hour traffic. An early start was wise. The ferry boat was a twilight-lit sea dragon. After that, a short drive through a damp plush wooded area. Bark was a big man with a pumping handshake and a big smile. Mason didn't catch all the names though he was being told as he gripped one hand after another. A plump light-haired woman with tiny hands. One dark in a low-cut dress with a profusion of pimples all over her chest. A weasel guy. An old poet with yellow teeth and age spots on the backs of his hands. Mason got cornered by the tiny hands-woman. “You have children?” “Yes.” “How many?” “About, oh, thirty, maybe forty.” She gave him a look. Cocked her head. He could see she felt put on. She started to laugh, decided not to, then walked away. He was sick of these people who always wanted to talk about their children. The host had brought up good wine from his secret cellar and many were sampling various ones. Others worked on aperitifs and mixed drinks. Low chatter about deception in the department against subdued Mozart. Plush carpets beneath feet. Indirect lighting. Nothing blue or breezy. Tone: definitely not racy or risque: something almost “old family” British. The dark woman with pimples sat on one side of Mason at dinner and Kit on the other. Kit wanted to know what he thought of detective stories. Was Kit some sort of plotter? Sandra Pirsig, Miss Pimples, wanted to know how long he'd be in Seattle. His mouth was full of mystery steak: he couldn't answer either one. By the time Don Giovanni-Ellis was delivered back to the faculty club he was half drunk and suffering with acute sinusitis. Kit's tail lights finally vanished down the driveway. Mason thought of walking. But, The Impostor might be out there in the shadows! Yet lying down would only increase the congestion, the pain. The villainous damp night air had quickly gotten to him. He turned back. Slept poorly. But the coffee in the morning helped. He had a piece of toast with it. Then it was Sandra Pirsig, this time in a plain sweater and skirt, who came for him. He noticed something suggestive in her eye, a kind of nervous vibration from her body reached his. Funny business. Mason read to three hundred students in a lecture hall then talked half an hour. About? Literary snow jobs, blarney-festerings, writerly deception and the conflict and exchange between these states and the sacred grounds of truth. What else? Hum. Then they took him to lunch and he was, finally, at three-thirty free. Sandra asked him if he wanted to be driven anywhere special. No, he wanted to walk. She thought that interesting and decided to walk with him. She led him down to the shopping area near the university. A pleasant hocus pocus afternoon: an unclear tricky day, and green, green, green and gray, hard gray. The sky was, in part, swollen with dental cement—and sculptures of Presbyterian cows grazing on wet cotton. A mist hung low in the undergrowth as they cut through the park. She kept probing him about himself but his answers were cryptic. Mason tried to unscramble a mental poem buzzing in him but when he succeeded (as she talked on) it turned out to be a woodcut print of—of what? He wasn't sure. Somehow, though, this sadness of moss and lichen along the walkway, appealed to him: nature had declared martial law on civilization. Plush, damp, oozy stretches seemed to pull at his nerve endings. Mrs. Yznaga's seventh grade geography, her talks of the Pacific Northwest, the Olympia National Forest, hadn't prepared him for the sentimental fiddle music nature was coming on with here. Huh? Oh, yes Sandra was saying something about getting together tonight. Oh yes, why not . . . His flight wasn't till ten in the morning.