by John Domini
Bedlam
John Domini
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1978, 1980, 1981 Bedlam by John Domini
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2015 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
Some of these stories originally appeared in:
The Boston Globe, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Transatlantic Review.
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-936873-99-9
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
For Mary Ann
Your aim is true
No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined;
rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches.
—Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”
Contents
Bedlam: an Introduction After the Fact
Over 4000 Square Miles
The Return
Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be
Special Instructions, Special Instructions
Astral Projection
At the Dig
Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side
Chasing Names
An Encounter
Some Numb Commitment
Ul ’Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo
Bedlam: an Introduction After the Fact.
For reissue by Dzanc Books, e-format, 2015
Now, asserts the Evangelist, we see as through a glass darkly. Now our mirror’s pocked and grody, and only in some better, brighter future will we see face to face. The author of First Corinthians had the story to go with it, too, the transformation on the road to Damascus. Right there on the highway, Saul became Paul, as his imagination carried him far into the future, beyond his own death and to the end of the world. Come to think, doesn’t the imagination always face the way? Towards the future? Isn’t it about what’s emerging: a Kingdom above the sky, a story beyond the scribbles? Seems so — or rather it seemed so, till Dzanc Books and their generous ePrint program showed me how the imagination colors a look back, too. For a writer, even in the future to which he once looked forward, the mirror of “now” remains smudged and blemished.
The publication date for Bedlam was the start of 1982, and that edition held just nine stories. In the first months of that year, though, I completed two more, “At the Dig” and “Chasing Names.” Both landed at good quarterlies and, in light of the Dzanc offer, both look to be of a piece with the rest of the collection. They’re products of the same inspiration and follow the same binary code. One is urban realism, the other another road-vision, voyaging out beyond death. So too they share the book’s most common narrative tension, between the gathering grind of the mundane and the tenuous filaments of the heart.
For the collection I wrote most of the back-cover copy, and there I claimed that the stories “sooner or later come round to the subject of love.” It does appear — now — that I had in mind the two I was working on, as well as what was already in the Table of Contents. I can see how “Dig” fumbles through the same lovers’ glitches as other stories here, while “Names” completes a trilogy of intimacy that extends beyond the body. That much I can discern, at least, in the distant mirror of this born-again text.
Other details remain clear, to be sure. The book appeared on fiction international, a magazine that was branching into publishing, the brainchild of the resourceful Joe David Bellamy. I’d appeared in the magazine, and Bellamy had circulated a request among his contributors, asking for story collections. By decade’s end, I should add, he was chairing the literature division of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he’d sold the entire venture. San Diego State now publishes the magazine (the name in upper case), and for all I know, a few of Bedlam‘s first print run languish yet in a warehouse in La Jolla.
The pieces I sent Bellamy were selected from a group about twice that size. I went for unifying concerns, that balance of types and tensions, and I made sure to include the two stories with the best magazine credits: Ploughshares for “Ul’Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo,” and Paris Review for “Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be.” The latter publication may still rank as my Greatest Hit, when it comes to fiction, and some thanks must go to Stanley Elkin. Elkin was teaching in Boston in those days, as I was, and he’d just finished a story set, like “Kookaberry,” in Hell (“The Conventional Wisdom,” brilliant stuff). The man proved generous, sitting down with my manuscript. Yet grateful as I am, I can’t point to specific changes he suggested. Elkin didn’t make notes, we had no more than an hour in his BU office, and once again, I see but darkly. All I know is, at the time I tended to resist coaching; I wasn’t in school anymore.
In the same way, I went with my own versions of the two stories edited by Gordon Lish, at Esquire. Lish worked over “The Return” and “Special Instructions, Special Instructions,” then accepted both, telling me when each would appear and estimating I’d be paid a thousand apiece. Both were then returned without a penny — over the phone, Lish blamed his superiors, but many writers have since told me similar stories — and so for the submission to Bellamy, those stories were back the way I wanted them. “The Return,” happily, found what used to be an excellent venue, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (which paid just shy of a thousand, FYI), and that story was also the one I most often read aloud, during those years. For the Dzanc ePrint, I’ve gone with my “reading copy,” a version in which the drama’s knuckles stand out more whitely. I’d kept the old marked-up typescript.
Typescript, yes. That’s part of the shadow that falls between the first Bedlam and this one. These stories were all composed longhand, and even when I took the drafts to another technology, it was a clumsier device by far than my MacBook Air. Now, typewriter nostalgia does sweep me away from time to time (ah, the roller bar), but nostalgia always, so to speak, whites out some part of the reality. What matters is the change in affect, while writing. Myself, I still occasionally go back to paper and pencil, I muck out the channel between the tips of the fingers and the back of the brain, but even then, I can only wonder at how the flow has changed. About that change, I’ve seen what others have to say. Robert Coover, Geoff Dyer, others. The light they shed on storytelling and its machinery, though, doesn’t reach in where my thumb used to throb, as I scratched and scrawled.
Bedlam also affords a glimpse or two of my masters, sure. The piece that most smacks of Donald Barthelme, wouldn’t you know it, was first composed while in Barthelme’s seminar. Yet I revised “An Encounter” several times more, and though Barthelme remained a friend I never shared it with him. I sent him the issue of Transatlantic Review in which the piece appeared, and he told me he heard John Hawkes in it. So too, while one story may carry an echo of eloquent John Barth, and another a strain of streetwise Richard Price (both close readers for a while, each kind enough to commit blurbs), the noises I notice most are personal. Bedlam came out of bedlam, a citified hullabaloo that suited a scatter-shot career and, in a fitting touch of the aleatory, launched a long marriage. Love wore frayed corduroy and Truth arrived smeared with cheap ink, in the pages of a so-called “underground newspaper.”
It was such a paper, the Boston Phoenix, that gave me my most thorough review. The author, Kathleen Hirsch, liked “Some Numb Commitment” especially (i
ndeed, she went on to publish a book on the mad and homeless). Other praise appeared in places like North American Review, and the book helped me land some good jobs. But what really came to matter, as the glow of publication dimmed, was the private approbation.
An outstanding case concerns a grim ‘90s birthday. My latest career had gone off the rails, that same early marriage had fallen into its dying spiral — and a letter arrived, happy birthday, from a West Coast writer who’d loved the book. A letter as long as the Phoenix review, it mattered to me more, by far. The same goes for the woman who showed up at an L.A. reading in 2007, an event to launch a very different book. She had Bedlam with her, this woman, and she told me she was there because of how much “Kookaberry” meant to her. In exchanges like that I recognize, through the murk of everyday, that the collection amounted to more than a stray shared “now,” in which my stolen hours dreaming on paper overlapped Bellamy’s luck with state and university funding. Something in the text proved durable and nifty enough to last, to reach an occasional stranger who sampled the text, through the ever-more scattered and unruly decade and a half before my next saw print.
The imagination may be built for looking ahead, but you can’t pretend it’s got no influence when you’re looking back. Gilbert Sorrentino observed that art was “the act of smashing the mirror,” and so when it comes to Bedlam, finally I have to give up on tracking down sources and meanings. I have to trust in its power to break through my own mirror, scuffed and pitted, and get clear. Dzanc Books, thanks for the smash.
Des Moines, IA 2014
Over 4000 Square Miles
What Hartley couldn’t take were the Town Halls. Up the coast from the Everglades the limousine carried him, cutting through Fort Lauderdale to reach the ocean. Then it was one resort after another, places where most of the buildings had been put up since 1975, getting wealthier as they headed north. Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach. And in each town Hartley would be amazed by the Town Hall. They were dinky, flattopped, single-story jobs, a slap in his face it seemed. They were painted effeminate seashell colors, with stucco walls that looked like wrinkled paper. Even the lettering on them looked like paper, like something Hartley’s kid could do. The one in Boca Raton had obvious plastic flowers standing lamely around the front door.
“Are you kidding me?” Hartley complained. “You call that a Town Hall?”
Garbeau, sitting beside him, right away cracked up. She was from Vermont originally and knew what he was talking about. The limo driver meantime lowered the divider between the front and rear seats.
“What’s the matter with that, man?” the driver asked. “Ain’t they got Town Halls where you come from?”
Garbeau laughed even harder, putting her head in Hartley’s lap. Hartley felt her throat trembling through his swim trunks.
“What they make ’em like where you come from, man? Your Town Halls got reefer on ’em or something?”
Garbeau had brought along a cigarette pack filled with joints. Hartley cupped his out of her reach now and concentrated. The driver was a big middle-aged black man, with a classic serene expression, like soggy jungle leaves.
“I’m quartered at Fort Devens,” Hartley said. “That’s in Ayer, Massachusetts.” He tried to make it clear he was still complaining. “And up in Massachusetts a Town Hall is serious business. A Town Hall up there has got a plaque for the war dead. It’s got a cannon on the front lawn.”
“That so?”
“Hartley, God.” Garbeau tweaked the inside of his thigh as she sat up. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re a soldier.”
Hartley nodded; he’d heard it before. But with that he fell silent. He moved his eyes from the rear-view mirror, where he’d been watching the driver, and he took a couple nervous tokes.
“Not in Florida, man,” the driver said finally. “A cannon on the front lawn is way too heavy for Florida.” The car was in cruise gear and the driver’s voice had changed. “This here, man, this the shadow world. Don’t you know that? All these fine new buildings, don’t let ’em fool you. Florida Indian land, pirate land. It’s alligator land, you dig?”
The driver’s voice was rounder, more hushy. Easily he fell into his tall tale. It seemed President Carter—“that’s President, Jimmy, Carter, you dig”—had to wrestle an alligator in order to win some important endorsement from the Seminole Indians.
“I heard that story,” Garbeau said, suddenly businesslike. To Hartley it seemed like she hadn’t spoken in twenty years. “I did research for that story, in case we were going to use it. Carter had to send a couple Secret Service down.”
Hartley started to regret his last couple tokes. Too much grass made him anxious.
“Course,” the driver said, “ain’t that hard to wrestle an alligator.”
“That’s what I heard,” Garbeau said. “Just have to stay clear of the tail.”
The driver nodded seriously. Hartley racked his brains for some joke to break up this insane conversation. In the end he could only tug on his dogtags and say directly, harshly: “Look, I don’t want to be a tourist. All right? You guys are filming my life down there. That’s what I want to see.”
Garbeau had lit her own joint by now. With the artificial smell of the air conditioning, the car stank.
“You told your wife,” she said, “today you’d be a tourist. You told her that last night you were out watching us shoot.”
Hartley filled his lungs with more smoke.
Noon. He was farther out of his head for noon, Hartley realized, than at any time in the last dozen years. When they pulled onto a public beach above West Palm, he sat in the shade with his elbows hooked over his knees. Slowly the sand irritated the white scars on his lower back.
His trouble was, when he complained it came out like a wisecrack. Garbeau and the driver had treated that entire business of the Town Halls as if it had been some kind of joke. And now Garbeau came and said he sounded like a little kid. She sat beside Hartley, gulping down a fried-clam lunch with doped-up speed. There were good reasons for his being here, she said. Her company had brought him down so that he’d serve as Special Advisor on a television docu-drama. They were filming the story of his escape from prison camp and his flight, alone, back to his own position in the winter of 1967-68. Garbeau’s company was trying to tell a simple human story without political overtones, a story of one man’s struggle to survive that would be truly meaningful for real people everywhere. Hartley tried saying he’d heard this speech before. But Garbeau only laughed.
“Look,” Hartley said, “if I’m just going to be doing the tourist bit, Claire should be here.”
This time Garbeau’s laughter had an edge. Something confidential; it made his groin tingle. Mildly, she pointed out that his wife Claire would be down no later than next week. Hartley had to look away. Claire and he had talked it over for three nights running and each time they’d reached the same decision. One parent should remain with the kids while they took their exams.
“Good reasons,” Garbeau said, finishing an enormous milkshake. “All very good reasons. So don’t be a crybaby. It’s high tide and I’m going in to body-surf.”
He sat watching her. When Garbeau stood up after riding her first wave in, the three patches of her wet string bikini came at him like a rose thrust in his face. Hartley had always thought he’d be a success at adultery. Or at least, he’d thought so since the Army had started sending him out on local publicity assignments. Sitting round with media types and New England pols, he’d been impressed by how much better in shape he was than most married men. Put Hartley in a T-shirt and jeans, and he’d look like everybody’s lippy teenage grease monkey. This at thirty-two. Plus, the first joke out of his mouth and the women would start asking him, my my Captain Hartley, is that the way a soldier talks? What does the Army do when it finds out the truth about you?
It was the war-hero business. He’d always known it gave him an advantage. Only last night, at the hotel bar, he’d pressed the adva
ntage home.
“I’m so glad you’re here with us,” Garbeau had told him. This was after dinner. “You make our story true to life.”
They’d eaten Chinese. Beforehand, she’d shared a couple joints with him, and ever since they’d been drinking rum. During dinner he’d been able to keep her talking either about high school, where she’d been a year behind Hartley and his wife, or about how she’d gone from St. Johnsbury to Hollywood. But now Garbeau had wanted to talk about the war.
“Hartley, God,” she’d said. “How could you go through what you did and not wind up, just, an empty shell of a human being?”
“Well”—Hartley had grinned—“I wrote a song about you.”
She hadn’t seen he was joking. She’d lifted her eyes to him, almond French-Canadian eyes Hartley had thought were beautiful since the age of fourteen. Over her rum, Garbeau’s expression was still all piety.
“Oh, on your guitar?”
Piety, piety, piety. Everyone was always so impressed that he’d had a guitar with him in the prison camp. Hartley had long ago stopped bothering to point out that it wasn’t his guitar. You couldn’t do a recon up Hill 1338 carrying a guitar. The guitar had belonged originally to one of the Dak To support personnel, a P.O. boy who’d gotten picked up during a convoy hit. The boy had died under torture.
“That’s right.” Hartley had grinned again, forcing it wider. “I wrote a song just for you. I called it, ‘For Ronnie G.’”
She’d smiled back uncertainly.
“No,” he’d gone on, “no, that’s not true. I called it ‘For V.G.’ So no one there would know who I meant.”
After that it had been as simple as Hartley had expected it would be. He believed he understood the psychology at work. Since the woman had allowed herself to come so close already, since she’d already made herself vulnerable, Hartley needed only to jiggle that first impression the least bit. To demonstrate the fun they could have with a shared trust. Then the interest in him would turn special. Any number of times, he’d seen the signals change in a woman’s look. But only here in Florida had he pressed beyond a look, beyond the surreptitious gropings and prolonged good-night kisses he’d gotten once or twice before.