Moise and the World of Reason

by Tennessee Williams

  I know when a sentence is going on too long for the mental breath of a reader not to mention a writer so let me complete what I had started to say and leave it there and go on. I have never known a writer to say that he can’t write alone. Now how is that for a simple declarative sentence?

  Nevertheless I have always regarded writing as the loneliest occupation this side of death and yet I have the distinction of being a writer who prefers not to write alone, especially after midnight, and I know that there is a contradiction lurking in that statement but I think it belongs there. I think that many contradictions, whether disguised as paradoxes or not, belong where they are because of the contradictions of that four-letter word to which I prefer the synonym of existence and the contradictions of character and of meaning, the contradictions are practically infinite this side of death and I am also aware that I have made three references to death on a single page or surface for words. I think it must be because I am writing alone after midnight. The tick of a clock is the most uncompanionable noise in existence. I call it noise, not sound. It jars the senses more than a garbage truck at this hour. It is so assertively. And I am aware that that is an adverb without a noun to belong to, there are very few violations of law and order in writing which I commit without knowledge. Moise once said, “You are cunning!” and she didn’t mean cute. I think it is probably the only thing she has ever said to me which was not intended to be a comfort to me and yet in a way it provided me with a comforting reassurance since I have long, if not always, understood that cunning belongs to the animal side of a man that helps him survive under circumstances not favorable to his survival.

  If you begin to write not alone, as I did with Lance the skater and continued for such a long time to, you are not likely to use a typewriter not only because the clatter of typewriter keys is also a noise, not a sound, worse than garbage trucks past midnight, but because you have discovered the purest delight of living which is companionship while doing that thing which you care about even more than lovemaking. . . .

  I am writing alone at one twenty-seven A.M. in this hooked rectangle flimsily sectioned off from the desolation of a disused warehouse. Of course I have written alone but less than comfortably always. I have always preferred the presence of a companion. I think, in a way, that is the excuse for the Blue Jay and that I have now accepted it as the only reward in my case.

  But when a piece of writing begins to sound like an incantation, you turn it gracefully there as a practiced skater turns unless you are Gertrude Stein who has forsaken existence or Alice B. Toklas and I am not her, either, although I do sometimes wear a little mustache and take an interest in cooking, at least enough to know when something is on the back burner, and when there is little to cook.

  I have mentioned the time, still passing, and the fact that I’m writing alone this passing moment now being announced by the one-legged clock by the bed. I am drunk. I am stoned. I’m alone. You name it, I am possibly it, and there is another contradiction, for I am not alone, I’m with the clock.

  I had my Blue Jays. Lance had his “blackbirds” and his “white crosses.”

  An unholy trinity of which was or is the craziest I don’t know.

  Out of almost nowhere I recall a story that Lance told me about the various aberrations of love which he had speed-skated into during his brief lifetime.

  After a performance in Omaha, Nebraska, a very youthful fan burst into the men’s dressing room, spotted Lance stripping, and tried to thrust a fifty-dollar bill into his hand as he panted, “I want to buy your jockstrap!”

  “Yes, he tried to give me the piece of green decorated with General Grant’s likeness, and I would have accepted the flattering offer if a late-middle-aged man that was not his legitimate father hadn’t burst in there a couple of beats later and snatched him out of the dressing room and I could hear them fighting like wildcats outside it and in the morning paper I read that a seventeen-year-old youth had jumped out of the tenth floor window of a rich industrialist’s bedroom. This was the beginning of a two-week gig and a couple of days later the paper said that the kid was going to be buried at a certain cemetery the next afternoon, and I went there with flowers to put on the grave, and I want you to know that a week later than that, the paper announced that the rich industrialist had jumped off the roof of some fat-cat asylum and the paper named the same cemetery where the remains were going to be planted a couple of days later. Well, I thought about you and us and love good and bad and got on a crazy high and did a disgusting thing. I went to the burial service with a spiritual look on my face like I was truly bereaved and I listened to the preacher extolling the beautiful quality of the departed spirit and each time he invented some beautiful quality to extol I made a loud sobbing noise. I had pushed up close to the relatives of the departed who looked uncomfortably cold in their fur coats and anxious to get home. It had started snowing on the casket covered with hothouse flowers and his nearest and dearest were much more interested in the limousines than the eulogy for the departed. They looked like they’d never heard of him except as the President of the Miracle Fiber Plant but I went SOB, SOB, SOB and GULP, GULP, GULP like the printed expressions of grief in a comic strip and all the while I was holding my jockstrap in my overcoat pocket and pushing up closer to the casket with the blanket of roses in the snow, Jesus, I swear this was the scene, out of sight, even the mother of the son of a bitch, she was so old there was scarcely any point in her leaving the cemetery but she was struggling to get on her feet and back into a heated limousine. Nobody seemed to notice her efforts to get up. This was an acid trip I was on, it was after my last matinée in that frozen city and my jockstrap in my pocket was still warm from a performance in it, and do you know I helped the old lady to her feet and I led her to the casket about to be lowered and right in front of her open-mouth face I took out the jockstrap and raised it over the casket and over my head so everybody could see it and recognize what it was and the preacher’s and the morticians’ mouths dropped open like the old lady’s as I dangled it in the snow above the rose-covered casket as it started to be cranked down and I shouted, ‘This is in memory of the boy John Summers that the departed seduced into death last week in his tenth-floor bedroom,’ and then I dropped it onto the descending rose-covered casket and hustled the Fiber King’s mother to a big black shiny cockroach limousine and pushed her ass in and then raced out of the graveyard like I was high on skates with acid, and, Jesus, yes, did I ever steal that show from the Fiber King’s interment, well, I have stopped some shows and I have stolen some shows but never better than that one, and now I know why I did it, it was done more as an expression of social indignation and racial protest than in memory of John Summers or in comment on the Fiber King’s black-hearted love and”

  He was about to go on when Moise put a quiet stop to it.

  “Now, Lance, you know that eulogies are not delivered in graveyards.”

  “No, they’re not,” I agreed. “The eulogies are delivered in a church and in the graveyard a few words are read from the Book of Common Prayer, so obviously your brain was confused with acid.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Lance, “I had the honor and satisfaction of burying my jockstrap with a king, that I know, and what’s it matter if I heard the eulogy at the church or the cemetery, I got a free ride there in a Cadillac but had to go back to the hotel on wings of acid.”

  “Let’s drop the subject,” I suggested to Lance since it appeared to me that it was too heavy to hold even with six warm hands in a winter room.

  “All right, love, but just remember that I can be meaner than a junkyard dog when the spirit moves me, that’s a good thing to know about the living nigger on ice.”

  Moise drew a breath as long as she was when standing over us seated and touched my head with her hand.

  “Take him home for hot chocolate,” she suggested to me, and then Lance wrenched me off the narrow bed of Moise with such violence that my shoulder muscle ached the rest of the night and
he shouted, “He gets it lighter than chocolate, honey, but it sure is hotter.”

  On the way back to the rectangle with hooks I began to cry as if I were listening to Lady Day singing “Violets for Your Furs,” this being actually the first time I understood about the bad side of love.

  It is now ten past four A.M. and I still remain here alone except for Blue Jay and pencil. . . .

  But I am talking rapidly now, yes, talking out loud to myself as if in delirium which is a practice I have when I am alone with a pencil and Blue Jay and once it got me into very serious trouble. I was about Charlie’s age, passing a glorious autumn in the hooked rectangle, corners softened by the presence of Lance and many things suspended from the hooks, mostly the funky and brilliant costumes of Lance all of whose garments were like professional costumes and nearly all conceived and put together by him who could put together almost anything but his head.

  I was not unprepared for the tour of the show on ice but had rejected the contemplation of it as one does approaching death. Still it was coming and one night it came, just after he had come in me.

  He said to me, “Well, love, you know the show’s going out tomorrow.”

  “I knew it would be soon but why did you wait till tonight to tell me you’re going tomorrow?”

  “Why should I let you think about it beforehand and depress us both?”

  “I don’t think you let yourself get depressed.”

  “Why should I and why should you?”

  “Do you think I’m exhilarated staying on alone here in this corner of a warehouse by the docks while you are performing fantastic leaps and whirls and arabesques on skates in ice-domes over the continent, and no letters from you, just crazy wires now and then?”

  “All right. Go stay with Moise.”

  “That’s the least possible thing I could do. Moise is a solitaire when you’re not here and so am I and putting a couple of solitaires together does not make a pair.”

  “Sugar, you and Moise are a natural pair, I always knew you would wind up together when I go through the ice.”

  “I’m not going to Moise’s.”

  “Then where do you plan to go?”

  “I’ll take a room at the McBurney if you will pay in advance.”

  “Honey, if you checked into a Y, you would check out with a board nailed over your ass.”

  “Are you telling me it’s Moise’s or else?”

  “I think you’re wrong about the pairing of solitaires like you and Moise, but”

  He got out of bed to pee and when he came back he said, “I will git you a room at the Hotel Earle and pay in advance till Christmas when the show’s booked into Madison Garden.

  It was there at the Hotel Earle that I began to talk out loud as I wrote and after one week of this, the other tenants, who were mostly retired actresses mainly engaged in comparing their scrapbooks, complained that an insane boy had invaded their sanctuary, that he was babbling out loud all night so they looked like wrecks when they made their rounds of agents and producers in the morning and were being offered character parts for the first time in their lives. Only one of them defended me from the others. She was an actress named Clare something who had made a hit in a play by Steinbeck once. She was a warm and strong-hearted lady but her defense was of no avail since her shapely figure and her superior scrapbook had alienated her from the other actresses there. And so I was hauled off for observation at Governor’s Island which is a sanitarium in the East River, in case you don’t know, and the observation which was made of me there did not result in an early release despite the protests of Moise and Clare who visited me every Sunday. I wasn’t working out loud, or working at all, I was mostly desperately waiting for something which was, in my case, the return of the living nigger on ice for his holiday gig at the Garden.

  Terrifying experiences like that have a maturing effect, especially in the bin, for even when you are staring vacantly while waiting, you notice certain occurrences outside the storm in your head. I will describe only one. Among the inmates in my ward on the island was a travesty of an aging queen who had entered as a dyed blond but whose hair had now turned silver and who was always in motion, undulating up and down the corridor and around the dayroom, always with a comb in his hand, touching up his curls, and making the mistake of pausing to roll his eyes directly in front of an Irish truck driver who was in there for observation because of nightly wife-beating, whose fists always doubled up tight as evening approached as if he were expecting his wife to appear. Well, one evening this fantastic queen paused in front of him once too often and the truck driver sprang up and smashed a fist in the mouth of the queen, removing all his front teeth. This in itself was not particularly remarkable, I suppose, but what does strike me as deserving of notation as I sit here now with the noisy clock pushing five and still no Charlie, is that the following morning the silver queen undulated again down the corridor into the dayroom, running the comb through the curls with his swollen lips ajar on the crimson cavern of his mouth’s interior where those sudden extractions had been performed. The truck driver was seated exactly where he had been the evening before and the silver queen with the crimson cavern stopped again exactly in front of him with the same ocular rotation and the falsetto simper and something happened but I don’t know what. I honestly don’t remember although I know that something of a shocking nature did happen.

  Of course I also know that I have recorded this queen and truck driver scene as if it were comic-strip humor which is certainly not how it struck me when I was twenty.

  “Terrifying experiences,” “maturing effect,” crock of shit . . .

  Oh, Christ, now I remember. The truck driver sprang up again and took the queen in his arms and thrust his tongue into the bloody cavern of his mouth with a moan of longing for which transcendent is not too romantic a term.

  And so perhaps “maturing effect” is applicable to these experiences after all, despite the fact that I don’t know how they matured me nor to what purpose.

  Just a minute ago I wandered outside of the hooked rectangle we live in to look through the windows of the unpeopled vastness in which the rectangle crouches. I don’t remember having ever done that before at night. Well, it is no longer night but after five in the morning which also qualifies as a wolf’s hour when it is dark.

  My first impression of the dark vastness was one of silence. Then I began to notice little sounds in it, the distance-muted patter of rodents’ feet and then the despairing squeal of a small creature assaulted by a larger.

  I wondered a number of things: would there be rats in the place if a section of it were not inhabited by human life? I thought, Probably yes, since rats are beings which survive through concealment, in over- and underground places which offer a secret existence from all but themselves and the menace of cats which is to them what Moise means by “the sudden subway” for people. I have a repugnance for rats and all other vermin, although I admire their cunning and their persistence under all circumstances through all seasons. I think they compete with insects and with germs for the honor of outliving man on this earth. I thought of germs, the venereal species, because I was twice infected with gonococci by Lance and also with pubic lice. Having to take a prick and rectal smear test at a free clinic twice was about as humiliating and wretched an experience for me as my stay on Governor’s Island, and as for the pubic lice, I have never felt so loathsome. I had never heard they existed until I had them and Lance explained what they were. He was contrite about it but he defended his need of sex on the road with the ice show.

  “Baby, if you’d learn to skate I’d get you in the show with me and be a totally faithful lover, but since you claim your ankles are too weak for skating and I am an oversexed cat, once in a while I am bound to infect you with pubic lice and the clap. You know I don’t on purpose, it’s just that I’m overly sexed and nowadays when I’m high on the streets at midnight and am approached by a good-looking long-haired boy, it’s like a call of nature which nob
ody with an intestinal or urinal tract can ignore.”

  “Lance, you’re rationalizing the negligence of your nature.”

  “Baby, you know they come at me like flies. I’m not lying, they do.”

  “Well, why don’t you get you a can of fly-spray to carry in your pocket on the streets after midnight or fantasize your libido like I have to do when you are out on tour?”

  “What do you mean by fantasizing your libido, baby? You mean you?”

  “I mean I think about you and caress my body at night, sometimes burning a candle and looking at your picture in your tights.”

  “Do you masturbate, then?”

  “No, I don’t. It desensitizes your sex and is a messy habit, I just fantasize your caresses over me lightly till I fall asleep.”

  He held me close in the lock of his legs for a while, then he said to me, “Sometimes I feel like God has given you to me.”

  He had me stand up, then, and removed from his luggage a bottle called “A-200” containing a pale green liquid which he slowly and thoroughly rubbed into my pubic hairs, around the genitalia, into the armpits, and even over the light down surrounding my nipples. Since the crabs had been burning, it felt deliciously cool and soothing. Apparently it destroyed the vermin at once as well as nearly making me come from his fingers’ manipulation.

  “Okay, now do it to me.”

  I gave him the same slow and thorough massage with the excitingly cool liquid, A-200, and this time, rubbing his balls which must have been large as a mule’s, I suddenly gasped to him, “Love, I’m about to come.”

  “Hell, quick, put it in me!”