Desolation Angels: A Novel
Page 32
All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss. I actually remember the dark swarming bliss of 1917 altho I was born in 1922! New Years’ Eves came and went and I was just blisshood. But when I was dragged out of my mother’s womb, blue, a blue baby, they yelled at me to wake up, and slapped me, and ever since then I’ve been chastised and lost for good and all. Nobody slapped me in bliss! Is God everything? If God is everything then it’s God who slapped me. For personal reasons? Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?
Yet in Raleigh a tall blue-eyed Southerner told me my bag was being shipped to my destination station in Winter Park. “God bless you,” I said, and he did a calm double take.
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As for my mother, there’s no other like her in the world, really. Did she bear me just to have a little child to bless her heart? She got her wish.
At this time she was retired from a lifetime (beginning at 14) of shoe skiving in shoe factories of New England and later New York, was collecting her social security pittance and living with my married sister as a kind of housemaid tho she didnt mind doing the housework at all, natural to her. A neat French Canadian born in St. Pacôme in 1895 while her pregnant mother was visiting Canada from New Hampshire. She was born a twin but the gleeful fleshly little twin died (O what would she have been like?) and the mother died too. So my mother’s position in the world was immediately cut off. Then her father died at 38. She was housemaid for aunts and uncles till she met my father who was infuriated at the way she was being treated. My father dead, and I a bum, she was housemaid for relatives again tho in her prime (wartime New York), she used to make $120 a week sometimes at the shoe factories on Canal Street and in Brooklyn, those times when I was too sick or sad to be on my own with wives and friends, and I came home, she totally supported me while I however wrote my books (with no real hope of ever having them published, just an artist). In 1949 I earned about $1000 on my first novel (advance) but that never went far so now she was at my sister’s, you saw her in the door, in the yard emptying the garbage, at the stove making roasts, at the sink washing dishes, at the ironing board, at the vacuum cleaner, all gleeful anyway. A suspicious paranoid who told me Irwin and Julien were devils and would ruin me (probably true), she nevertheless was gleeful as a child most of the time. Everybody loved her. The only time my father ever had any cause to complain about this pleasant peasant woman was when she’d let him have it fullblast for losing all his money gambling. When the old man died (age 57) he said to her, to Memère as my nephew now called her (short for grandemère):—“Angie, I never realized what a great women you are. Will you ever forgive me for all the wrong things I’ve done like those times I was away for days and the money I lost gambling, the few pitiful dollars I could’ve spent on you with some silly hat?—”
“Yes, Emil, but you always gave us the house money for food and rent.”
“Yes, but I lost a lot more than that on the horses and playing cards and money I gave away to a lot of bums—Ah!—But now that I’m dying I guess, and here you are workin in the shoe factory, and Jacky’s here to take care of me, and I aint worth it, now I realize what I lost—all those years—” One night he said he wished he had real old good Chinese food so Memère gave me five dollars and had me ride the subway all the way from Ozone Park to Chinatown New York to buy Chinese food in cartons, and bring it back. Pa ate every bit of it but threw up (cancer of the liver).
When we buried him she insisted on an expensive coffin, which made me so goddamed mad, but not only that, though I wasnt mad on that score, she had his old sweet body ambulated to New Hampshire for funeral and burial there by the side of his first son, Gerard, my holy brother, so now as thunder breaks in Mexico City where I write, they’re still there, side by side, 35 and 15 years there in the earth, but I never revisited their graves knowing that what’s there is not really Papa Emil or Gerard, only dung. For if the soul cant escape the body give the world to Mao Tse-tung.
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I know better than that—God must be a personal God because I’ve known a lot of things that werent in texts. In fact when I went to Columbia all they were trying to teach us was Marx, as if I cared. I cut classes and stayed in my room and slept in the arms of God. (This is what the dialectical materialists call “cherubim tendencies,” or the psychiatrists call “schizoid tendencies.”) Ask my brother and my father in their graves about tendencies.
I see them tending towards the golden eternity, where all is restored again forever, where actually whatever you loved is all compacted in One Essence—The Only One.
Now Christmas Eve we all sat around drinking Martinis in front of the TV. Poor little sweet Davey the gray cat who used to follow me into the North Carolina woods when I went there to meditate with the dogs, who therefore used to hide above my head in the tree, once throwing down a twig or leaf to make me notice him, he was now a ragged cat taken to carousal and fights and even got bitten by a snake. I tried to sit him on my lap but he didn’t remember anymore. (Actually my brother-in-law kept throwing him out the door.) Old Bob the dog who used to lead me thru the woods down midnight paths, shining white somehow, he was now dead. I think Davey missed him.
I took out my sketchbook and sketched Ma as she dozed in her chair during midnight mass from New York. When I later showed the picture to a girl friend in New York she said it looked very Medieval—the strong arms, the stern sleeping face, the repose in faith.
Once I took home five teaheads in Mexico City who were selling me pot but they all turned out to be thieves, stealing my scout knife, flashlight, Murine and Noxzema while my back was turned, tho I noticed it and said nothing. At one point the leader stood behind me, as I sat, for a good thirty seconds of silence, during which time it occurred to me he was probably going to stab me with my own knife so they could search the apartment at leisure for my hidden money. I wasnt even scared, I just sat there not caring, high. When the thieves finally left at dawn one of them insisted I give him my $50 raincoat. I said “Non” distinctly, for sure, finally, saying that my mother would kill me: “Mi madre, pow!” pantomiming a punch to my own chin—To which the strange leader said in English: “So you are afraid of something.”
On the porch of the house was my old rolltop desk with all the unpublished manuscripts in it, and the couch where I slept. To sit at my old desk and stare was sad. All the work I’d done at it, four novels and innumerable dreams and poems and notes. It made me realize suddenly I was working as hard as any man in the world so what did I have to reproach myself for, privately or otherwise? Saint Paul wrote (Corinthians 8:10): “Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edification, and not to destruction.”
When I left, after Ma made a huge delicious turkey dinner for New Year’s Day, I told her I’d be back in the Fall to move her out to a little house of her own, figuring I’d make enough money on the book that had just been accepted. She said, “Oui, Jean, I do want a lil home of my own,” almost crying, and I kissed her goodbye. “Don’t let those bums in New York talk you into anything,” she added, because she was convinced that Irwin Garden was out to get me, as my father had predicted for some reason, saying: “Angie, tell Jack that Irwin Garden is going to try to destroy him someday, and that Hubbard too—That Julien is all right—But Garden and Hubbard are going to destroy him.” And it was weird to ignore it since he’d said it just before he died, in a quiet prophetic voice, as tho I were some kind of important Saint Paul or even a Jesus with foreordained Judases and enemies in the Kingdom of Heaven. “Stay away from them! Stick to your little girlfriend who sent you the cigars!” yelled my ma, meaning the box of cigars Ruth Heaper had mailed me for Christmas. “They’ll destroy you if you let them! I dont like the funny look in their face!” Yet, strangely, I was on my way back to New York to borrow $225 from Irwin so I could sail to Tangiers Morocco to visit with Hubbard!
Wow.
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Raphael was always making time with my girls. Unfortunately my pa’d never known him.
On the train to New York I saw a pregnant woman pushing a baby carriage in front of a cemetery.
(That’s a pome.)
The first thing on tap as I unpacked in Ruth Heaper’s bedroom was Life Magazine was going to take all our pictures in Gerard Rose’s print and frame shop in Greenwich Village, arranged by Irwin. Gerard Rose had never liked me and didn’t like this whole idea at all. Gerard was the original cool subterranean who was so bugged, so listless, yet so goodlooking like Gerard Phillipe, yet so down, so bored, that when Hubbard met him he said this to me in comment on Gerard:—“I can just picture Gerard and me sittin in a bar when the Mongols invade New York—Gerard’s leaning his head on his hand sayin ‘Tartars Everywhere.’” But I liked Gerard of course and when I finally published my book that Fall he yelled: “Ho ho! The Playboy of the Beat Generation? Wanta buy a Mercedes?” (as if I could afford it then or now.)
So, for the Life photographers I drank up, got high, combed my hair and had them shoot me standing on my head: “Tell everybody this is the way to keep the doctor away!” They didnt even smile. They took other photos of Raphael and Irwin and Simon and me sitting on the floor, interviewed us and wrote notes, went away inviting us to a party, and never even published the pictures or the story. There’s the saying around the trade that the cutting room floor of Life Magazine is cluttered a foot deep with “Lost Faces,” or “The Face on the Cutting Room Floor.” It wasnt about to destroy my potentiality as an artist, a writer, but it was an awful waste of energy and in a way a grisly joke.
Meanwhile we went to the party indicated and heard a man in a Brooks Brothers jacket say: “Who wants to be a party pooper after all?” The moment we heard the word “pooper” we all left, something somehow wrong with it, like the farts of summer camp counselors.
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Yes, it was only the beginning. But things were still horribly funny in those days, like Raphael painting a mural with house paint on the wall of a bar on 14th Street and 8th Avenue, for money, and the owners of the bar were big Italian gangsters with gats. They stood around in loose-fitting suits as Raphael painted huge monks on the wall. “The more I look at it the more I like it,” said a mobster, rushing to the phone as it rang, taking a bet and sticking it in his hat. The mobster bartender wasnt quite so sure:
“I don’t know, I think Raphael dont know what he’s up to.”
Raphael whirls around with the brush, the other hand forefinger to thumb like an Italian, “Lissen you guys! You dont know anything about beauty! You’re all a bunch of big mobsters wondering where beauty hides! Beauty hides in Raphael!”
“Why does beauty hide in Raphael?” they ask somewhat concerned, scratching their armpits, pushing back their hats, answering the phone to take more bets.
I sat there with a beer wondering what would happen. But Raphael yelled at them: I suddenly realized he would have made the most beautiful persuasive mobster in New York or in the whole entire Mafia: “Ech! All your lives eating popsicles on Kenmare Street then when you grow up you bring no popsicle beauty with you. Look at this painting! It’s beauty!”
“Am I in it?” asks the bartender, Rocco, with an upward angelic look at the mural to make the other mobsters laugh.
“Of course you’re in it, you’re the monk on the end, the black monk—What you need is white hair!” yells Raphael dipping his brush in a bucket of white paint and suddenly daubing huge white waterfalls around the black monk’s head.
“Hey!” yells Rocco seriously amazed. “I dont have white hair or even long white hair?”
“You do now because I’ve pronounced it, I’ve pronounced you Beauty Hair!” and Raphael dabs more white all over the whole mural, ruining it actually as everybody’s laughing and he’s grinning that thin Raphael grin as tho he had a throatful of laughter he doesnt want to let out. And it was then I really loved him because he wasnt afraid of any mobsters, in fact he was a mobster himself and the mobsters knew it. As we hurry from the bar back to Ruth’s pad for spaghetti supper Raphael says to me angrily: “Ah, I think I’ll quit the poetry racket. It’s not gettin me nowhere. I want tiplet pigeons on my roof and a villa on Capri or in Crete. I dont wanta have to talk to those dopey gamblers and hoods, I wanta meet counts and princesas.”
“You want a moat!”
“I want a heartshaped moat like in Dali—When I meet Kirk Douglas I dont wanta have to apologize.” And at Ruth’s he immediately plunges in and boils canned clams in a vat of oil, meanwhile boiling spaghettini, and pours it all out, mixes it, mixes a salad, lights a candle, and we all have a perfect Italian Clam Spaghetti supper with laughs. Avant garde opera singers rush in and start singing beautiful songs by Blow and Purcell with Ruth Erickson but Raphael says to me: “Who are all these creeps” (almost “cweeps”)—“Gripplings, man.” He wants to kiss Ruth Heaper but I’m there so he rushes out to find a girl in the bar on Minetta Lane, a colored and white mixed bar now closed.
And the next day Irwin carts me and Simon and Raphael off in a bus to Rutherford New Jersey to meet William Carlos Williams the old great poet of 20th Century America. Williams is a general practitioner all his life, his office is still there where he’d examined patients for 40 years and got his material for fine Thomas Hardy-like poems. He sits there staring out the window as we all read him our poems and prose. He’s actually bored. Who wouldnt at 72? He’s still thin and youthful and grand, tho, and at the end he goes down to the cellar and brings up a bottle of wine to cheer us all up. He tells me: “Keep writing like that.” He loves Simon’s poems and later writes in a review that Simon is actually the most interesting new poet in America (Simon will write lines like, “Does the fire hydrant weep as many tears as me?” or “I have a red star on my cigarette”)—But of course Dr. Williams loves Irwin of nearby Paterson N.J. the best because of his huge, in a sense uncriticizable howling altogether sameness greatness (like Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Dizzy comes on in waves of thought, not in phrases)—Let Irwin or Dizzy get warmed up and the walls fall down, at least the walls of your ear-porch—Irwin writes about tears with a big tearful moan, Dr. Williams is old enough to understand—Actually a historic occasion and finally we dopey poets ask him for the last advice, he stands there looking thru the muslin curtains of his livingroom at the New Jersey traffic outside and says:
“There’s lots of bastards out there.”
I’ve wondered about that ever since.
And I had spent most of the time talking to the doctor’s charming wife, 65, who described how handsome Bill had been in his young days.
But there’s a man for you.
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Irwin Garden’s father Harry Garden comes to Dr. Williams’ house to drive us home, to his own house in Paterson where we’ll have a supper and a big talk about poetry—Harry is a poet himself (appears on the editorial page of the Times and Tribune several times a year with perfectly rhymed love and sadness lyrics)—But he’s a bug on puns and as soon as he walks into Dr. Williams’ house he says “Drinkin wine, hey? When your glass is always empty that’s when you’re really sippin”—“Ha ha ha”—Rather a good pun, even, but Irwin looks at me with consternation as tho it was some impossible social scene in Dostoevsky. “How would you like to buy a necktie with hand painted gravy stains?”
Harry Garden is a high school teacher of about 60 about to retire. He has blue eyes and sandy hair like his eldest son Leonard Garden, now a lawyer, while Irwin has the black hair and black eyes of his beautiful mother Rebecca, of whom he wrote, now dead.
Harry gaily drives us all to his home exhibiting ten times more energy than boys young enough to be his grandsons. In his kitchen which has swirling wallpaper I go
blind over wine as he reads and puns over coffee. We retire to his study. I start reading my silly far-out poem with just grunts or “grrrr” and “frrrrt” in it to describe the sounds of Mexico City street traffic—
Raphael yells out “Ah that’s not poetry!” and old man Harry looks at us with frank blue eyes and says:—
“You boys are fighting?” and I catch Irwin’s quick glance. Simon is neutral in Heaven.
The fight with Raphael the Mobster carries over to when we’re catching the Paterson bus to New York, I jump in, pay my fare, Simon pays his (Irwin stayed with his father) but Raphael yells out “I aint got no money, why dont you pay my fare Jack?” I refuse. Simon pays it with Irwin’s money. Raphael starts to harangue me about what a coldblooded money-fisted Canook I am. By the time we get to Port Authority I’m practically crying. He keeps saying: “All you do is hide money in your beauty. It makes you ugly! You’ll die with money in your hand and wonder why the Angels wont lift you up.”
“The reason you havent got money is because you keep spending it.”
“Yes I keep spending it! And why not? Money is a lie and poetry is truth—Could I pay my bus fare with truth? Would the driver understand? No! Because he’s like you, Duluoz, a scared tightfisted and even tight-ass son of a bitch with money hidden in his 5 & 10 socks. All he wants to do is DIE!”
But tho I could have used a lot of arguments like why did Raphael blow his money on a plane from Mexico when he could have rode with us in the woesome car, I cant do anything but wipe the tears in my eyes. I dont know why, maybe because he’s right when all is said and done and we’ve all given good money for all our funerals, yay—O all the funerals ahead of me, for which I’ll have to wear ties! Julien’s funeral, Irwin’s funeral, Simon’s funeral, Raphael’s funeral, Ma’s funeral, my sister’s funeral, and I already wore a tie and bleaked at dirt for my father’s funeral! Flowers and funerals, the loss of broad shoulders! No more the eager clack of shoes on the sidewalk to somewhere but a drear fight in a grave, like in a French movie, the Cross cant even stand erect in such silk and mud—O Talleyrand!