by Jim Harrison
How clearly I remember the evening in Hinsdale, Illinois, when her father and teenage brother threw me off the porch of their fine home. I’m not a shrimp so it took some doing. She was restrained by her mother and could not run to my side if, indeed, she made the attempt. They were wealthy people and I had falsely assumed a certain level of manners. Her father had been sure I was one of those “Chicago radicals.” Her brother was on the Yale crew, one of those big boys who row a boat until they become a sizable knot of muscle. Never had I felt more like an orphan than when I was sprawled there in their yard, nose down in a flower bed Cindy had doubtless planted.
* * *
For a number of specific reasons I awoke at dawn laughing. This comes closer to a triumph of the human spirit for a fifty-five-year-old man. I recalled a dream early in my eighteenth year that the closet in our old Indiana farmhouse, which had slowly been surrounded by a suburb, contained all of my future unlived life, everything I wouldn’t get around to doing. Even at that time I thought this might be a case of premature aging. My parents, of course, were on the verge of dying but hadn’t yet done the job so I couldn’t blame the dream on their absence. I had no dream clues to the content of this unlived life, just that it was there in the closet. The simple conclusion about this dream that kept reoccurring over the years was that we are partly defined by what we draw back from, by what our temperament decides to exclude before it has a chance to happen. Years ago when I had been working on my Bioprobe of Barry Goldwater I met a ninety-year-old German woman who had been living in an Airstream trailer in an Arizona desert since 1946 for obvious reasons. My dream would have indicated that she should have moved there earlier, say in 1934 or 1935. She was a botanist and by professional happenstance knew of some of my father’s work in wild-plant genetics. When I answered her question about my own livelihood her eyes dismissed my profession as if I had said that I spun cotton candy at county fairs.
The main source of my laughter, however, had been my long walk the evening before from Cajou near Nineteenth Street up to and far east on Seventy-second where I have my New York studio apartment near the river. For the cognoscenti, I live near the George Plimpton compound. We’ve never formally met but have nodded at each other at the embarcade while we watched passing tugboats and other craft. Anyway, on this long walk home I watched limousines and town cars loading and unloading small groups of wealthy businessmen at expensive restaurants. I’m not sure what struck me as suddenly so funny about my own “class,” say those who made over three hundred thousand a year, though perhaps over five hundred thousand would be closer. I don’t mean from inherited wealth but actual working, mostly white men, and excluding actors, musicians, and professional sports players. The highest echelon of working stiffs is peculiar indeed but I can’t say that up until this moment had they ever seemed profoundly comic.
Curiously, my brother Thad wishes dearly to be one of these creatures but he simply doesn’t know the secret of how to effectively offer up his entire life. Not incidentally, Thad blew the hundred grand he stole from me on day trading and a ten-percent share of a sure-thing filly at the Keeneland Sale in Kentucky that year. I can’t bear to describe these men in extensia, the members of my fraternity at large, my fellow alpha canines who when at their kindest are still baring the teeth of total self-interest. The usual self-referential potato cannot clearly describe his potatohood. And on this long walk home, more clearly than ever before, I could see my brethren as lucidly as you could spot a diplomat in a dime store. These folks were going to micro-manage, truly an ugly word, their after-dinner farts.
I was laughing when I turned on my coffeemaker, invariably prepared the evening before, and laughing that I had arisen at nine-thirty rather than the habitual seven. I’m certainly not a cold-hearted prick. I’m just not at all sure of what to do except work. There are some interesting clouds out my window, rather pretty cumuli on the warmish morning. How do they adhere to themselves rather than fall apart? A call to my sister would get me the information quickly but this morning the very idea of useful information gives me an un-comic tremor. While watching the clock reach ten, I wondered what I could summon up from my life that is private, but dismissed the question by calling my favorite local wine store and ordering a case of the Gigondas I had favored the evening before, plus a pack of cigarettes, an item I hadn’t touched in a full decade. I was tired of being on the correct side of every issue that arose on The New York Times editorial pages. I was in full possession of my senses which are anyway quite intractable. The fashion in recent years for early, mid-, and late life crises among white men always seemed an indication of a shabby emotional I.Q., a failure to see that there is always another corner around the next corner. Primitive societies had circles. We have corners.
It was obvious to me that I knew I’d try to call Cindy’s house before it became a conscious act. My morning laughter was a shot of oxygen from a not so simple phone call, no matter that the phone call hadn’t worked. There is the current notion of “closure.” I stopped seeing an attractive and intelligent ex-model this winter in Chicago because she couldn’t stop using such words. There are dozens of these verbal turds in our common usage and I’m not about to demonstrate them, though the worst is the time of “healing” that is called for right after some schoolkids get their guts blasted out with automatic weaponry. I talked one evening to an eminent translator at Café Select on Montparnasse in Paris and he said these sorts of tainted nodules can also be found in current French, usually by people who are consumed by a fatuous sincerity.
The wine-store deliveryman, Rico, arrived with the Gigondas and a raised eyebrow at the cigarettes. I’ve known Rico for years and he’s a veritable mine of information about strange food practices available in the New York area. One February evening he picked me up in his ancient Corolla and we drove out to Queens and ate a goat-head stew at an African restaurant. I hedged at the eyeballs but not Rico. Rico used to teach high school biology in Brooklyn but cracked up when his wife left him for a soccer coach. By delivering wine Rico believes he is bringing beauty into people’s lives. I agree. It’s impossible not to get sentimental about these true New Yorkers. One of my favorite taxi drivers is an Inuit, an Eskimo of sorts. Rico is about my age and keeps in good shape by trundling cases of wine. He admits he could live on the life insurance left him by his father but he simply loves to talk about wine and deliver it. We had a small glass of wine with our coffee, a mid-morning French tradition. He enjoyed watching me smoke a cigarette and cough. He also coughed sympathetically. Before he left he showed me a discreet Polaroid of his latest conquest, a slightly plumpish but attractive secretary who worked at the World Trade Center. She was fresh in the city from the Adirondacks and he had cooked her an elaborate Tuscan dinner which had done the “trick.” I’ve been slightly jealous of his sexual energy for years which he attributes to red wine, garlic, the physical exertion of his job, the reading of erotic classics, listening to Brazilian music, and the simple fact that unlike myself he avoids mental exhaustion.
When Rico left it was the French and three ounces of their wine that gave me a sneaky idea. I called Cindy’s flower farm and announced myself as Jacques Tourtine from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a botanist curious about the availability of certain wild-flower seeds. I was advised to ready myself for a call back within a few minutes. Now I was rather too nervous to laugh and sat there watching the kitchen wall clock moving. I limit myself strictly to one bottle of wine a day for specious reasons. I’m scarcely the sort to get out of hand. After seven minutes the phone rang and it was Cindy on her cellular from the tallgrass prairie near Wichita, Kansas. I began with a fake French accent but she wasn’t fooled for more than a few seconds. “You asshole,” she laughed. Feminist women who used to refer to us as “needy” frequently now call us “assholes” which is endearing.
The conversation was pleasant, though afterward I was a sweaty puddle in the kitchen. Keep your studio at sixty degrees and you’ll work harder. Ye
s, she could scarcely help noticing my many Bioprobes. I could hear the prairie wind over her phone and the way it modulated her voice made me envision her at sea in a gale.
“How in God’s name could you write about Kissinger?” she asked. “You were so anti-war, so terribly radical.”
“It’s a living,” I said lamely. “The book did very well. You don’t have to agree with someone to write about them.”
“Oh bullshit,” she said. She never used to swear. “I always thought you’d be a poor, noble poet living in Spain. I liked your Linus Pauling but when I looked at Newt Gingrich I wondered how a man I once loved would jump headfirst into a fucking pigpen.”
“I’m still supporting my brother and sister. Unlike yourself I didn’t inherit enough to live on.”
“Neither did I. My father went bankrupt. Luckily my last divorce made me able to buy a farm. I did fairly well on the second one, too.”
I didn’t know where to go with this peculiar feminine logic that allows them to win the point even when they’re wrong. It was, however, easier to take in her next blithe chatter in which she asked how I, as a former poet and ex-fictioneer, could write prose that sounded like that on a network news program or in a newspaper or, of all things, in the National Geographic. I used to be so imaginative and read her the poems of Dylan Thomas, Lorca, and Yeats, and even my own lovely “stuff.”
“You’re stomping my balls,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but first I got stuck in the mud earlier this morning and then I had a flat tire. There’s sharp flint rock buried in the mud around here and I’m not finding the blooming flowers I expected. I’m a few days early.”
What she had to say was not the less hurtful after she mitigated the circumstances. You step on a tack, then you shoot someone in the head. When I asked if I could see her the following weekend, it was now Wednesday, there was a longish pause and then she said, “Why not?” I told a gratuitous lie saying I had to be in Minneapolis anyway and would reach La Crosse by dinnertime on Friday.
* * *
I took one of those hopeless showers where you have the illusion it will do you some actual good beyond destroying noxious bacteria on your skin. It was tough enough to have the early love of your life belittle your prose and its subject matter. Assuredly biographical prose tends to be like old-time midwestern football, three yards and a cloud of dust. Another three yards and more dust. More immediately painful was her vision of me as a poor noble poet in the Spanish countryside, possibly leading a donkey carrying my belongings. In truth Spain had been my central obsession at the time of our nine-day marriage, but when I finally had the wherewithal and the freedom I forgot to go to Spain.
Coming out of the shower I did have the suspicion that the language I was using to describe myself to myself might be radically askew. I could doubtless extend this to the language with which I describe the world. My word tools, as it were, are cool, analogic, slightly ironic, as if there were a more wholesome backdrop onto which I might paint my language decals. Metaphor, for an instance, is illegal in my Bioprobes. Metaphor is largely illegal in any “for profit” prose in the media at large. And back when I was acquiring my desperately valueless M.F.A., metaphor was fast becoming proscribed in our prose fiction. I find this is predominantly true now when I flip a few pages of novels in bookstores. If metaphor can’t be taught, then it must not be very important, that’s at the very least a logical conclusion. Poor Shakespeare, perhaps looking in the mirror when he said, “Devouring time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.” Oh well.
I keep a ball bat near my door in case of any intruders. If they’re armed with a pistol you would naturally hand over the money and whatever, but a mere knife is no good against the swing power of a mint Louisville Slugger. At the moment I felt like breaking something valuable. If only I had a Ming vase. For the lack of anything else I set a bottle of my Gigondas on a kitchen stool and swung heartily, watching it cast its purple spell around the room in irregular drips and splotches. Time for a walk.
By the time I hit the street I was, of course, laughing at my childish behavior, but then why should I evaluate all my gestures? It is as feeble as lovers asking “Was it good for you?” after desire has drained off into the void. I will only give a flat fuck when I clean up the mess.
It was a more than fair day as I headed up First Avenue, as sure of my first stop as Admiral Byrd was of the Pole, whichever one it was. I was going to stop at Schaller and Webber for a one-dollar slice of head cheese which I often do. Head cheese was one of my father’s few food passions. Another two blocks across Eighty-sixth and I would arrive at the Papaya King for two dogs with sauerkraut and mustard. I had been eating oatmeal every morning for seven months to “combat” cholesterol and at this moment I’d rather gobble a steaming dog turd than look at another bowl of oatmeal. I certainly remembered that I had an appointment with my editor and publisher, the same editor I’ve had for thirty years who is now the president of the publishing company. I have never forgotten an appointment in my life. This time I was going to leave him hanging, probably at the bar at Four Seasons with his club soda and lemon twist. He used to order a cup of hot water during the brief period when this heady drink was the fashion in Gotham. I tried it once and thought it was like coffee without coffee. Someone massively famous must have begun this fad, though it never appeared to have crossed the Hudson.
I very nearly walked into the path of a speeding cab and had to throw myself back on my ass. A well-dressed older black man near me shook his head as if I were a careless child. Something in my brain was jogged by the close call because I strained to remember something the poet Jack Spicer purportedly said on his deathbed, “My alphabet did this to me.” It was on that order but then it had been thirty years since the seediness of my M.F.A. days, the only period of my life where I drank too much. I lived in an old house with two other aspiring writers and it was “de rigueur” to drink too much, smoke a great deal of pot, though I avoided LSD. Anyway, one of my housemates had a considerable library of “Beat” writers and knew all the gossip surrounding them. I was drawn to the work of Spicer, and his relatively early death caused by alcohol led him to say, “My alphabet did this to me,” or so I remembered immediately after my brush with death-by-cab. It seemed sufficiently profound. All of his perceptions, the totality of the way he received the world, had congealed into this private alphabet which led him to his early death.
Jesus Christ, but this made me hungry for my late breakfast at the Papaya King. I rushed along, a bit wary at the cross streets, hit Schaller and Webber for my well-wrapped slice of head cheese, opening it with trembling hands. A passing, very attractive young woman frowned as I took my first bite, more in curiosity than disgust. Once you are over fifty they usually look just over your head as if you were a janitor and not worthy of registering in their senses. I read a lot of magazines and newspapers to keep my finger on the not very vibrant pulse of the culture but I couldn’t recall anything memorable about the young women these days. I only knew two, and not very well. Not to be disingenuous, I see a young woman in France on my two- or three-day trips each year over there, which I basically take for a break in my routines (though I generally work every day in my hotel rooms) and for reasons of culinary freedom of choice. This young woman of twenty-five, Claire by name, is kind enough to accept about a thousand bucks a month from me to help support herself as a burgeoning artist. I’d have to describe her as interesting rather than charming. She thinks of a man’s penis as “banal,” which is disarming. She lives, with my help, over near the Jardin des Plantes, which is why I was able to use the name of this garden to reach Cindy. I’m so accustomed to being lied to when I do interviews for my Bioprobes that I have a tendency to lie to myself, not to speak of small meaningless lies in my work. To be frank I send Claire closer to two thousand a month. Why not? She has the prettiest butt I’ve ever seen, though I’ve been far too busy to have that many lovers. Of the dozen or so lovers in the past thirty years she is dead
last at making love. I’m unsure of my motives with Claire. Perhaps her mediocre energies and skills in bed are reassuring? That’s a refreshing notion. Once while I was going down on her I caught her glancing at a magazine on the bedside table. Why should sex be yet another unpleasant challenge in one’s life?
How can I shatter language at my age? The ball bat meeting the bottle was wonderfully easy. At the counter facing the street at the Papaya King an attractive, waspish woman eats her unadorned hot dog with moist eyes. She is having some real emotions. I want to say, “It can’t be that bad,” but it probably is. She is my sister’s age but then my sister has certainly limited her exposure to anything that could cause her grief.
A quick stop at my travel agent made Cindy a great deal closer. I thought, “I’m actually doing it.” How I loved this woman though such specific emotional density becomes distorted into something else over the years. It’s hard to weigh something you can’t specifically identify except by tremors, pangs, longing. When I first brought her home my sister said, “Jesus, she’s just a kid.”
Here’s what happened on the ninth and last viable day of our marriage. We had started driving to Chicago from Iowa City to announce our marriage to her parents. When we hit Joliet her plans changed and she decided it would be better if she delivered the news alone. We went to the apartment of a promising writer-teacher where we would be staying. He has since disappeared. The last I heard of him, maybe twenty years ago, he was teaching English in Taiwan, his single volume of verse so slender that it has doubtless disappeared from the bookshelves of our nation. Anyway, Cindy took a cab from the apartment to her parents’ house and after only eight days of marriage I was liberated for a night on the town. In those days we writers all drank a good deal and between bars we’d have a toke or two of a joint. It was intended to be a sedate evening because we were going to a reading by Stephen Spender, the English poet, whom my friend claimed to know, but at a small reception before the reading Spender seemed not to remember my friend and ignored him. In fact, when my friend attempted to introduce me to Spender the poet turned away toward a small table of glasses of sherry, cheese, and crackers, and my hand was left hanging in the air. I can’t say that I was particularly upset because I had so long been tortured by the formal study of English literature that I was itching to run off to a blues club to see Muddy Waters who was in town. We made our way to the door of the reception room where my friend turned and bellowed, “Fuck you, creeps” to the crowd. At the time this struck me as poetic rather than childish.