by John Lawton
My father phoned me a day or so later. He never mentioned Althea, but then he didn’t have to. I knew why he’d called.
By the April of ’63 I felt I was living with a caged tiger. Her anger came in waves and battered against whatever was there, me included. Her affection became ferocious, her attention negligent. I’d go days without seeing her, then she’d appear out of nowhere, fling herself at me, drain me and move on. I’d wake from post-coital sleep to find the bed empty, a light shining from Mel’s old room and she’d be stuck over her books oblivious to my presence until the next time. I am not an inarticulate man but what I felt I could not utter, I could not find the words to create the confrontation I wanted and dreaded. I said nothing. I watched part of me die instead.
That spring I picked up the phone and got blown away.
‘Hi, cowboy.’
‘Mel?’
‘Of course it’s me, you fuckin’ idiot.’
‘Where are you?’
‘New York. I been back about six months.’
‘Back from where?’
‘Mexico, Guatemala . . . you know . . . places.’
‘Are you coming home?’
‘What? With Little Miss Fireball still in residence? Are you kidding? Nah . . . what’s home? I’ve lost the sense of that word. I guess home is New York. Maybe a bad habit rather than a home. Sometimes it feels like I never left. I have an apartment in the East Village and a job on the Voice.’
‘I still have your stuff.’
‘Keep what you want, put the rest out on the street. Let the bums help themselves. I’m kind of fixed up now. Which is also why I called. I can fix you up too.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I mean there’s a job on the Voice I could put your way. I could even find you a room.’
‘I have both of those things here, Mel. And, as you put it, I also have Miss Fireball.’
He paused in his rattle.
‘Yeah, but for how long? I watch TV. The woman’s on fire. A moving violation on legs. Know your Emily Dickinson—“You cannot something something a fire”, jeez I forget, but the next line is, “A flame that will ignite will burn without a spark upon the stillest night”. That’s your Miss Burke.’
‘I’m so glad you shared that with me.’
‘Fuck you, Turner.’
The next call was about six weeks later and went better. He didn’t mention Althea.
‘There’s still a job for you here.’
‘I’m not a reporter, Mel.’
‘Neither was I.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
I wasn’t lying. He’d put it in my head. How could I not think about it? But consider it? Never. Leave Althea? Never.
It was not long after that the Movement announced the big rally in Washington that summer, timed for August 28. Tolstoy’s birthday—not that anyone knew—and the day W.E.B. du Bois would die—not that anyone knew. Principal speaker Martin Luther King, known to us in SNCC as ‘de lawd’. I hardly ever heard Althea refer to him as anything else.
It was understood we would be there. A march of hundreds of thousands of people to demand civil rights and an end to segregation, to pressure Jack Kennedy into getting his Civil Rights Bill out of logjam, through the House and the Senate and into law, was something we’d both worked for and believed in. Then, it was decided that Althea should not speak. Althea was compromised, pink at the edges, a revolutionary would-be and pretty far from the image the Movement wanted to present. She was furious.
Mel called me again. I said no. I urged him to come south for the march. All he said was, ‘Been there, done that.’
One day in early August I got home to find Althea packed. Packed as simply as she’d arrived. Backpack shouldered, typewriter in hand.
‘Don’t do this,’ I said.
‘I have to go now, Johnnie. If you love me you won’t stand in my way.’
‘Go where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will you be back?’
‘Don’t know that either.’
She kissed me. Not with the fire and flame of her old passion, but sisterly. On the cheek. She pulled open the door. I grabbed her hand in a pathetic gesture—symbolic, no force in my grip, just wanting to hold onto her. She smiled, that Naughahyde look again, and just as gently pulled her hand from mine. I watched our palms slide, our fingers part, my hand big and white, hers small and black and pink of palm.
I called Mel.
‘No problemo. The job’s gone, but there’ll be another one up for grabs at the end of the month.’
‘And the room? Would we be sharing an apartment again?’
‘Nah . . . woman I work with needs a lodger. You’ll love her. She’s this real sassy Englishwoman called Rose. Has a place down by the Fulton Street fish market.’
It took me a week or two to pull out. Find a home for Liberace. Sell off what was worth selling. What wasn’t I put out on the street along with Mel’s stuff. It was all gone the next morning. All except a box of Althea’s old divinity texts. I had never bothered to imagine the day I might leave my work, leave the home I’d had those last few years, but I now found I could do it almost on auto. Without Althea I’d lost that life, that way of life. Home, the work, the Movement—all that mattered. Stripped clean and tossed down. I’d lost me, and lost America with it. I knew now how Mel felt after Mississippi. I knew how much he’d lost. Lost himself, lost his place in the nation and its culture. I’d been on those same skids myself since Mississippi. I just hadn’t known it. We were homeless. The well-educated, well-heeled Bums of America.
By chance, I did not so time it, I ended up catching a bus for New York on the morning of the big march. Washington was quiet—every congressman had found a good excuse to be out of the city that day, there were more cops standing around than regular citizens. As I stood in the bus depot a black guy came up, looked at my pack and bag and drew the obvious but wrong conclusion, and said, ‘You just got in for the march? Then you’ll need one of these.’
And he pinned a SNCC badge on me. A black hand and a white hand clasping each other. I still have it. Somewhere. It’s all I have left of those long years of my life. Besides it reminds me of the last time I saw Althea in the flesh—my hand clasping hers.
On Saturday, August 28, 1963 I was the only passenger on a bus heading north, as bus after bus poured into the city southward. I tried counting and gave up. Years later Paul Simon captured that same bleak feeling I had that day when he sang about counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike—a line that still makes me want to weep. God knows, maybe the man thought he’d written a song of optimism. To me it has always spelt night and darkness, the glare of headlights in the rain, perfectly capturing the way I felt on a bright sunburst August morning. A quarter of a million people. ‘All come to look for America’—just when I knew I’d lost it.
§
I have seen Althea many time since in the remoteness of mediation. Althea in the New York Times, Althea on the nightly news, Althea on the cover of Time, arguing the case for Labor, for Equality, whatever. She has never lacked a cause or a platform. She even flew to North Vietnam, but got totally eclipsed by Jane Fonda. Just as well. By ’72 she was acceptable enough to run for Congress as a Democrat and get slaughtered in the Nixon landslide. I heard her challenged on her record on several occasions, the accusation of Communist sympathies flung in her face. And I heard her answer. It went roughly like this, a basic model even if the detail varied with every utterance: ‘Do you have it on record anywhere that I was or ever claimed to be a Communist? I say now what I said in ’62 and ’63—it’s as valid now as it was then—what are we trying to achieve by sanctions on Cuba? Have we improved the chances of democratic change in Cuba by these means? Have we made it less of a totalitarian state? Of course we have
n’t, we have simply gone on making an enemy in our own backyard. And if you still think I’m a Communist I’d remind you that HUAC came to the opposite conclusion.’ It worked—revise, backtrack, rewrite. By ’77 Carter thought enough of her rapport with the Unions to put her in charge of an off-cabinet Labor Relations committee, and in 1984 she finally made it in into Congress for one of the Georgia districts. I believe it is now one of her missions to give Slick Willie a hard time.
§
1969. I had hoped to make El Paso that night, but there was no way I was going to push that old Buick the way the traffic cop had done. I have never much liked driving. That Jack Kerouac/Sam Shepard number of ‘just-get-into-the-car-and-go’ has never been me. I know, almost unAmerican and one day it’ll be a felony. But there I was, crawling along the interstate in that broad flat nowhere of southwest Texas feeling more bored than I had thought possible and determined to pull in at the next motel even if it was run by Norman Bates, when, as Kerouac had put it, God pointed his forefinger at me. I had brought it on myself—cruising roads as straight as arrows, having played every tape at least five times, with only the aftermath of harvest, endless fields of wheat-stubble and straw, to look at I had come to welcome any distraction. Dead skunk—score one. Live, scuttling armadillo—score three. The merest, the smallest, the most shot-up roadsign (that’s Texas for you, take out your boredom on a harmless road sign) achieved the status of literature, the serial novel of ‘No Littering’, ‘Eat at Fred’s—only 45 miles ahead’ and ‘Farm Road 1,000,001’. God pointed his forefinger at me. The clouds gathered, the sky blackened, the thunder rolled and lightning zapped down all around me. Great bolts of electricity, a summer tempest fit to fry me, set the cornfields blazing. Talk about your burning bush, I felt my entire ass was on fire. I floored the pedal, surrendered all my misgivings about the car and tore out as fast as I could.
I found a motel, somewhere west of the Pecos is about as accurate as I could be. And the guy who ran it looked nothing like Norman Bates. Just as well. I had God and Kerouac to worry about. ‘Off the Road’, ‘Don’t go to Arizona’ ran through my dreams like a mantra. But when I woke in the morning it was gone. The storm had blown out, it was a pleasant, summer morning, the last breath of cool in the long day. I sat on a verandah, chair propped back on two legs like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine, drinking overcooked hotplate coffee from a plastic cup and eating a sticky, too-sweet blueberry muffin and finding both tolerable. Arizona here I come.
§
It was later than I thought. Isn’t that always the way. I had turned off I-10 at Bowie and headed south along a gravel road into the furthest corner of Arizona. I hated to admit it, but I was beginning to think I was lost. All I had to go on was the knowledge that the Moondogs had holed up in a ghost town on the slopes of the Chiricahua mountains. I had thought I would ask. But I hadn’t passed anyone to ask. It was the empty quarter. Arizona Deserta. I wasn’t quite driving in circles, but I did have the feeling that I was going nowhere. Half the farmhouses I passed seemed to be abandoned, those that weren’t had chain gates and big dogs—so I drove on. South. Closer to Mexico.
About fifty miles on I could see my first sign of life since I left the interstate. A horse and wagon were pulled up at the roadside, the horse grazing on the shoulder, and an old feller in dungarees and a straw hat was slowly whacking in a fence post. I pulled up.
‘Afternoon, sir.’
‘Almost evening,’ he replied. ‘But a good one to you all the same.’
‘You wouldn’t happen to know where . . . ?’
Where what? Dammit I hadn’t worked this through. Again. Was I going to ask him where a drugged-up bunch of crazies were holed up?
‘I’m looking for . . . a community.’
‘Community,’ he echoed. Didn’t seem to be a question.
‘Well—a commune more like. Somewheres hereabouts. Group of . . . young people. You might have seen them.’
‘If you’re looking for the hippies, why don’t you just say so?’
Point blank range. Got me right between the eyes.
‘I’m looking for the hippies.’
He took off his hat, wiped his brow on his sleeve, and used the hat to point.
‘T’aint far. Carry on along Buzzard Creek Road. In about fifteen miles it swings south, you go east up a dirt road to the foot of the mountains. About six or seven miles beyond that the road twists into a canyon like a corkscrew. That’s your whatdeyecallit commune. When I was a boy it was San Pedro. Nobody lived there since the Depression. Nobody ’cept ghosts. Till the hippies that is. You don’t look like a hippie to me.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Well, some of them are decent folks.’
‘Some of them?’
‘Just like everybody else. Some are, and some ain’t. Enjoy the sunset. Looks to be a good one tonight. See them little ribbons of cloud, them long wavy ones.’
I turned in my seat. Looked back westward.
‘Just the kind of sky to glow of an evening, like fire on the horizon.’
He picked up his mallet and started pounding his fence post again. I drove on. Missed the turning and doubled back. The old guy was right—corkscrew described the road pretty well. It doubled back on itself a dozen times in a matter of a few miles. High above me were the bluffs of a narrowing canyon—the sort of rock formation you see in Westerns, Burt Lancaster leaping from one to another as though it were effortless.
I passed through the neck at the head of the trail and found myself in a wider, flat-bottomed canyon. If I had but known the term I’d’ve realized I’d blundered into what is called a micro-climate. Not desert, not mountain either—but a little of everything. Alligator juniper, manzanita, Arizona oak, patches of prickly pear and ocatillo—all nestling under towering cliffs of green-tinged rhyolite columns looking like the ribcage of a long dead monster, and watered by a snow-fed cascade that leapt down between the columns to cut a path across the canyon floor. By comparison the town, or what was left of it, seemed tiny. A couple of dozen buildings, some patched up, some in complete decay. Here and there hens clucked around, goats strained against their tethers and pigs peered over the tops of pens. And in the middle of a big plot of tilled red earth a red-skinned woman stood hoeing the weeds from a bed of squashes.
It was like a Hollywood device I’ve seen in countless movies. After whatever ordeal, whatever rejection, the hero, and what’s left of his family, suddenly stumbles across ‘the place’—somewhere where things work, where the rent is affordable, where the guys with pickax handles are actually using them to dig not beat your brains out, and everything has a hint of paradise to it. It all smacks of New Deal propaganda and invariably the movie ends with, ‘Can we stay here, mister? Can we really stay here?’ and the bit player playing ‘mister’, always seemed to be Henry Travers or Arthur Hunnicutt or anyone who’d made the folksy benign his own, pulls on his pipe and smiles. Is that the way The Grapes of Wrath ends or have I just not seen it in a long time? A cinematic cliché? Absofuckinlutely, darling, as my late wife used to say.
I got out of the car and ambled over to the Indian woman. Before I could speak she said, ‘We didn’t know when to expect you. First it was yesterday evening, then lunchtime today, and it was only half an hour ago we really knew you were on your way. I suppose you’ll want to see Notley right away?’
She pointed to an ochre-colored adobe chapel—the cross on its roof still intact, a few gaping holes in the walls, a door looking pitted with age and bullet holes.
‘In there?’
‘It’s sort of his place. We all have our own place.’
‘And he’s expecting me?’
‘Of course.’
Maybe Burt Lancaster had been leaping from rock to rock, flashing news of my arrival?
‘In there?’
‘How many times do you
want me to say it?’
‘Will my car be OK here?’
‘Everything will be OK here. Nobody will steal a thing. You go on now.’
I stepped into the chapel and waited a second or two for my eyes to adjust to the light. There was a figure up a stepladder, painting something onto a huge image tacked to the wall. As my eyes resolved the image became clearer. The old woman from Village 77, staring blankly into Mouse’s camera. It was the same blow-up I’d seen back in Lubbock at Mouse Photo.
The guy on the ladder didn’t turn.
‘Been expecting you,’ was all he said.
I didn’t think I’d made any noise, but, God knows, it was so quiet in there, maybe he could hear me breathe?
‘Mouse?’ I said.
‘Yep.’
‘He told me he didn’t know where you were.’
He wiped his hands on his Levi’s, leaned back to get a look at what he was doing. Still with his back to me. I could see clearly now. The old woman was still the old woman, but I’d swear the pink outfit she was wearing, somehow over-projected onto her, and delicately touched up with paint and gouache, was the same one Jackie Kennedy had been wearing that day in Dallas. There was even the dirty crimson of dried blood on the lapel. But instead of Jackie Kennedy’s high cheekbones and numb grief, there was the vacant stare of a Vietnamese peasant. Beyond grief. Calmly fixing to die.
‘Mouse didn’t lie to you, Mr Raines. All I ever give him is a box number in Tucson.’
He came down the ladder, backing towards me, looking up at his handiwork. Wherever I went I seemed to see not the writing on the wall but the painting on the wall. Tsu-Lin, Huey, the anonymous painter of the Last Supper in Lazarus, now Notley. I began to feel I’d stumbled into a national obsession. Over to the left another gigantic blow-up. A shot I knew and I tended to think everyone in Amerika knew. The guy kneeling in the street in Saigon, who had his brains blown out by a Vietnamese Police Chief, in front of Eddie Adams’ camera. Associated Press put that picture into half the newspapers on earth. Only in this version it wasn’t Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulling the trigger, it was Elvis, Elvis as seen in one of his third rate movies, cowboy shirt and sixgun, Elvis as reworked in three overlapping frames and washes of primary colors by Warhol—and now, it would seem, by Notley.