When I left New York City after my first nine months I had only two people to say goodbye to, a tribute to my own grotesque hostility and to the skin of ice that covers nearly everyone there. Acrid is the word. And talk because there's no other movement to make and the subways are clogged with geese. I watched them ice skating at Rockefeller Center and at the mangy terrifying children's zoo in Central Park. Tchelitchew-painting children with glass brain covers. A city of clanking manholes. We dragged an old man into the store who had been blasted up onto our doorway by a taxicab. The driver naturally said the “fucka” crossed against the light and I said there was no light out there. Meanwhile blood and vomit were pouring out of the man's mouth and around a metal book rack. Blood out of the ears and nose too. DOA at bookstore and a crowd looking in. I opened his jacket and saw that his shirt was wet; he must have turned and caught three thousand pounds in the chest. When the police ambulance came there were no witnesses not that it mattered. I went over to a bar near Forty-second and Eighth Avenue and put my brain to sleep.
Things were over with Barbara. She had left for East Hampton two weeks before with a junior broker type from Mississippi. She called me at the store and asked if she could come back and I said no very kindly and that I would call her if I ever returned to the city. I called Laurie three times over a period of days before she would consent to say goodbye. We had coffee at a White Tower restaurant near Hudson Street, and then went over to the White Horse where she asked for a Coke and I had a half dozen Margaritas. Then we had a very strained, expensive dinner where she was weepy and barely touched her food. I was all packed and was in the process of spending my bus money. I'll have to hitchhike home and she won't even eat the food. In fact I took a train to Philadelphia then walked all the way up Broad Street to Roosevelt Boulevard where I stood for two hours before I got a ride out to the turnpike. When we said goodbye I told her that I would come back in a few months and marry her. I liked happy endings especially when drinking.
V
HOME
Certain memories have the quality of an alabaster trance—you float into their places in the brain where they sit, a white temple or pavilion in a grove of trees. After I started the car still shivering a bit from my bath I totally lost my sense of panic and realized I had been worrying about whether the car would start without consciously knowing it; the threat, a fifty-mile walk, was too grand to even consider. I began driving very slowly and came to a full stop where the shadow had crossed the road three nights before; no tracks but with the wind blowing this hard and then some rain—I couldn't prove to myself that I had seen a ghost. I remembered Barbara having nightmares and deciding to sit up all night because if she slept during the daylight she thought the nightmares wouldn't return. And I awoke to her voice thinking a visitor had come but when I opened my eyes it was dawn and she was sitting in a chair before the window, the open Venetian blinds casting stripes of pink light across her body, one stripe across her hair, then her throat and breasts and stomach and knees. I called her over to the bed and she fell asleep instantly. I felt sorry then looking at her face against the pillow for all creatures who are afraid of the dark or the things that must be “in” the darkness. Another such memory only involved lying on the grass at the Cloisters with my head on Laurie's thigh listening to a Gregorian chant and watching a maple bud fall out of a tree above us, falling with infinite softness toward my head and missing it by a few feet but in a split-second pause in the music I heard the bud land on the grass just as I had once heard a sparrow's feet touch a limb while sitting in the woods. The third temple involved a sort of terror I couldn't bear, the mixture though they were years apart of two visions which had married in my brain: the first in Nevada, washing my face in an irrigation ditch and suddenly seeing a rattlesnake close by and my exploding backward up the bank; the image of this was accompanied by being lost while deer hunting when I was fourteen. It was dark and cold and the trees were black columns in front of me and when I fired the agreed-upon three quick successive shots blue flame came out of the rifle tip and blinded me while the delayed sound deafened me. Then before the echoing stopped I heard my father's rifle answer and I quickly turned toward the source of the sound so I wouldn't be fooled by echoes.
Driving out of the woods I felt a new and curious calm but doubted that it would last: I had changed my life so often that I finally decided there'd never been anything to change—I could make all the moves I wished to on the surface as if I were playing Chinese checkers but these moves were suspended on a thin layer that failed to stir anything below. A sort of mordant fatalism I lived within concerning geometrical matters—jobs, alcohol, marriage and the naturally concomitant joblessness, drunkenness, infidelity. Perhaps all true children of Protestantism are victims of such self-help—the notion of the law of life involving steps, paths, guideposts, ladders. St. Paul out in the red rock wilderness trying not to think about women. Just as I thought now of whiskey. When I reached the main road I would stop at a gas station and make a reservation at a hotel in Ishpeming and when I got there I knew I would shower and go down to the bar and drink myself into the comatose state I knew I deserved. Consciousness is simply the kind of work I can't make a continuous effort at—a disease causing giddiness, brain fever, unhappiness. Maybe King David drank heavily in his canopied tent the night before battle.
There were washouts in the road where there hadn't been seven days before. I took the first few too fast and on one bottomed out on the gas tank. I got out to check damage but there wasn't any other than a raw scrape. Relief. I proceeded more slowly until I came over the crest of a hill where the road crossed over an unused beaver dam with a swamp on the left and a pond on the right. An overflow from the pond had worn a deep trench in the road and I knew I hadn't the slightest chance without an hour's work. I cursed the loggers for not grading the road I didn't want them to use. I tiptoed down the hill in my bare feet—I wanted my red heels to dry —and looked at the miniature ravine and the trickle of clear water flowing into the swamp. I heard a splash in the pond and saw the widening ripple and then farther out another occurred. Trout. And no rod. I felt pissed enough to shoot at them with the rifle. The last-minute claustrophobia that made me leave things behind in hopes of discovering something else. Fuck all gurus on earth and advice and conclusions. I put my boots on with considerable pain and began dragging any dead logs I could find down the hill, trimming the dry branches with the hatchet. I was so angry my vision seemed rimmed with red and I took off my shirt which had become soaked with exertion. I filled the hole in about an hour, gunned the car as if I were on a drag strip and crashed over the pile, nearly losing control. There was an ugly clunking sound as I drove on, either a wheel bearing or the universal joint. I had hated cars all my life; a friend and I had dismantled a ‘47 Plymouth years before at sixty miles an hour while drunk. We were working as carpenters at the time and we flailed away with hammers at the windows and dashboard and when we got to his place shot out the tires with a pistol.
I checked the speedometer. I figured it was about thirty more miles to the main road and mid-afternoon. I would reach Ishpeming in time to buy a clean shirt and pants. The hotel catered mostly to mining engineers or those who had business with Cleveland Cliffs. The ore had finally become low grade but someone had discovered the taconite process so the town was booming again. I once noted the resemblance between Ishpeming and Houghton and English mining towns: even the people had the same denuded, milky-eyed look of those who spend a third of their life underground. Part of the reason there are so many strikes is that miners reach a point occasionally when it's no longer possible to continue the life of a mole. Calumet-Hecla had closed a copper mine after a two-year strike. The mine filled with water and the lives of thousands became virtually dead.
I slowed down again to cross a rut and thought I saw some tracks in the reddish sand. I took the Murie book from my pack but they belonged to a coyote. I was still generally angry and it occurred to me as I finally drov
e out on the main road that I felt none of my usual fears. A cautionary feeling. Fuck the dark, cars, electricity, fire, police, Chicago, Agnew, universities, pain, death, Marine mentality. Even the earth as a rotting tomato, death by implosion, slow rot at the core. I turned on the radio and caught the end of a Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. Strutting music. Who can put on his grandpa's boots? Or is this again the cowboy stupidity that brought us to where we were? I stopped at a gas station and made a phone call for reservations. My first words to another human in a full week were “Fillerup check the oil.”
—Why don't we get married?
—Because you're a whore.
—I'll stop being a whore.
—You can't.
—I'll get a job or money and we'll go to Mexico.
—I don't want to go to Mexico and we don't have a car.
I only wanted a 500-cc. Triumph. I had three dollars and they cost eight hundred. I turned in the bed and looked into her eyes which as usual in these discussions were twin pools of hazel tears. Hazel eyes are rare.
—I don't want a job and I'll never have one.
—I don't think you love me.
—Right.
I got up and drank a cup of lukewarm coffee. Total mess everywhere—the remains of a party and stale smoke sticking to the skin. I went out into the ozone air and walked over to Fifth. Servants entering apartment houses for the day's work. I looked across the street at the Metropolitan and at the third step where I had sat so often with Laurie, and out into the park beyond. Not a square inch without a cigarette butt. We made love against Cleopatra's needle and against benches and fences and on the grass, behind rocks, against trees. Once we almost tripped over a faggot daisy chain over near Central Park West. Ho hum. I walked down to the East Side Terminal and caught a bus for La Guardia. Forty-eight hours to find that I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons again. I was stunned with boredom and slept all the way to Detroit, the most wretched of our cities. Then a flight to Lansing with some apparent legislators who looked even more bored. It was March when everyone is bored and wants to emerge from a cold muddy hole and shed a skin. My last exploratory trip. On the phone Laurie's mother wouldn't give me her address with a nasal Bronxian “Haven't you done enough harm.” No, of course not. Ill return as a five-star Wac and then you'll be sorry. Mrs. Menopause. Mothers protecting twenty-year-old daughters with daily litmus tests to see what they've been up to. I got into my car and drove home, picked up my gear in total silence and headed north. Then turned back south when I saw how much snow there was. I slept for three months before making another move.
Standing before a full-length mirror in the bathroom with new chinos and a Hawaiian style short-sleeved shirt, a three-dollar special on the shirt. In the mirror I saw the same me with a bit more tan and windburn and perhaps ten pounds lighter; a characterless slack jaw and the left eye bobbing off on its own sightless adventures. Five grand minimum for a cornea transplant. I wanted to be in San Francisco with a necklace on, fucking a starlet with a hash pipe still smoldering in an ashtray. Dopey dipadick. You can't take everything at once, Brad. Settle on your poison. I got a bad table in the corner in the dining room, reserved for criminal types and less than stylish fishermen; in fact the same table I had two years before. I held up a forefinger and a waitress approached.
—Planked whitefish and a rare T-bone.
—Both?
—Yes.
—At once?
—And a triple bourbon with water and no ice.
—Appetizer?
—No.
I drank the bourbon with three long swallows. Oh what incredible, easeful warmth. Up with whiskey. Within a few moments I got what my druggie friends call a “rush,” a slight dizzying hollow vacuum in the brain pan. Feet numbing. I ate the fish first and with haste in great gobbling chunks, then loitered over the T-bone. Rare enough for a change and coolish in the center, I picked up the bone and chewed on it to the disgust of Mr. and Mrs. America at the next table. Mom's birthday or an anniversary I bet. Get her away from that old hot stove for an evening and let her put on the Easter dress and hat. I stood and loosened an uncontrollable, resounding belch that echoed back at me from the far end of the dining room. Many stares and I salute with slight embarrassment. Sorry folks. Now for a walk and buy all the magazines and newspapers available in this company town and tour the bars.
Life, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Cavalier, Adam. I passed over Outdoor Life, Sports Afield and Fortune. Wish they had some clam magazines. I forgot what one looked like. Three bars so desolate and crumby it was hard to finish a drink and Finnish accents sing-songy, stumbling in the air. I returned to the inn and the bar on its first floor with its beautiful gleaming murals of trout fishing, and mining machinery. I was greeted with an affable “Hello sport” from the young bartender.
—Double Beam with water and no ice.
—Catching many?
—Only small ones.
We lapsed into an involved conversation about U.P. rivers and several other men entered it too. All the names, so beautiful and round to the tongue: Black, Firesteel, Salmon, Huron, Yellow Dog, Sturgeon, Baltimore, Ontonagon, Two Hearted, Escanaba, Big Cedar, Fox, Whitefish, Driggs, Manistique, Tahquamenon. I told a moderate, polite number of lies and they returned equally specious tales of fishing. Very friendly buying of rounds until I felt my brain was numb enough for sleep. Into the room dumping the sack of magazines on the bed and a single nightcap swig from a fresh pint for the drive tomorrow. I thumbed through the magazines from pictures to news to sports to air-brushed tits and jokes that weren't funny. Another drink. I didn't want to be here. Where is my musty tent—over the bulldozer seat. And where is my mind and why won't it die now. Fantasy of British Columbia and packing in for three months with a .44 Colt Magnum in case of feisty grizzlies. Take the coast boat to Bella Coola and set out to the east, guideless, with pack rod and dried food. A hermit. Five pounds of tobacco, Bugler, and Zig-Zag papers but no grass or whiskey. Meet Indian girl and ficky-fick. Prick dead. Or get back with wife and forget a decade, written off as they say, a bad time was had by all. I want twenty years ago and milking cows in the evening before dinner, pitch the silage in trough before stanchions. Oats for horses with the hay. Alfalfa too thick to walk through now. How long has it been since I've been home where no one lives now anyway?
An average hangover breakfast with too many glasses of ice water. I asked for ham and eggs and potatoes and a double bloody mary.
—The bar's closed.
—May I see the manager?
—He isn't here.
—The assistant manager?
I got the desk clerk who went downstairs and made the drink. I tipped him a buck and leaned back in my chair. Two men at the far end of the dining room reading their separate Wall Street Journals and so far from New York. They glanced at me with evident distaste when I entered and I gave them a quick finger but they were back at their papers and didn't catch it.
I made the Mackinaw Bridge in record time driving at eighty in my old car and finishing the pint in the first hour. Nice buzz now. Hello woods and water and hello bridge. I crossed it with averted eyes—I'm terribly afraid of bridges especially the Verrazano Narrows and the Mackinaw. Too long. Somehow the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate seem sturdier. Maybe I'll move to Frisco and take dope but I need seasons and the alternating rain and fog depress me. I reached Grayling by dinnertime and detoured to pass the house I was born in but was disgusted with the way the merchants had attempted to turn the town into an “alpine village” by putting false-front shingled mansard roofs on their stores. Holy shit upon birthplace but I felt nothing and continued south after buying another pint.
My father placed me on the bank near a black hole in the bend of the river and I was told not to move. It was scarcely daylight and I stayed in the same place until later afternoon when he returned with a creel full of trout. But I had a half dozen trout and a few suckers which he threw do
wn the bank for the blackbirds to eat. We drove back to the cottage from Luther to Bristol to Tustin to Leroy to the lake and ate the fish. Two parents and five children in a small cabin shingled with asbestos. We slept for a while then near midnight got up again to start bass season which began at twelve. I rowed around the lake and he cast hundreds of times with his favorite plug which was a jointed minnow. He caught four and I caught one. We ate them for breakfast with eggs and potatoes. I slept with my brother under the bare beams of the loft and the heat traveled up to us as did mosquitoes and the smell of wood smoke. And often rain beating madly on the roof a foot above my head and when it stopped, more rain blown off the tree branches in gusts. I never thought at the time of the people I was connected with—the family below me and the brother in bed. Or the ceaseless droning gatherings involving my mother's relatives or my father's relatives or the large yearly gathering of Mennonites we were connected to through my father. Related to hundreds of people with an old photo of Lincoln and in the background an ancestor smiling through an elaborate beard. And when my father died I stopped being connected to any of them, without effort except for an occasional funeral. I couldn't bear the way his mother, my grandmother, had an enlarged photo of him on the wall with old college photos surrounding it and sprigs of dried flowers and newspaper clippings. Some shrine she looked at until she died. I think families based on kinship are disappearing—slowly to be sure but they are still disappearing.