The Ballad of W. C. Fields (2:20)
And so we come to my most recent song, this ballad of W. C. Fields. I sat down not to write it but to give the urgency in my breast a controlled release through my fingertips, and this song is what happened. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time for the music, just the words and the beat. And so it is in the form of a walking song, it walks me through the underworld of the dreaming masses, where this pudgy demon of truth, Mr. W. C. Fields, with his dirty top hat, his run-down elegance of manners, his drunken scrollwork of a personality, presides like the Chief Official over the technology of our souls. And the singer doesn’t want this, he doesn’t like it, and he begins the song by telling Mr. Fields to go away: Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields Go way from this beautiful place Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields You’re blocking the view with your ugly face. But the clown won’t go away, you see, for he is taking the singer by the hand and leading him through the window over the great landscape of the underworld that looks so beautiful from the window of the safe house and showing him what it really is. And he sees the bubbling sulfur pits of intentions, and the slake mountains of ideals, and great plains of gray ash as far as he can see, the ashes of innocence creased by rivers of blood. And every man he sees is blind and running around in circles and no sound from the tapping of his cane to tell him where he’s going. And a great pestilential wind suppurates the skin of the people and sears their eyes and their hair, and it is the wind of Mr. W. C. Fields ranting. But the worst thing he sees is an old couple exempt from all the misery, a beautiful fair girl and boy in their youth who have grown old together, an aged couple who have loved each other and lived in each other all their lives, in joy and comfort, and now sit chuckling, immune to their surroundings, chuckling in their awful senility. And when the singer is back behind his window and the view looks fine and good and green again, he understands who Mr. W. C. Fields is, and he says: Some day we will stop laughing at you, Mr. Fields At your bulbous nose and the pain of your distress At your thirst and your drunken pratfalls, Mr. Fields At your bitter, bumbling, saintliness. And Mr. Fields brings forth a bottle and blows the dust from two glasses and rubs them on his dirty elegant sleeve and pours us each a drink and says to me: Drink it down, drink it all down, my boy And kick the kids at Christmas I give you my crooked cue stick, Billy Cause you know what the game is
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. A PEDDLER IN A PURPLE CHORISTER’S ROBE selling watches in Battery Park. Fellow with dreadlocks, a sweet smile, sacral presence. Doing well.
Rock doves everywhere aswoop, the grit of the city in their wings. And the glare of the oil-slicked bay, and a warm-throated autumn breeze like a woman blowing in my ears.
At my back, the financial skyline of Lower Manhattan sunlit into an islanded cathedral, a religioplex.
And here’s the ferry from Ellis Island. Listing to starboard, her three decks jammed to the rails. Sideswipes bulkhead for contemptuous New York landing. Oof. Pilings groan, crack like gunfire. Man on the promenade breaks into a run. How can I be lonely in this city?
Tourists stampeding down the gangplank. Cameras, camcorders, and stupefied children slung from their shoulders. Sun hats and baseball caps insouciant this morning, now their serious, unfortunate fashion.
Lord, there is something so exhausted about the New York waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all Heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.
But I went back to the peddler in the choir robe and said I liked the look. Told him I’d give him a dollar if he’d let me see the label. The smile dissolves.
You crazy, mon?
I was in my mufti grunge—jeans, leather jacket over plaid shirt over T-shirt. Not even cruciform I.D. to flash at him.
Lifts his tray of watches out of reach: Get away, you got no business wit me. Looking left and right as he says it.
And then later on my walk, at Astor Place, where they lay their goods on plastic shower curtains on the sidewalk: three of the sacristy’s purple choir robes neatly folded and stacked between a Best of the Highwaymen LP and the autobiography of George Sanders. I picked one and turned back the neck, and there was the label, Churchpew Crafts, and the laundry mark from Mr. Chung. The peddler, a solemn young mestizo with that bowl of black hair they have, wanted ten dollars each. I thought that was reasonable.
They come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, and find a piece of sidewalk and go to work. The world’s poor lapping our shores, like the rising of the global-warmed sea. I remember how, on the way to Machu Picchu, I stopped in the town of Cuzco and watched the dances and listened to the street bands. I was told when I found my camera missing that I could buy it back the next morning in the market street behind the cathedral. Sure enough, next morning there were the women of Cuzco, in their woven ponchos of red and ocher, braids depending from their black derbies, broad Olmec heads smiling shyly. They were fencing the stuff. Merciful heavens, I was pissed. But, surrounded by Anglos ransacking the stalls as if searching for their lost dead, how, my Lord Jesus, could I not accept the justice of the situation?
As I did at Astor Place in the shadow of the great, mansarded, brownstone-voluminous Cooper Union people’s college with the birds flying up from the square.
A block east, on St. Mark’s, a thrift shop had the altar candlesticks that were heisted along with the robes. Twenty-five dollars the pair. While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade.
I’m lying, Lord, I just read the damn things when I’m depressed. The paperback detective never fails me. His rod and his gaff, they comfort me. Sure, a life is lost here and there, but the paperback’s world is ordered, circumscribed, dependable in its punishments. More than I can say for Yours.
I know You are on this screen with me. If Thos. Pemberton, DD, is losing his life, he’s losing it here, to his watchful God. Not just over my shoulder do I presumptively locate You, or in the Anglican starch of my collar, or in the rectory walls, or in the coolness of the chapel stone that frames the door, but in the blinking cursor …
TUESDAY EVE. UP TO Lenox Hill to see my terminal: ambulances backing into the emergency bay with their beepings and blinding strobe lights. They used to have QUIET signs around hospitals. Doctors’ cars double-parked, patients strapped on gurneys double-parked on the sidewalk, smart young Upper East Side workforce pouring out of the subway walking past not looking. Looking.
It gets dark earlier now. Lights coming on in the apartment buildings. If only I was rising to a smart one-bedroom. A lithe young woman home from her interesting job, listening for my ring. Uncorking the wine, humming, wearing no underwear.
In the lobby, a stoic crowd primed for visiting hours with bags and bundles and infants squirming in laps. And that profession of the plague of our time, the security guard, in various indolent versions.
My terminal’s room door slapped with a RESTRICTED AREA warning. I push in, all smiles.
You got medicine, Father? You gonna make me well? Then get the fuck outta here. The fuck out, I don’t need your bullshit.
Enormous eyes all that’s left of him. An arm bone aims the remote like a gun, and there in the hanging set the smiling girl spins the big wheel.
My comforting pastoral visit concluded, I pass down the hall, where several neatly dressed black people wait outside a private room. They hold gifts in their arms. I smell non-hospital things. A whiff of fruit pie still hot from the oven. Soups. Simmering roasts. I stand on tiptoe. Who is that? Through the flowers, like a Gauguin, a handsome, light-complected black woman sitting up in bed. Turbaned. Regal. I don’t hear the words, but her melodious, deep voice of prayer knows whereof it speaks. The men with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. The women with white kerchiefs. On the way out I inquire of the floor nurse.
SRO twice a day, she says. We get all of Zion up here. The
only good thing, since Sister checked in I don’t have to shop for supper. Yesterday I brought home baked pork chops. You wouldn’t believe how good they were.
ANOTHER ONE HAVING trouble with my bullshit—the widow code-named Moira. In her new duplex that looks across the river to the Pepsi-Cola sign she’s been reading Pagels on early Christianity.
It was all politics, wasn’t it? she asks me.
Yes, I sez to her.
And so whoever won, that’s why we have what we have now?
Well, with a nod at the Reformation, I suppose, yes.
She lies back on the pillows. So it’s all made up, it’s an invention?
Yes, I sez, taking her in my arms. And you know for the longest time it actually worked.
Used to try to make her laugh at the dances at Spence. Couldn’t then, can’t now. A gifted melancholic, Moira. The lost husband an add-on.
But she was one of the few in the old crowd who didn’t think I was throwing my life away.
Wavy thick brown hair parted in the middle. Glimmering dark eyes, set a bit too wide. Figure not current, lacking tone, Glory to God in the highest.
From the corner of her full-lipped mouth her tongue emerges and licks away a teardrop.
And then, Jesus, the surprising condolence of her wet salted kiss.
FOR THE SERMON: open with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing … to share their innocence.
But then I asked myself: Why must faith rely on innocence? Must it be blind? Why must it come of people’s need to believe?
We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity’s rule or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. God’s authority is a powerful claim and reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly gratitude.
So where is the truth to be found? Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to Salvation … and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know—of course we think we know. We have our belief. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a story? Can we, each of us examining our faith—I mean its pure center, not its comforts, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments—can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? What, for instance, has the industrialized carnage, the continentally engineered terrorist slaughter of the Holocaust done to our story? Do we dare ask? What mortification, what ritual, what practice would have been a commensurate Christian response to the Holocaust? Something to assure us of the truth of our story? Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau—a mass exile, perhaps? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I don’t know what it would be—but I know I’d recognize it if I saw it. If we go on with our story, blindly, after something like that, is it not merely innocent but also foolish, and possibly a defamation, a profound impiety? To presume to contain God in this unknowing story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive … in our story of Him? Of Her? Of whom? What in the name of our faith—what in God’s name!—do we think we are talking about!
WEDNESDAY LUNCH.
Well, Father, I hear you delivered yourself of another doozy.
How do you get your information, Charley. My little deacon, maybe, or my Kapellmeister?
Be serious.
No, really, unless you’ve got the altar bugged. Because, God knows, there’s nobody but us chickens. Give me an uptown parish, why don’t you, where the subway doesn’t shake the rafters. Give me one of God’s midtown showplaces of the pious rich and famous, and I’ll show you what doozy means.
Now, listen, Pem, he says. This is unseemly. You are doing and saying things that are … ecclesiastically worrying.
He frowns at his grilled fish as if wondering what it’s doing there. His well-chosen Pinot Grigio shamelessly neglected as he sips ice water.
Tell me what I should be talking about, Charley. My five parishioners are serious people. I mean, is this only a problem for Jewish theology? Mormon? Swedenborgian?
There’s a place for doubt. And it’s not the altar of St. Timothy’s.
Funny you should say that. Doubt is my next week’s sermon: the idea is that in our time it is no more likely that a religious person will live a moral life than that an irreligious person will. What do you think?
A tone has crept in, a pride of intellect, something is not right—
And it may be that we guardians of the sacred texts are in spirit less God-fearing than the average secular individual in a modern industrial democracy who has quietly accepted the ethical teachings and installed them in himself and/or herself.
Lays the knife and fork down, composes his thoughts: You’ve always been your own man, Pem, and in the past I’ve had a sneaking admiration for the freedom you’ve found within church discipline. We all have. And in a sense you’ve paid for it, we both know that. In terms of talent and brains, the way you burned up Yale, you probably should have been my bishop. But in another sense it is harder to do what I do, be the authority that your kind is always testing.
My kind?
Please think about this. The file is getting awfully thick. You are headed for an examination, a Presentment. Is that what you want?
His blue eyes look disarmingly into mine. Boyish shock of hair, now gray, falling over the forehead. Then his famous smile flashes over his face and instantly fades, having been the grimace of distraction of an administrative mind.
What I know of such things, Pem, I know well. Self-destruction is not one act, or even one kind of act. It is the whole man coming apart in every direction, all three hundred and sixty degrees.
Amen to that, Charley. You don’t suppose there’s time for a double espresso?
ALL RIGHT, THAT WISE old dog Tillich—Paulus Tillichus—how does he construe the sermon? Picks a text and worries the hell out of it. Sniffs at the words, paws them: What, when you get right down to it, is a demon? You say you want to be saved? But what does that mean? When you pray for eternal life, what do you think you’re asking for? Paulus, God’s philologist, this Merriam-Webster of the DDs, this German … shepherd. I loved him. The suspense he held us in—teetering on the edge of secularism, arms waving wildly. Of course, he saved us every time, pulled back from the abyss, and we were okay after all, back with Jesus. Until the next sermon, the next lesson. Because if God is to live, the words of faith must be renewed. The words must be reborn.
Oh, did we flock to him. Enrollments soared.
But that was then and this is now.
We’re back in Christendom, Paulus. People are born again, not words. You can see it on television.
FRIDAY MORNING. Following his intuition, Divinity Detective wandered over to the restaurant-supply district on the Bowery, below Houston, where the trade is brisk in used steam tables, walk-in freezers, grills, sinks, pots, woks, and bins of cutlery. Back behind the Taipei Trading Company was the antique gas-operated fridge too recently acquired to have a sales tag, with the mark of my shoe sole still on the door where I kicked it when it wouldn’t stay closed. And in one of the bins of the used-dish department the tea things from our pantry, white with a green trim, gift from the dear departed Ladies’ Auxiliary. Practically named my own price, Lord. With free delivery. A steal.
Evening. I walk over to Tompkins Square, find my friend on his bench.
This has got to stop, I say to him.
My, you riled up.
Wouldn’t you be?
Not like the Pops I know.
I thought we had an understanding. I thought there was mutual res
pect.
They is. Have a seat.
Sparrows working the benches in the dusk.
Told you wastin’ your time, but I ast aroun like I said I would. No one here hittin’ on Tim’s.
Not from here?
Thasit.
How can you be sure?
This regulated territory.
Regulated! That’s funny.
Now who’s not showin’ respeck. This my parish we talkin’ bout. Church of the Sweet Vision. They lean on me, see what I’m sayin’? I am known for my compassion. You dealin’ with foreigners or some such, thas my word to you.
Ah, hell. I suppose you’re right.
No problem. Unsnaps attaché case: Here, my very own personal blend. No charge. Relax yoursel.
Thanks.
Toke of my affection.
MONDAY NIGHT, a new tack. I waited in the balcony with my BearScare six-volt Superbeam. If something stirred, I’d just press the button and my Superbeam would hit the altar at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second—same cruising speed as the finger of God.
The amber crime-preventing lights on the block make a perfect indoor crime site of my church. Intimations of a kind of tarnished air in the vaulted spaces. The stained-glass figures yellowed into lurid obsolescence. How many years has this church been home to me? But all I had to do was sit up in the back for a few hours to understand the truth of its stolid indifference. How an oak pew creaks. How a passing police siren in its two Doppler pitches is like a crisis being filed away in the stone walls.