‘No, and if he did try to feel up my leg with his knee, I wouldnt talk to him anymore.’
‘That’s funny, now why not?’
‘Because I think it would add up to an insult to my person as a male person.’
‘Well that’s well put. You know, I was intelligent. I shouldna sold out to the assassination business. The Mouthpiece liked me and told me I could go a long way. How you like my silk dressing gown?’
Then a note comes in for me that I can call for bail bond money. I ask for my Johnnie’s number and call her up in front and say: ‘Lissen, my father is mad as hell, wont lend me a hundred for the bond, the hell with him. Johnnie, you borrow that money from your aunt, I’ll get out of here, we’ll get married, right now, we’ll go to Detroit and I’ll get a job in a war plant and pay her off her hundred dollars (or your father might lend it) but in any case let’s get married’ – my father having abandoned me the first thing I thought of was getting married – ‘and then I’ll get a ship and ship out to Italy or France or someplace and send you my allowance.’
‘Okay Jackie.’
But meanwhile, back in my cell trying to read, here comes the rest of them, the whole bunch (except the Chinese, who were Tong), everyone of them saying they were the only honest individual in the cellblock and to tell them the Gospel truth alone would save me.
But the Gospel truth was simply that Claude was a nineteen-year-old boy who had been subject to an attempt at degrading by an older man who was a pederast, and that he had dispatched him off to an older lover called the river, as a matter of record, to put it bluntly and truthfully, and that was that.
That was why he was really a ‘child of the rainbow’, even at fourteen he could see through that guff, and the particular way it was laid down in this case, which was amounting to pursuit almost to the point of strong-arm threat, or extortion.
A man has a right to his own sexual life.
Demeaned by exhibitionism, ragged, hagged, witched-at, not left in peace of own soul, right in the face of mankind’s pleasaunces he just dumped the malicious child-mongerer in the bloody drink and brook me that. Brool me that. (And duel me not that.)
XX
Shades of the prison-house. It’s Saturday evening in August, in New York, a late sunset goldenly appears in a gap in the firmament between great dark cloudbanks so that the early lights of the city in the streets and on the watchers in the wallsides of high buildings suddenly shine quite feebly in the big light that was like the glow of a golden rose in all the world: and people look up and around with strange mulling thoughts. All day it has been gray, and really depressing, in the morning it’s even rained some, but now’s the dull clouds empurpled and made to flame at borders in evening and the one great hit and visitation of the Heavens throbs just widespread in the atmosphere like a great big golden old blue balloon and alike a harbinger, you might say, of mysterious new kindsa glory for everybody even over the soft tremblings of Times Square, and of 14th Street, and of Borough Hall in Brooklyn, even over the darkling waters by the piers where planks float, even where the Narrows soften by Staten Island and her silly wretched statue to the rose night true sea, even over the buzzing hums and great rumorous neons of rooftop Harlem and the Upper Italian East Side, and even over the millions of packed places where in my New York life I’d seen so many people who were preparing for the soft air and whatever celebrations and occasions that must, and do, arise in piddling earth in the vast night’s camp.
And so, gentle lug heads, how sad, how true, how necessary that a whole day might have to be like a sodden rag, lumpish, distress-ful, like the last day of the world (which it oughta be sometime) when all the ‘windows be darkened and the daughters of music brought low’, and men can go about with a kind of jaundiced toolbag sorrow and black hats and coats to a card game like Cezanne’s which is more sorrowful than sources of disenchanted soul itself. Workmen who sweated all day did sweat without joy, and hated dumb labor, and thought of home without consolation, except for pizza and the Daily News and the Yankee game. Indoor workers gaped with itchy pants and embarrassment at windows. Housewives and storekeepers Vergilized a gray empty doom and led their whoresons on. Children marveled like lepers at the amazing sadness of day, turning little faces downward, tho, not at ships, nor trains, nor great trucks from South Carolina arriving over bridges and all the smoky fanfares, movies, museums, bright toys, but to awful fogs in which, yet, the central joyous source of the universe there still hung on, clear as a bell ever, the pearl of Heaven flaming on high. So that even in jail, men look up from whatever they’re thinking with the same struck mull thought, say ‘Yah, red out there, ugh,’ or they say, ‘What’s that, no rain?’ or say nothing and watch awhile before returning to the feverish waiting mat.
On the fourth floor of the Bronx Jail I, a young man, standeth silent outside the cell in the barred hall of the tier, I look across another hall thru the bars of a window that opens in that immense silly blushing New York with its awestruck, yet sad, pot-of-man look. And down the hall, there’s the card game. There’s the evening guard sitting among the men in shirtsleeves with his cap thrown back. Maybe he’s got a quarter. Last few hours before lights out. Harsh white light burns over the muttering concentrations. Every now and then some guy looks up from the ring of heads and says ‘What, no rain?’ A gaunt man with a black patch over one eye, that being, of course, Little Red Riding Hood, says ‘Stick to your guns, Rocco, by the time you get out there you’ll be the last rose of summer.’
‘In the spring a young man’s fancy? Give me three.’
‘In a year, Eddie, you can kiss the boys goodbye and go home.’
‘Never mind, that’s allright, dont think about abiyt nem dibt wirrt hyst ren nberm t isegyts, yuck.’
‘What’s he talkin, Ay Rabic?’
‘I’ll remember it,’ says Red looking away.
Anyway, see? No time for poetry. And anyway, see? No time for poetry.
XXI
So the next day I have to call the DA, Grumet, so tell him I want to be let out for a few hours to marry Johnnie. I can see the DA rubbing his hands together thinking gleefully ‘I KNEW she was pregnant.’ He gives the go-ahead. A big Irish dick from Ozone Park, clothes plain, comes for me and says ‘Come on.’ We go out together. He’s carrying a thick gat under his coat. It’s cool now August, but the subway’s still hot and so we ride downtown together hanging on to straps and reading the Daily News and the Daily Mirror respectively. He knows I aint going to make a run for anything but because there’s nothing on me in the Bronx Opera House maybe he thinks I’m a nut, what I mean is, anyway, he’s got his eye on me. We get downtown and meet Johnnie and Cecily. Cecily is going to be the best woman and Detective Shea the best man.
When he gloms Cecily his lips ooze out ‘OO’ and we go down to City Hall and get the license. In two minutes flat a justice of the peace is marrying us. Shea is standing proudly in the back with beauteous Cecily at his side and me and Johnny are married.
Then we repair to a bar for an afternoon of pleasant drink and talk. Evening comes. One more for the road. Shea is about forty-seven years old and about to retire. He’s never been a best man at an impromptu wedding with a bourgeois doll like Cecily, actually that’s mean, a beautiful doll like Cecily, only twenty, and he’s flushed and good times, in fact he buys all the drinks, but anyway I’m married to Johnnie and I give her a big kiss as Shea and I have to return to Bronx Jail to put me back in my cell. She’s going to wire home for that one hundred and I’ll be sprung in a few days. The wife of my youth I married anyway.
When I’m being escorted down the evening hall to my cell that night around nine of the prisoners are going ‘Ye, ye, ye, that’s some wedding night for that boy, ha ha ha.’
In the middle of the night everybody is silent, snoring, or thinking quiet thoughts one way or the other, and the only thing I hear is the Chinese brothers
going quietly in the dark ‘Hungk-ya mung-yo too mah to.’ I think of all the rice in their father’s shop. I think of all the ink in my father’s fingernails. I think of all the absurdity of going on when there’s no place to go. Then I think:
‘Absurdity? Of course there’s someplace to go! Go mind your own business.’
Book Thirteen
I
Talk about ‘widening your consciousness’ and all that crap they talk about nowadays, if I’da widened my consciousness enough to narrow down the piecework numbered on the counters of the piecework ballbearing laborers in Federal Mogul Factory in Detroit that September, where I went to earn and save that one hundred dollars I owed my new wife’s aunt, they’da widened my arse and narrowed my head with a monkey wrench and not a left-handed one at that.
It was the best job I ever had. From midnight till eight in the morning, it was gotten for me through the influence of Johnnie’s well-known society father, via friends thereof, and I dont know what the ballbearing boys thought of me but they saw that after twelve, when I checked their opening count on the counter, I had nothing to do till eight but occupied myself the entire noisy night sitting at the foreman’s desk I guess it was, on a high dunce stool, reading and taking down notes endlessly. What was I doing, I was studying very carefully a list of books dealing with American literary criticism so I’d be ready for the wars up ahead other than those we were making ballbearings for.
Ballbearings, of all things, my boyhood joy because they could always outroll the marbles and win the horse races . . .
Because DA Grumet let me out of Bronx Jail not long after Johnnie and I were married, on that one-hundred-dollar bail bond for the five-thousand-dollar bail, and we went west to live with her aunt, in Grosse Pointe Michigan. First my Pa and Ma came to see me, tho, in the jail, sat at the long table and talked to me in front of a guard just like in the John Garfield movies. They were surprised I had decided to marry Johnnie, they understood I did it because I had no friends, had to get out, try something new, they looked on me as an errant but innocent son victimized by decadent friendships in the evil city, which was true, in a way, but anyway, everything was forgiven.
In Johnnie’s aunt’s house in Grosse Pointe, everything was fine, we had wonderful dinners every evening at seven on laced tablecloth with regular china dishes and casseroles of silver and chandelier above, albeit cooked by Johnnie and served by her aunt, no maids, but a beautiful quiet home and a beautiful quiet woman her aunt. Of course she had nothing for me over roast beef and brown potatoes but words that would make me feel slightly guilty but when I sat with her in the parlor after dinner and continued my reading and notetaking she began to realize I might be serious about the ‘writing game’.
‘Well,’ she’d say, ‘I’ve heard of some people who made a living out of writing books, Pearl Buck, they told me today at the club, and Harriet van Arness of Pinckney Michigan made quite a renown for herself.’ Pinckney Michigan was where they had a farm, occupied by relatives, right near Henry Ford’s farm, near Ann Arbor or a few miles, a lovely farm we visited for Sunday dinner and across the fields of which, in the lovely northern October of Michigan, Johnnie and I roamed, to go lie down in yellow weeds by creeks exuding cold of coming winter, wishing someday we could own a farm and lie around in corduroy slacks and wool sweaters and smoke fragrant pipes and raise healthy little butter eaters, creamery butter from the cows, that is. But Johnnie was unable to have children because of a dangerous anemic condition, and as for me, it turned I found out a few years later I was like my uncles Vincent and John Duluoz and my aunt Annie Marie, well nigh sterile. That Duluoz family being so very old . . .
I guess it’s not unusual that by the time my father and I came around at the bottom of the pot of Duluozes, the only good thing we could figure had ever happened to us was that we could fall asleep at night and dream, and the only bad thing, wake up to this gnashing world. At least the early Duluozes had fields of green in Cornwall and Brittany, horses and mutton chops, barks and rigging and salt spray, shields and lances and saddles, and trees to look at. Whoever they were, them Duluozes (Kerouac’hs), their name meant ‘Language of the House’ and you know that’s an old name, and that’s Celtic, and that any family that old cant go on much longer. ‘Bad blood’ as Claude used to say to me. But anyway the ‘wife of my youth’ and I could never have children.
Palmer was probably an old family too, she was the granddaughter of a Scottish furniture tycoon whose fortune had been squandered by her Pop but all in good fun. Think of all the literary and political asses who get prizes for being abstract telling you that life and its ‘values’ are wonderful, in great chosen terms deliberately stuffed with cover-up platitudes, who dont know what it is to come from an old family which is too old to lie anymore.
I worked for the whole month of September into October till I had paid back Mrs Palmer in twenty-dollar-a-week installments, cleared my debt, then got old Mr Palmer now to arrange me a free truck ride to New York City so I could ship out again. It was October 1944, ships were now headed for other interesting shores like Italy, Sicily, Casablanca, I think even Greece.
II
So I kissed Johnnie goodbye, to Mrs Palmer’s approval, and got on that truck in the evening. In the morning we were in the smoky Pennsylvania hills in their autumn haze and apple smell. At night I was back on the New York waterfront talking to some guys near the hall, in the morning I signed on as an acting able-bodied seaman on the SS Robert Treat Paine, AGWI lines again, as the Dorchester had been. They were so short of seamen now they were making ordinary seamen like myself into acting able-bodied seaman. I didnt even still know how to figure the lines and bits and gadgets of the deck. The bosun of the ship spotted that right away and said ‘Who the hell do you think you are signing on this ship as an A.B. when you dont even know what to do to swing a lifeboat out?’
‘Ask the union, at least I can make coffee and stand bow watch and hold the wheel at sea.’
‘Lissen punk, you’re going to learn one hell of a lot on this trip’ But in front of the rest of the guys he didnt call me ‘Punk’, he called me ‘Handsome’, which was worse and much more sinister. But we were docked on the North River loading up so I got out at 5 P.M. to go up to the Columbia campus and look up Irwin and Cecily and the others.
The Claude-Mueller murder story was still the talk of the campus and the bar. A little story by Joe Amsterdam in the Columbia Spectator about the murder was illustrated in ink, showing Russian hovel steps leading up to glooms, making it look romantic and fin de siècle. He was also congratulating me for giving up ‘rock-ribbing football to turn to Wolfean novels’. I’d already lost the long novel I had been writing for Claude’s and Irwin’s pleasure, in pencil, printed, in a taxicab: never heard from it again. I was wearing my London outfit of black leather jacket and chinos and phony goldbraid hat. The big sad salesman took my picture in the Columbia bookshop. I’ve never seen it again but it was a picture of despair in bone and flesh, I’ll tell you.
But beauteous blond Cecily started to turn on the come-on, which is enough for me, and I did the rattiest thing of all my life, I’d say, by reciprocating in kind and trying to make her. But she was just ‘teasing’. Still I necked with her all night. I think if Claude had known about this in his cell at reform school, where he’d gone after copping a manslaughter plea, he would have wept. She was after all the symbol of his nineteen-year-old year. Anyway he never learned of it till after he came out two years later. That woman was a menace anyway.
Because sitting in the West End Bar with me and poor little Irwin and Dover Judd a garrulous poet-student from Georgia, she even started to flirt with two Naval officers, who got sore because we were ‘all queer’ and here this great blonde beauty was going to waste. They even addressed me directly, threatened to bat Irwin and Dover on the head and were acting like they had Cecily made to go out to the Ritz. I went to the men’s room, like th
at time in Hartford, practiced a couple of punches on the wall, and came out and yelled ‘Allright, let’s go outside.’
Outside, the first Naval lieutenant held up his fists à la John L. Sullivan which suddenly made me laugh. His buddy right behind him. I waded into him with a series of little slaps right and left that were swift and hard and knocked him on his back on the sidewalk. Some Navy man I was. Then the other was flying at me through the air and I just instinctively held up my elbow with the fist cocked at my own face. He hit the hard bone point and slid 6 feet on the sidewalk on his face. They both got up bloody and sore as hell. Now they combined to wrassle me down the sidewalk where they grabbed my long black hair and began to try to bang my head on the pavement with that grip. I held my neck tense so the hair just ripped out, ouch. Then little Irwin Garden waded in trying to help. I began to like him. They just pushed him away. Finally, Johnny the Bartender, my big buddy, came out and, with a bunch of others, and his brother, said ‘Okay that’s enough, two on one wont do. Fight’s over.’
So I went to my new room in Dalton Hall with Irwin and Cecily and wept on her belly all night. I felt it was horrible, the feel of flesh smacking on sidewalks, the terror of it. I should’ve thrown her right out of the room for starting the whole thing anyway. Also I kept picturing those two Naval officers suddenly rushing in the door to finish the job. But nope, the next day I went back to the West End for a beer, about ten in the morning, and there they were all bandaged up, drinking quiet beers and not even looking up at me: probably got hell from the captain of their ship. They had bandages because they had corpsmen, I had nothing but the mindless seaman’s waterfront and went down there that afternoon to get more hell from the bosun about how stupid I was on deck. As if he’d notice the blood in my hair.