Mason was up—as he rapped to students of Florence. “My Apple, as they say, was not theirs: I smelled whisky on breaths. Gwen, my oldest sister, my mother too, wrote to me rarely. I was alone: in isolation: as though in a country where I didn't know the language. Casual affairs clung to me like fish-smell in the beard. Appletrees nowhere in sight. I screwed married women on kitchen floors: pale fire, pale leeway: possessed with keys to their own dark places these women went mad, on their knees before broken or drunk husbands, clutching Lower East-side yellow rent-stubs and smearing their red, red blood on Flea Market and Klein's furniture. They stayed hidden in First Avenue-deadness even when there was a Way Out. Their Deadness was equal to my own. And of course there were the young women so different from the older, married ones. How different? They were not shut-in damsels waiting to be serenaded below their windows. No eighty-miles-per-hour jerk was going to climb the vines of their castle-wall to get an axle-grease-coated finger on the elastic of their Bloomingdale-bloomers. My concern was also still Chicago: for the boogie-woogie oobop-shebam girl with sweat under her arms. They were doing the Twist, the Pony, the Cakewalk, the Superman—a dance I invented. The pill later did not rhyme with castle. Such a rich history: I'll never know how I spaced-out in Amesville on a John Deere, up to my nose in wet cowshit: I couldn't even see that Cezanne's Portrait of Henri Gasquest wasn't really Rod Steiger posing. Although gnatcatchers and beetrappers were after my sanity from the start, I turned out to be Somebody. Wesley could have, too, but he had no need. I took issue with the ache of my own body. Rather than leaning against my own death or ecstasy, I—Pokerface, Boston Blacky, Wild Dick, Holy Joe, Fingers, Mister Zilch—discovered Stein's American space and in that terrain sweated my way along the floor (ground, desert) of an orgy of heavy laughter, dry tongues; voiceless friction, dry areas, yellow eyes, red skin, sharp fingernails; breasts uneven and staccato teethprints in shoulders and necks; climbed into frowns, broke my way through polka-dot shame and awkward, uh, long sentences, twisted rhythm. In other words, I made direct contact. I pried open and entered salient spirits: slept well while growling, yodeling and chewing sounds surrounded me: as confusing as that scene where Florence played a bonyleg-squaw shielding the infants as the braves sent arrows into General George Armstrong Custer. She must be twice my age, eh? Never mind . . . Had I been the pilot of a two-engine I might have gotten a wider view of Stein's American space: from the aircraft I might have watched the wavers below wave at my waving propellers—might have thrown artful kisses to those poor suckers stuck to the terra cotta: those Goldilocks, Big Bens, Fatsos, Molls, Babyfaces, all of ’em! Innocence fun-crushed by tangy sadness, eh? From up there, ohboy . . . the shadow of my craft bewitching the pink earth with its purple shadow: tits for mountains. I might have looked, from on high, into my own darkness, my potshots, my wild guesses, my calls, this bamblustercated fear, my own—: not for perception or higher wisdom but for the oceans, seas, deserts, cities beyond Celt, that were surely in there. Know what I mean? But, like everybody else, I was stuck by gravity to the spongy earth: in birth action death. Framed. So by the time I first drifted to The Apple—with unreliable Celt just above my head—I needed quick solutions: to the mystery of married women; Deadness; being spaced-out; the problem of wild oats; unfaithful muses; the elusiveness of Stein's space; orgies; but more particularly I wanted a formula to solve the problem of the inherent muddle inevitably found at the bottom of, in the final stitch of, any given perspective. This was not to say: the world, history, couldn't be changed. People made it all up: it could be remade. But how, when and where. I played a lot of angles: for lack of an answer I got together a gang of shadows and captured the black angels, let them down into the slow waters of my own bad eyesight: Albert Ryder was back there riding a white horse against the dawn. The angels were supposed to protect: yet they could not prevent dancing devils from lynching my father at daybreak. I found pieces of my mother's flesh and hair in my bowl of soup. I tore open the chest of history and hundreds of years of blood, gall, acid, crossed-wires, frazzled brain tissue, broken promises, disremembrances, killings galore, starvations, diseases rampant as—. It all poured out. Too much for the normal eye. Terrible: sentimental, romantic. I'll never escape. Times when the hard, cold precise word, thing, refuses to make your point. Poor Amygism. I tried once being the king. Prayed for goodness but kept doing all the wrong things. Love? I gave up: it was hopeless. Wore a shabby beard, carried a tall staff—befitting my rank, spoke to everybody I met about the possible solutions to perspectives, and, uh, about other matters, too. I'm getting long-winded. Don't want to bamboozle you. It's just that I'm still sorta . . . Never mind . . . ”
He was in the bank when everything went out of focus. Next in line, he never got his American Express Travellers Cheques cashed. The floor turned slightly. Pictures reproduced from works by Raphael and Pinturicchio in silver frames behind the counter slid sideways. Mason felt as transparent as a metalpoint on blue handmade paper. His panic was reflected in the eyes of the clerks and other customers. The guard was the first to cry out. He was an old man who fished in his holster for his pistol without luck. The tilt continued for . . . who could tell how long. Time itself left the space. The ceiling cracked, slightly. “Che cos'è?” “Oh no!” “Oh no!” Was the ancient city of Florence being bombed? Mason found himself huddled in a corner with the others. A man who was probably the bank manager started shouting for everybody to go to the basement but nobody made it. Why? Six men with ski masks came in with submachine guns. They shot the guard then told everybody else to make like they were praying to Dante or God or David or Michelangelo himself. They all got their hands up. Although Mason was funny at times, this time he wasn't shaking like Willy Best as he held his hands above his head. His eyes didn't buck. His teeth didn't chatter. The floor beneath them continued to rumble. Five gunmen aimed their guns on the clerks and the manager. One took care of Mason and the other customers and potential customers. He kept talking to them in a Bogart voice, which sounded pretty funny in Italian. An old woman among them fell to her knees and started praying to Lazarus and a fifteenth century Tuscan pilgrim Mason had never heard of. The floor cracked as the clerks filled two canvas sacks with lire at gunpoint. When they finished, the plate-glass window facing the via D. Corso flew to smithereens! Mason couldn't help wondering if some nasty streak of bad luck was following him. He sort of wished he was sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying a glass of wine with Italo Calvino . . . When the police arrived, minutes after the robbers fled in their oxydized gray Fiat, the bank—as all of Florence—was still shaking like a drunk the-morning-after.
The bed in his room at the Argentina was lumpy. Sleep difficult. He was beginning to fear sleep anyway: it held too much danger. Yet he had no choice: the asymmetrical shot of a runner—himself?—(no longer a swimmer) . . . What mocking sound out there? Bats in the . . . ? Nightmare alley . . . Hay, w-wait! . . . wasn't that an old Bogart-Eddie . . . No, you're thinking of The Wagons Roll at Night. Go to sleep, tough guy. You've made your own bed of nails. He who lurks in the company of hyped-up cons, charmed thieves, rejected marks, the damned in flight from search warrants, outlaws with golden arms, carpetbaggers, elastic molls, addicts who wheeze, killers in Little Caesar-shoes, forbearers in search of big money, Cagney-dudes turned Camus-sharp, Studs Lonigan dupes, wild-side-walkers, dudes in Houdini-getups whispering farewell my lovely, and ex-skateboard freaks with butterflies tattooed on their proletarian buttocks, cannot expect to soar in unsentenced clean flight with restful sober falcons. Maltese? No, no . . . sleep. Your days will become indistinguishable. You thought you were like a gray boy, could grow up and marry a Vassar girl, settle down on Moby-Dick, your yacht, out there . . . ? Pull—pull harder: conflict is connecting with yang and exchange is tangled into yin. Thought you smarter than Invisible Man, joker! You pastoral cowboy on the run! Will you run to faith or with facts? The priest will hand you over to cops. Vice versa: if Gary Cooper or Wayne don't get you first at gunpoint, g
unslinger. What was that noise—out there . . . in, i-in, uh, the hall . . . Public Enemy ain't here now, bud, to spoon feed ya. For crysake! Clean up your act—grow up! Pity: you can't turn to anything ’cause you don't believe: oh, you remember hearing about the Black Madonna in Poland? if you were a God-fearing Christian you'd be able to trot with your guitar or harmonica up the Jazna Gora at Pauline and sink to your holy knees before the icon and beg forgiveness or go to the Holy Grail or . . . oh, hell, forget it. You think Mexico or South America the answer. How can you be sure you're not being observed right now, that Schnitzler and Signard and Armegurn are not all connected? Maybe you should've never left the ghetto, swindler: might've been better to marry your secret design or, yeah, how about the first grownup woman to take your skinny butt to bed: remember Mabel Study? Presser with thick arms, fried hair, red eyes with yellow rims: rusty feet, huge sagging mammary glands: and when those hard black thighs opened on that two-bit hotel bedroom you smelled her machine's steam lift to befuddle your face. Yet your youth and inexperience and, bygolly, your teenage hardon, led the way. Mentally maybe you never left that plateau! Did you leave that episode baptized in her steam? You humped away at her hardness till you couldn't hump anymore. Then you knew she went home to her dingy house full of ill-conceived hungry children. You on the other hand threw your “proud” head back and went in search of . . . of what? . . . to have married her: a sturdy life of brainrot to protect you from this gruesome plight. Nobody knew your name then. Nobody knows it now. Native son? Naw. You remember Defoe—ha! “My true name is so well known . . . that it is not to be expected I should set my name on the account of my family to this work . . . It is enough to tell you . . . the name Moll Flanders so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am . . . ” You're now on a roller-coaster to the . . . May as well: O picaro! You devilish old Lazarillo de Tormes! Huh? God protects the victims . . . ?
. . . Cooler up here—after a good two hundred and fifty tunnels: Hem at seventeen was abed here back when the Universite Degli Studi di Milano was a hospital. As in Catania, the school was right in the city—Old Town, actually. His hotel: seven minutes' walk away. Professor Ina Bulletti, who'd just had a cancer operation, emitted a sense of vast humility. Her handshake was like walking in rain on a sunny day. She must have been sixty. “I met you once in the states but that was years ago. You wouldn't remember . . . ” Her smile was self-effacing. “Your work will be the subject of a whole chapter in a book I'm writing.” They finished their coffee and went across the street with its old street-car tracks toward the university. It was midafternoon and people were going back to work. She led him into the courtyard then along the walkway to the Instituto di Lingua and Litteratura Inglese e Letturatura. She was chairman of that outfit. As she rapped about the author he felt a strange twitch: wanted to turn himself by voodoo or hype or hip or volcanic faith into a snail safely housed inside a Prince Albert tin at the bottom of the last ditch on the outskirts of the last cockfight with wagerers screaming, shouting, calling through cocaine-thick voices for more blood. Keep close to the action. She gave him an upbeat introduction. Mason started off talking about his early influences—mentioned Vittorini, bridged this with the French thing, connected to Toomer's magical rendering of soft, lingering shadows, the dew and dusk, morning mist and mulattoes, sweetness of a land without Spring snow. His language was like stepping nervously in fine grained cowboy boots made by Santa Rosa 1906. He hooked this whole romantic mood to Claude's hectic, joyful exploration of nightlife in Harlem and gave them the wonderful details of that ol' banjo strummer rambling mentally and physically about Marseilles. The whole so-called lecture was a merry-go-round of egocentric, brash jive with references that some of them caught only because they were students of Bulletti. This stuff was sculptured language; cryptic skip-system junk; pretzels; jigsaw hunks. After the show the “champ” got a big hand then went to the toilet where he did not find a message from headquarters scrawled on the booth wall. A Nazi symbol, yes, but no word from Control. Although Professor Bulletti took him to Santa Maria delle Grazie to see those cracked and faded figures, it made him feel like a bleeding tunnel through a stone mountain.
He was spacing—not quite sure where he was: was this Zocalo and was he feeding the stupid pigeons peanuts—? Never mind: it was lonely being a fugitive. Had somebody slipped a different name into his little blue book? Say, Jack Verbb or Geechee McKee or Gauz Gazabo or Heavy Hebe or—Cut it out. He'd come through more tunnels, he knew. Italy? It had to be: then why this feeling of Mexico City—chatter, tinsel, beeps, rumble, screech. Gringo negro on the run! If only the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan were there to hide in, lie still in. You must have a bad, bad hangover: this is Italy! Italy I said! Sure, sure. And I'm on my way to the Empire of Genova, right. Correct. Roger. Check. One thing he needed was time. There was a cactus taste in his sour mouth just beneath the whim of scotch. The tavern smelled faintly of kerosene. He missed his Monet Fall surfaces, the Mediterranean: though it wasn't far. Finally, he saw the road sign: Pisa. Took exit. Tried to hold up the falling structure with all he had. Crowds of tourists cackled at his effort as he gave up, crawling to safety as the edifice tumbled. But it wasn't Pisa that he wanted was it. No, that Empire. Back in his vehicle he turned on the radio to try to short circuit the circle of his flapping fangs. The radio, in English, said, “Hi. I'm still your friend. Keep on trucking.” It turned out to be an American rock star making it big in Italy. Then there was an American punk star singing an interesting hit full of pals and gals guys and girls dudes and dames. It made him laugh till tears.
In Genova and totally a victim of vertigo Mason flapped his wings and threw his voice against an auditorium ceiling. If he could make his whirling voice true, being in brackets wouldn't matter: swastika and cross both could exist within the confinement of a triangle. He read: “He felt his heart had been cut out. He could still feel a draft where holes had been driven into his head. He was Still Life with Holes. Hard of hearing, he didn't listen to Florence whispering, the pineapple and chocolate lap of her bitter tongue. The flesh of his body seemed all he had—at the moment. His enemies—unclean spirits—tied him down and searched through, back far into, his cave, up into the flue of his flamed mind, down through his Coca Cola-cold blood, in the shoestrings and telephone wires of his being. They cut sharply not only along the flesh but deeper into the fanged bone. Devils! No yolk, no jelly! Only the ashes of an ancient West African village, a teepee pole, the scarred boots of an Irishman, the apron of an Irishwoman. He smiled. Alone in himself, things howled at him in the mineral night. First snow, through gray heat: he could almost see a white bank glowing in fog. Flakes wide apart. Black limbs of emotional trees with Springtime pink blossoms. He hoped for renewal, a kind of life, to unseat the lame-duck. Florence held him but not closely, not with feeling, with enjoyment. She also held a large bunch of artificial flowers. Going deeper into himself he found a jazzhall full of brass: nobody'd ever robbed this place: decked with scarred, juice-stained, tough furniture. But walking in the city—for him, as he remembered it now while lying in bed—was a comfort, a distraction: in front of an antique shop on a narrow cobbled street an old woman—Celt in disguise?—with a mullet-face wearing a tartan fumbled at the window of a bar he was about to enter. She couldn't see in there: wasn't wearing her specs. Flaccidly pretending to be seriously involved in life, she touched her tam-o-shanter gingerly then pulled her fifty-year-old dress unstuck from her girdle; found her rhinestone glasses then looked through her luster at the imitation figures moving around: he was one. A full silty sky was clamped firmly overhead. It was carnival time in these streets. Confetti floated from high windows. He looked into the woman's alarmist-eyes: they were paste and gem quartz: salmon tongue, spotted. She aimed her best eye at a big tree by the cathedral: it was just a way to avoid the piercing and derailing eye of Mason. What did he want? The state of his mind: noise. He liked it: it made him want to go to the center of
the carnival, dream there, as though inside the delicate fluttering heartbeat of a nuclear holocaust: he'd ride a ferris wheel—oiled by faith and politics. He'd drink pig-tea from a wooden creosote-dipped cup, dip horse-snuff: it was always the same when he tried to reconnect with lost Celt or to find the root of C or the siren or Kangaroo Eye or Wind Voice or Chiro or—: they were each so distinct; interfaces yet interchangeable.
He got through the Genova episode somehow without remembering it: he did it well and nobody knew he wasn't there. At Hotel Cosimo near the opera house. A message from Professor Pauliani Poggi: “If you're up to it, my husband and I'd enjoy having you come to dinner tonight. Just buzz when you arrive . . . ” Dinner went so smoothly he hardly noticed he was there. And the lecture the next morning took care of itself: despite his strange hard-to-follow reference to conquistadores raping the be Jesus out of Indians and to Cortes and hidden eyes and what was meant to be a joke about the wallpaper in his hotel room (“ . . . of the glittering sword planted in the neck of a defiant black bull—repeated eight thousand tiny times all around him on the wall . . . ”). Mason didn't let his bat-infested head spoil things. Although he'd gotten on well with pure Pauliani and guarded Gino, answered student questions and shaken hands with the faculty, he left with wild birds riding his back and monkeys clinging to his legs. He even stopped to rest, on his return to Nice, in a tree: a leafless old black tree. Demented goblins and unfortunate old women (referred to as toothless witches) danced in dank moonlight below. Mules and goats dressed in formal attire paid their moist respects to . . . Mason almost escaped the beauty of their strangeness when he was about to be dragged before a firing squad to be shot for imitating a . . . But at the last minute he was needed to fill a vacancy in a gigantic choir. Yet he didn't know the Medieval song they were ready to unearth.
My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) Page 17