Memoir. How do writers remember? How to reconstitute the details of the past? Let a ghostwriter jog their memories, jibe reality with recollection? Do journals lead to memoirs? I can guess, imagine peculiar as well as mundane circumstances surrounding my early life, talk in a nonchalant matter of fact way about it; or as if I was struck blind, play the amnesiac for causes of emotional chaos, and déjà vu the rest. Regardless, these episodes don’t seem to make much difference, considering my transitory life at that moment. Is there a sidearm pitch to transcendence, where I’m out of my body, but under the radar? Perhaps it’s just that anxious time of young adult character germination that plagues everyone, as it has me for the last six months. There’s hardly any remembering my life prior to this episode, for now my time is spent adding description and vision to my prescient endeavors, like fashions I should discard but wear in parody. What is my real semblance? The hiatus in naïve suggests two heads in the first person “I.” Which son am I: bon fils, or the disappointing prodigal son?
“Two Madeleines”
I.
“You can write better stories than that. You wrote better stories when I knew you. You didn’t write at all then.”
He bought this line from her, longing for her, surrounded in her mystery. She had written a letter he had expected for some time. He had stopped writing himself. Their separation was into its sixth month, and he had run out of characters to write about. To him, letter writing was story telling, with its characters and themes. In whatever he wrote, the writer — and he nearly always spoke of himself in the first person — was never the same. One time daring, another time begging; forsaken and full of young confidence all at once. The characters were only weak because they were always in search of a method. Each fictional development stopped at the letter’s end. Every time he wrote, he would give her someone else to think about. He hoped that he might stumble upon the one person she wanted. Her latest story spoke of a looming rapture with girlfriends. She only mentioned him as a footnote. She admitted that she wondered how he would fit in. He gathered that he didn’t fit in, at all. This was understandable, for in her words, “I love the person who’s there at the moment, and right now it’s…” love the one you’re with.
She was with her old high school friends, reunited in a bar after four years. Everyone was paying attention to Madeleine again. In high school she had a steady; they made a nice couple, so she said. She had only met him in college, swearing that she would not get mixed up another time. He had taken her by surprise: she was first his confidant, then they became lovers, though no one could ever be sure of that. The students regarded them as independents, separate from each other. Such a mistaken but widely held opinion was seldom encountered on a small campus. If they were actually lovers, everyone should know. Only a handful of friends noticed a vain smirk of immortality in this relationship. The two were quick to deny it, obliging their own independent natures. They could not suppress their love for long. Only graduation prevented their marriage, as they were expected to pursue professions. (Was this youthful exaggeration?)
He went home to Denver. He was within her and without her, romantically aroused but bent on adventure. He soon found himself in a sullen mood, negligent of his friends and money. After a month, he began to drive a cab, working nights.
Always intoxicated by the sun, he wanted a job that sweltered under an azure and gold sky, not star lit. The perspiration that poured from him when he labored outside in the high altitude sweated his sins away, which he was confessing to himself at a dizzying pace. At times of indecision and self disgust, he craved a return descent to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which he had visited a year before, seeking forgiveness for an indiscreet liaison. He was apart from Madi that summer, and consoled himself with another, a local suburban miss named Kat, mistook her sexual tension for love.
He wanted to endure the summer days of pain, but found it difficult to endure the nights. Driving the yellow cab worked for a few weeks. He sought the comfort of high school acquaintances — what her letter talked about — and parked his taxi at the golf course where two friends worked, Cooch and Josef. They watered nights, had done this for years. They could spell every night in a way he couldn’t. They prided themselves on being great sitters. Kerouac had said that about himself and Cassady. He was reminded of how she had made him sit for hours in her dorm room while she busied herself; she made him look out the window to no purpose. His history professor remarked at a party that his second wife coaxed him to relax on a beach. Driving a hack should have stayed his course, but he began to hate driving, got a Glendale ticket in his cab, and gave it up after a month. He could not bear to stay in Denver, and after six weeks, retraced his steps to Chicago.
Finding her living at home, he joined her for a few days. She opened herself to his sexual pleasure, on an easy chair in the basement; she spread her legs but scarcely smiled. Her father was ill, her mother observant. He left to see his friend in Maine, a lobsterman, who had accompanied him to the Grand Canyon. She watched him excuse himself, she didn’t let a tear fall, but that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t like that, crying at airports. She had said goodbye one too many times. She had no emotions left for him. He didn’t realize this until he was a thousand miles adrift, only half-pleasuring in his autonomy. He knew she liked Maine, had watched over kids at a camp, and had even made another counselor love her. Theirs was a trusting love, which she craved. He was sorry at times that he had taken that summer girl’s place. He didn’t love Madeleine in the simple way she had been loved. He had forced her into the complication of his head-trips and sexual wanting.
He left Maine to plea with her for a bargain, a life together in Chicago. When he arrived, he called her from the train station. Her sister answered and said she had gone to Washington, D.C. His adventure had turned a mockery; he went home again. Later she wrote that she left not to follow him, but to establish herself, and entice him to join her in the city. She didn’t like cities, but knew his needs; he had always wanted a life in the city. She became confused in Washington, as she was alone. She returned to her family home south of Chicago, despondent and mistreated. She had been there since. They missed their chance crossing trains of thoughts.
Forcing her to write, he attempted to collect their love despite the distance. The writing got tedious, and misunderstandings surfaced over the lag of days it took a letter to arrive. They had always been physical with each other in private, so this separation stifled their romance. She gained new strength in the company of old friends surprised by her reappearance in the small town where she had grown up. He rented an apartment on Capitol Hill in Denver, to live alone.
A brotherhood of friends supported him: Cooch and Rilke, Josef, too. Louie lived down the Poet’s Row block. He was robbed soon after moving into the Emily Dickinson building. Didn’t bother Louie; he was on the make and spent his time at the clubs on Broadway and Colfax, dancing with the boys. Sometimes Louie brought him along. They were best friends from high school.
He talked to his friends voraciously about books and music, but he could not sit still. After some time, he saw the folly of his life, the contempt of idleness. He told her this when he wrote. His letters featured imagined characters that represented enviable traits because he recognized his self as stifled. Her letters sounded full of determination. They made him grimace. She would not come; she would buy a car and move to Chicago with a girl friend. She liked the people in Chicago. She had a fine time on New Year’s Eve with her friends. On New Year’s Eve, he was with Louie leering at the people being festive at the Broadway, a gay disco, as Barry White seduced everyone with his repeated moaning. They left apart and he went to bed alone. A shroud of regret draped his torso.
Listening to Tammy Wynette stopped him from reading her stories. In gratuitous self-pity, he wanted Madeleine to sing like Tammy and “see him through.” He wanted to hold onto her, but he knew that they were fallen angels; no longer were they innocent of each other’s needs.
II.
“He welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.”
A phantom on Colfax: hooded sweatshirt, low brow, beard to hide his face; an old pair of baggy jeans that sagged at the knee, wafting in the summer wind; black high top Chuck Taylors, untied and faded. A looseness about the sight gliding past doorways and the quartz inset walls of Safeway on Washington Street. He smoked unfiltered Kools, stood erect, spectrelike at crosswalks, unassuming yet diligent in his course. Looking wasted, he carried a library copy of As I Lay Dying, his body too hungry for dinner at six. There was that mute emaciated situation suggested by a starving artist, a gleam of broken glass in his eye. The hair on his face that of a fair young man, its early growth streaked by skin. The blank composure of his face might remind a passerby of an autistic child, given over to mystery and prayer, praying to no avail. What we see is rather the conversation he has with himself, to which he is resigned. There is no one else.
III.
“Little laboratories and Lawrentian sex, embattled of horns.”
He couldn’t write a letter to her because he was thinking of another Madeleine. Listening to a balmy and cry-streaked version of “Drinking Again” by Dinah Washington, he remembered that they both mentioned that song in letters that crossed in the mail, sometime just before their love expired. He couldn’t write a letter now. The next song came on, “Just Friends,” and he engages the immediate, his eyes a glassy blank.
IV.
Well listen, Madeleine,
(And my best letters, when I gotta get something off my chest, begin that way, with “listen,” because it’s imposing and a matter of fact; besides, it’s absolutely the only way I could write a letter now, because it must be sentimental and blunt but sincere. Otherwise, there are too many vacuous intangibles to sort through, matters of the mind and practice.)
Too long ago you said, “It’d be good for you living on your own,” but you know it ain’t easy. These miserable apologies… there aren’t any to be made. Perhaps you could say that I’ve been indiscreet, but I’ve got nothing to hide. It was a malicious joy to instigate — no, that’s too strong — to provoke circumstances between people, just to see what would happen, examining people in my own image, creating situations that described my personas in contrary terms. It was I who was conceptualized in these affairs of the heart. It’s schizophrenia, but I fear it was spelled out and willed by a mind that suffered the hurts of hypochondria, deliberating on themes stolen from literary glances of my life, and developing the pangs of conscience and guilt nurtured by the Romantic artist, who gives himself unto death in the proud remorse of a love unretained. Does nurturing the vulgarity that is soon regretted come from a life half lived under the pretext that others might be persuaded by a confession? For a minute I might be rid of the steady nausea that has plagued me since I recognized my complicity in corruption. Did he find himself guilty in his normalcy, a stranger, il Conformista?
The jobs I’ve taken are low labor, although the taxidermists I worked with thought themselves artists. They would insert glass eyes, paint fur, position limbs after studying nature shows on public television. They were mounting trophies for big game hunters, their patrons. I pounded sand with a jackhammer to form a footstool from a dried elephant’s foot. I dropped skinned skulls into barrels of bleach, and then searched the teeth drawers for dentures. I was looking for eyes and teeth for myself. A better paying job earned me the title of gandy dancer, pounding spikes for the Colorado and Southern. After kicking through a pair of Red Wings the first three weeks, I bought and wear black engineer boots and cut off khakis, a black t-shirt, a uniform which draws ominous looks as I stride right across downtown back to my digs. Always dark glasses. I drink with Charles and Mange from the track gang at the Mercury on Pearl Street, as we chant the western wanderings of Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The work is hard, my body spent, ideas rampage my brain.
My thoughts feed upon my body, whose care I relinquish first. They infect my mind, dragged into a paranoia I take too long to realize is self defeating. The miscegenation of types I thrust upon my person lead resignedly to an illicit self-bastardization, which I want and perform. I eviscerate myself with contradictions and unseemly alterations of behavior. Rather than focus and pursue the dispensations of talent and capabilities I displayed in college, I seek to expand my intakes, to overload all the sense capacities of my system, so that intoxication becomes the byword of a time when I prescribe drugs as sedatives to temper the anxious imbalance caused by my fetes of mental hypochondria. The harsh reality of hard labor gives way to rancid dreams and lurid machinations. My thoughts turn over you.
V.
“All blues, a color, yes, a color, the blues are more than a color, they are a mode of pain, a taste of strife, a sad refrain, against which life is played, blues are the living dues that we all are paying here.
“The sea, the sky, and you and I know all blues….” She gripped herself and faded into a hoarse whisper. Morgana King soothed him in the background of the sofa where he lay. He slouched and only the sky, framed by a window pain-grey at the end of winter, set in a northern exposure, a sky blue, all blues, and dotted by the colored bursts atop a vase of star flowers, was visible to him at midday. The bright fixtures of the flowers that loomed out of focus before the clear blankness of the sky upset him — they were too bright and full of exterior, the stuff that celebrities were made of. He was lured into thoughts of fame, and how he would achieve the excellent prestige of personality if only the equipment and opportunities were offered. He would paint this picture of him in his dirty pastel clothes: a beige pair of baggy pants, the cuffs drooping and waste sagging, topped by an old oxford cloth shirt, light blue and ivy league in its day, walking down the street with a slight lift, cars staring as he was in this instant, out a window that yawned in boredom on a parking lot below, in a pair of faded black sneakers, the shoelaces untied without fail, pledged to his defeats, he could no longer keep them tied, despite the scolding of his latent lover, the strings so flat and frayed after so much abuse on city streets, the laces greased beyond repair, one string could not lock arms with the other. In his mind’s eye, he locks eyes with her. He ruefully witnesses his own undoing, pleasing no one, as he piles abuse upon his body and person. He would paint a picture of this unlikely pastel phantom, doting on the light expansive of those simple star flowers, her blue eyes.
Or he could record the conversations that he and his friends purveyed. He thought that their conversations spoke better his epic of Denver nativity and misfortune than their writing and painting. He envied them their efforts, and so, that he might include himself in their gathering, labeled his bombastic intercourse as a kind of naïve art. He would record them and interview them as stylishly as he did himself in the irrepressible daydreams of like and kind, those queer imaginings suffered by young men lost to the love of another’s woman.
First the fame followed by the rapture and anxiety, the final self-annulment of romance. The chromatic appeal of the flowers hosted his heart’s infatuation, for he had bought them to relieve the paleness of the apartment walls, that she might come and meet him there, and never feel so repressed as she did that night. He could not explain the melodramatic intrigue that their incipient love held for him. That night, he was a week out of the cast that his ankle had worn a month. He had punched Rilke after a night drinking downtown, took a fall fighting, and walked home on a broken ankle. He was on the road to recovery, as his disposition had altered, too. After being laid up for three weeks, he swore to take better care of himself, and was all resolve when the cast was broken, his mobility retrieved. A friend at the taxidermist had made a deer hide cover for the cast, for it was winter. He molted that skin. He would garner again the mute respect that his friends shared with each other, and would not break that fast of silence with his wild conversations — guilt ridden interior monologues that were thrust upon his audience with a magnitude that overwhelmed and finally bored, till his friends deserted him with a perfunctory quip of goodbye, and he was left only raging to himself.
No, instead, he would inhale and absorb every breath of their postures, and leave them to their own lethal transport. As it was, in large gatherings, like the one he walked into that night, he couldn’t expect his friends to forebear his singularly incessant spite; their jealous attention refused to tolerate what they considered the wasted energy of his absurd diatribes. He supposed it was they who chided him shamelessly in Laura Nyro’s “Tom Cat Goodbye”: “You’re never gonna make a movie maker, always be a city faker.” He silently heard them sing it acapella, as he sat straight legged, slumped beneath the heft of a lunatic urge to write and record, and not be the last to know the reason why, which is proper madness.
He took stock of all these friends’ varied affairs among friends, and knew that he must avoid above all the rueful self-annihilation that befell him on just such occasions of kinship. He could be the good son, the bon fils. He would not stand for their accusing reticence. Albeit that night, he lost himself in her Julie Christie all encompassing eyes, silently sitting. That night when everyone’s face was blank but charmed with pointed stares, he stole her away to be by himself and her. They went dancing at the Broadway, which they would not visit again as a couple but which he found comfortable for a single night of exile, a place the wives of friends found non-threatening.
Jackie Wilson rang through his mind with, “Your love, your love keeps lifting me higher, higher and higher, your love….” The flowers engulfed him, his somnolent imagination led him to the sneering heroics performed by the likes of George Raft, a movie lead who always lost his audience by picture’s end. A knock at the door — indeed, he had been waiting days for it — to which his couched figure turned, he opened the door, and stuttered in disbelief at her coming. He could only say, “Why, why Madeleine, I didn’t expect, didn’t think, I was just…” before he poked his head out to discover her husband behind her, and pushing before him their only child, and all of a sudden, he swept them up, “Such a grand surprise, and Jesse, the blond child and heir apparent (that’s what your uncle Rilke calls you), and Josef, the inimical fellow who spurned my company last Friday, that cheap apology of yours really wasn’t worth the bother, but how good of you all.” He twirled and showed them in, his every footstep planted in mock seriousness and dreadful complication. He had left the party with Madeleine to avoid this conjugation of passions. When everyone was together, the cross currents of self-effacing energy confused and stultified these artists’ strained concerns, until they sat dumbfounded, over equipped. He had wanted to avoid that, and had found her pleading, but dully sodden in her place in that tangle of relationships. So they excused themselves to the others, they went to dance. He had not seen her again until this unexpected arrival — the family come to his apartment. This portentous turn of events clouded his otherwise glassy stare (a look he had gathered about himself, since someone at work had said that it was “the hungry look in their eyes” which had made Steve McQueen and Paul Newman famous).
He woke from drunken snoring with a start, blinked to regain his focus, and after a moment seemed to recall that his dream had been touched by romance, and that he needn’t wait longer, he could leave this apartment, free of the infatuation which had halted his day at noon. It was past five by now. He pulled on his dilettante’s folds to answer the door, and clamored excited about the plans he had for the apartment, graciously ignoring the solemnity of their seating, their climates altogether. Josef peered from a corner of the pink and faded languorous couch, Madeleine sat rigidly to his left, her legs crossed in natural defense — her legs looked to him relaxed yet cautious in their severe length. She sat upright but sank luxuriously into the sofa cushion, where she sat aside of Josef. He sat opposite them both on an orange lawn chair, preferred by him to the sinking comfort of the supine couch. She looked intimidated, but equal to her indignation. She had been dragged there. Jesse posited himself against one wall, and played the titular judge, he being their main concern, but ultimately absolved of the damage that would be wreaked by these people, his parents and his father’s friend. A dream, an omen, star flowers in an all blues sky out a pain-grey window.
VI.
“I’m so tired of being alone
I’m so tired of on-my-own
Won’t you help me girl
Just as soon as you can?”
How can I forgive? I can only rage, drink to forget and drink to savor the memory; this whole affair has passed out of our hands. I left you last and you could, could not discover why, but I’m to be blamed, and offer self-delusion in excuse. I thought that I could pass my time better on my own.
A life with the family warrants your escape now — having failed to find me in Washington — you maintain that it must be up to you, you’re on your own, and though I might admit to that, I can’t forgive, I can’t, I’m too proud and self-regarding to do that. Nor can I finally understand, because I’m indisposed in Denver, unfamiliar with your mother and friends. I only know my friends (these desolation angels of Denver), and rage over the thought of your absence, that you can’t know them like I do, and that I don’t know you anymore, which can no way be resolved.
Permit me my fashion, which you find vacuous. I’ll drink and sit in a slouch, “why” you can’t beware of, but don’t cry forgiveness, I’m desperate. I must endure this banal solitude, but you can’t expect me to move, and don’t assume that I’ve taken another lover. I only care for one, and rankle because she’s gone. The physical love passed long ago, and now the spiritual neglect is upon us. I swear that I’ll see you again, but Denver and Chicago are unlikely sites. Salud.
VII.
“And God gave him understanding for this end, that he might know him, and know heavenly things and made him as capable to know these things as any others. But man has debased himself and has lost his glory in this respect. He has become as ignorant of the excellency of God, as the very beasts. His understanding is full of darkness. His mind is blind.”
As Mr. Edwards:
I hope you don’t think, hope you don’t think I’ve given up, that I’ve given up the ghost, that I’ve given up the ghost over you, and surrendered to the pack of thieving mongers who press me in Denver for emotion… because they don’t, won’t press anymore; I declare myself the judge penitent in their presence, I dote on their and mine conjugal irreverence, and smite my forehead for them and me. I am the prophet and the king, but no one bows, and I would never expect it. I don’t care to be famous, full of fortune and half-hearted sighs. I am recognized by friends and that’s all I want of you, “affection for the misbegotten,” born in the baby boom, and now suffered of all expectations, I have none, the promise and hilarity of youth has been cast out that we might persuade our temperate selves to speak out, to mourn the losses, that keynote our times, but never to be caught in a political swirl of reform, just gratefully wizened to the sentimental Romanticism of which we partake. I want to talk and beware. To lasciviously exile myself to the inveterate stillness of solitude that desperate Romantics piteously pleasure in, to rush at the adjective conversations that these friends glory in. In the anxious conjugation of our words, it’s them that we held forth in our lost training to become priests. The life we lead together, the life of ritual modelings and mocking indifference to the masters of drink and art, sons of Neil Cassady and Van Gogh — those heralded poets of my contemporaries, my friends I call them, but I know nothing of either them or their idols, illicit markers of their aspirations. I don’t care and won’t have heroes, but I’ll praise these others to the heights, for their purposes and mine, that they might betray their souls in imitation, and that I might record and betray them in turn, that I can disclose their souls to the outrage we all inevitably experience, the despair and disgust that is nomenclature to the youthful generation out of which we are one. In turgid prostration before the finer arts, we are leveled and most of us abandon, but I will restore and invigorate in writing the pretentions of promise which we all hold, us Jesuitical bastards of inquisition fathers, indoctrinated in deafening scholarship, weaned on critical analysis, of and outside our common Catholic heritage, graduated to cynical bombastics, but we never outgrew our schoolboy trust, and so can dare. We are the Jesuits of the future, pledged to poverty, chastity, and hope, in our own cause, deemed to a finer course of sanctity and awakened preaching, among all these remnants of the bourgeois. We supplant the new Jesuits who are given over to fashion and the pursuits of their jangled emotions, emotions torn from us so long ago, torn cursed and wrecked beyond submission, we go on without them, sentimental roommates the whole lot of us are, given over to preaching and a peculiar strain of ego and intestinal trouble we disclose ourselves, the sorrow and the pity that we all know, not in boasting so much as example, we are foolishly proud in the Americana we were born into as native Denverites, members of the provinces who naïvely plague themselves with the aberrant warnings to the artist, and that life of irrepressible despair congeals with the vacuous spread of urban renewal through Denver, but our cosmopolitan airs are over expectant, our heads swell and senses expand, and so we get seriously drunk and make good sense, and such as we care to think of ourselves, albeit this truth be minor, we are finally faithful to ourselves.
VIII.
“Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.”
After Louie took me to the gay bars, the serious drinker bars and the discothèques, I found myself occasionally stopping in after work for a cheap drink at the Door, which was a horseshoe bar with mirrors all around, where you could see this red lit world in panorama. I took Josef there once, Josef the ladies man who had long been banging girls — in fact, he let me borrow one for a kissy date back in high school — and he had a hard time recognizing that the drag queen sitting across the bar from us was not a woman — the Kinks “Lola” crossed my mind. (I finally held a sliver of world experience over his head.)
I imagine Josef and me become lovers in the practical and true sense for us, living together, me the backbone, Josef as reckless as ever, but together we would drink, have cocktails every afternoon on the fire-escape, and woo the secretaries who parked in the lot below us, we would invite and swear by our sincerity, dressed in the casual fifties attire that is ours, pants of khaki and jean, worn, and with shirts that spelled comfort and style, or, on occasion, for these darlings, we would wear suits and white shirts, sporting love’s lyrics and literary promises, and those nasal toned bitches would snip at us and drive off, to leave us to our lechery. My mind makes mush of his slipping out on his Madeleine with a girl named Memphis. He regales us with his exploits. I find it morally egregious, and pledge revenge in my daydreams.
IX.
“I fear that I can’t wash away the lazy grime that coats my skin, I knew I couldn’t afford this cold winter alone.”
… This the goodbye that he bade a romance that had been fostered for years, now festering, collapsed due to neglect, for too long now they were just pen pals, and their love asphyxiated by correspondence, lost over the distance which supplanted their mutual physical appetite. They mock each other with the wistful promises they exchange, while they get used to the idea of separation, and are soon forgotten to the physical mystery that each for the other shared in love.
A thousand miles away from his original sin Madeleine, he rubbed her Mad chin with his palm, as they drank at factory bars, succumbed to the tang of cheap romance (and dirty tricks), their clothes they wore — layered, four or five thicknesses deep — sweaters, shirts and t-shirts, scarves and tight jackets, they said for protection against the weather, and people alike. They plied their bodies through clothes that seldom came off; they stripped a piece for the entertainment of each infatuous encounter that they wantonly suffered drinking in bars they didn’t like. To assuage the guilt, they made love in laundromats, cleansing each other’s lips, never unlocking eyes. She would drop Jesse off at her mother’s to run errands with Josef’s old friend.
Their trousers they never rolled, the cuffs of their pants filled with dirt, their sleeves wiped their noses too much, they sweated in their caps. He slouched in the comfort of an emotional ambivalence that persuaded him to believe in nothing but fate, the fortune of sheer accident, the capture in her eyes, Josef’s indignation. That was the worst cynicism. “I don’t want to wash my hands of our affair. I just won’t let it happen again.”
X.
“I can’t stand the rain against my window
Bringing back sweet memories
I can’t stand the rain against my window
It just keeps on haunting me.”
Ann Peebles sends me. You send me. Life is a pleasure. There was one love song on the album. He imagined himself happy. Overall, it was all blues, the singer’s mood bitter. “Do I Need You?” he wondered.
He slouched on a sofa, only the sky, framed, by a window pain-grey and streaked by the end of winter, was visible to him at midday.
XI.
“Rugged, covered with woe, he sits there with his black hair always over his brow….”
Just an American kid, trying to impress a dame. Always showboating for them, like the way I talk, picking up not dialects but phrases, from everywhere, every time, to sprinkle them in the most obvious places during conversation, to act the intellectual buffoon. A buffooning youngster who’s always throwing shadow jabs, and thinks that against his shadow he’ll win every time.
Playing cool Electric Ladyland Hendrix, beat jazz and rock undertones on “Rainy Day, Dream Away” for my sister who is soon off to Spain. I had let her pet the stuffed tiger at the taxidermy showroom when I worked there. She came to check on me because my mother feels unwelcome in my apartment, as do most women. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I cooked the turkey the boss gave me. That was all, just the turkey, which my gang of slouching soul brothers came to gnaw. My high school flame stopped by and left in disgust over me wasting my life. I ate part of the raw heart. Drank wildly after dividing rounds with glasses of milk. After everyone left, I stumbled down to Civic Center retching my guts out, to the tune of someone asking me if I was ok. No, I’m not, but “It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.”
XII.
Rilke,
I was listening to this song, “I never knew the meaning of true love/till you came into my life,” the only song of love on Ann Peebles’ album. She talks of gracious joy and sings like someone who’s been through it all, who finds true love, and life, everyday life pales in the brilliance of this love. But it’s not “true” anymore, once you’ve surfaced into so many affairs and surefire marriages, there’s no “true” love, it’s here and then it’s gone, just like every other moment we share alone with our discreet Madeleines.
Just another moment, but this new Madeleine sprang it, the whole solemn existence that’s developing for me (I’m getting used to the nausea), unexpected, my ambition fled, “true” love was lost, in her eyes, movement, susceptible to every moment and its changing emotions, but I don’t care, finally mystified by all women alike, I have no ideas for them, and the whole thing falls apart when you’re struck by something you can’t explain, reasons and morality are of no use; we’ve graduated. Rilke, it’s of no use, the heart nor mind, nothing, we do what we must, through no fault of our own, we are still beasts.
XIII.
Cooch,
I scarce know how to begin, this letter, but a new life as well. I’m afraid that I’ve been some disappointment, to you, to friends and relatives alike. As for myself, nothing has much mattered, and the only matter was a curiosity that coaxed me into evil doing, “to see what would happen.” I suppose this stinks of malice and cruelty, but it was the single joy that I could muster from an otherwise nondescript life spent in a hardwood apartment high on the Hill in Denver through one of its worst winters.
“It’s not easy living on your own.” I get stale, my words get hollow, and all my vitality is sapped and encrusted by the fantasies I work out on my own. If there’s no one to pour forth to, my thoughts feed upon my body, whose care I relinquished first, and then they infect my mind, from whence they came, and such incest as this leads one nowhere but to the asylum, where drugs are prescribed as sedatives to relieve the tensions of a mental hypochondria, which by definition is “all in your head,” and I’m glad I know that, that you were concerned enough to say, “You got a mind, why don’t you use it,” (to my “advantage” I supposed was your intended meaning), besides Louie saying, “Taking you along is like driving with my mother”: I must have been silently swearing. I know the feeling well, and just realized I’d been drugged into a paranoia that was only self-defeating.
These words of yours and his struck me at the same moment, and I can only regard them as promise saving revelations, points of order in the new world, as I drag myself out of my stupor. I am healthy, my muscles seem toned, and my body is tanned dried. However, my intellect requires new provocation, sources of learning that sting, coming from people whose mental intentions might serve to hitch my ease of the “hypos and paras,” to where I can function and create simultaneously.
XIV.
“I waited for Madeleine
All I did was call her name
A thousand times since half past ten
Madeleine, she never came.”
High and dry, living in Denver, where my skin is brown dry from working in the sun, spiking, picking, and the jive that smirks of a common cynicism and toughness that a man acquires after working on the section gangs for so long is wearing thin. I live good with these men, but their talk plods on like an empty box car train, a drone that best describes the unrelenting monotony which taxes a gandy’s strength. The cry on the track gang comes from a baritone weekend Mariachi singer, “Is there any hope?” to which all the spikers shout, “No hope.”
I’m nearly through with it, I have a mind that demands provocation from people whose hearts are pure, and their minds still dictated by intellectual restraint, whose standard is diligence, something I may trust, and will run to again, the demented, albeit inspired, pain gathering of my companions here has sapped all my moral vitality. I have moods and they’re vengeful. I’m sure I’m about to become a middle man soon, and both sides will be betrayed, but never outspoken, for I suspect they realize I’m not doing what I want, but I was able to convince them of my sincere intentions, and with a jocular manner even engaged in their conspiracies. Josef may take exception to this sentiment of mine. He came to my man abode and told me to “Stop.” No blows came of this. Shame, resentment, and remonstration came. Cooch reported later, “Josef is back home.” Back with Madeleine with his Memphis blues again. The marriage saved, another child born when I’m gone.
XV.
“Get out of Denver cause you look just like a commie
And you might just be a member
Better get out of Denver.”
Mange from the railroad, surname “Eager” by his own testimony, preceded many of the mass temples and migrations of his generation: he was in Woodstock before the crowds, in NYC working at Le Figaro (which just closed, the vestigial remnant of the Village 50s, beatnik), of late in New Orleans when the sniper struck, and of course, chased out of Chicago — before the riots. Eager Mange’s life and times, scattered everywhere in the sixties, becoming comfortable and saving to buy land in the resolute 70s, planted in Denver at the foot of the mountains he calls “sacred”. (If I had my druthers, I’d always see them as landscape to tall buildings, and the clouds reflected in the mirrored windows of the city dwellers’ altars to those mountains, the buildings which he had confined himself to, in mute sacrifice, but in hasty adventure, for it was Cain who first raised civilization, and that’s where Eager and he part company.) Eager took some records as he was packing up the place for his chess move to capture his original Mad queen in Chi-town. A chalk drawing of the cathedral by Rilke disappeared in the move — Cooch always blamed him for its mishandling. Was it Eager who wanted to sacritize his latest venture in hippie rambling, with a drawing of Immaculate Conception?
XVI.
A barge into Cooch’s apartment, I expect to put on Roxy to the tune of “Do the Strand,” get high with Cooch and Kate, and talk in bombastic tones about the music, Ferry’s voice and great percussion — it reminds me of Grand Hotel, we talked of it in similar hushed tones.
I do just that, ignoring Josef and Madeleine, outside of a wink to both, and the assurance to Josef that he would like this record, too. He disrupts my record changing to point out there’s something to be discussed. I think, Sure, I’ll tell you all about Chicago, but say, “That can wait,” not so curt as polite. He rages, and I shuffle to a stomp, like the streetnik wearing a green surplus raincoat and red knit slouch cap who confronts him to rail: “Josef, forget that shit, it can wait forever. Forget and forgive. Here, I’ll turn my other cheek. You can blast me.”
He had been in the Second City for two years, living with his first Mad queen till he tired of her courtly demands, now returned to the Queen City of the Plains. His latent lover Madeleine stood before him. Let the histrionics begin. He silently intones, “There’s a new sensation/A fabulous creation/A danceable solution/To teenage revolution/Do the Strand love.”
The next episode, the sudden yearning, when he thinks he can stage another game of hearts, he’ll just “Dance away the heartache/Dance away the fear” in the crowded rooms of gloom, among the faces blank, but charmed with pointed stares. That’s how he’ll get through the next round. Who will assist in his character suicide? He is still young, can outlive the remorse, but will regret challenge his confidence? Whose version will he write? Does he acknowledge any version as truthful, tactful, or are they all alternative facts? He writes seven stories over a year, and later tells his writing students nothing can be discerned.