Someone drove past on the road and beeped at me. I waved. Another early riser. I got back into the car and drove off back toward Reed City.
In the spring of 1960 I went back to New York City for want of any place else to go—I had gone generally berserk in three consecutive Februaries and had grown to expect it. I had found two girls to love back home and when I thought of them they seemed to resist each other's presence on earth with perfect balance. And the duplicity had settled in a sweet contradictory syrup in my brain so I chose the alternative of leaving them both. I walked from Penn Station down to East Eleventh Street and stayed overnight with an old friend, a brilliant homosexual who taught design at Cooper Union. We had had many quarrels and discussions about his sexual tastes—he was terribly handsome and I thought if I were that handsome I would have only the finest of women. Even on a purely physical level men offered one less possibility, a missing orifice. But he claimed he had known he was homosexual at thirteen and began having “affairs” at that tender age when most young men were still jacking off over Miss April.
When I arrived he and two friends, a lover and a young French girl who was living with them, were getting ready to go out for dinner. They dragged a mattress out of the closet and made up a bed for me on the kitchen floor and left me alone with no invitation to join them. Probably going to a freak orgy. I snooped around with a tumbler of vermouth in hand. Nothing but vermouth and gin in the cupboard. While looking through some books I found a manila envelope of photos, Polaroid photos of naked men. There must have been a hundred of them and the background in the pictures was easily recognizable as the apartment I was standing in. I immediately envied this rapacious sexuality. A uniform set of silly grins, some with organs erect, others at limp rest. My goodness. If I started at that moment and devoted all my time to it, years would be needed for that many conquests. I drank the whole bottle of vermouth and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I'm not handsome—maybe a few grand worth of plastic surgery. Tsk. Then I went back to the photos and mused about all the extant cock myths. None of them were particularly large when erect. I looked out the window feeling moderately juiced and high average. Using it not owning it, that's important. For years now all over the world people are doing it to each other, gland in gland. In caves and in mountain top chalets in Switzerland; fifteen minutes before death by stroke old Mr. Piggy Businessman is banging away and squealing. Give my love to a perfect rose.
I overcame my aversion to gin by mixing it with some bitters and fruit punch. When I finished the half bottle of gin I washed up and prepared for my humble bed on the kitchen floor. Another peek at the photos and I lapsed into uncontrolled giggling. There must be more to do on earth than wag our humble tools at other girls and boys. I thought of all the times when deep in romance I had gazed at a girl with heat, all asmarm with lust and bleary-brained. Goodrich rubber love. Launch with an ooga ooga and perhaps the mind on a movie star. Was it good indeed? Cornstarch with water for your thoughts.
I heard them enter after I slept a few hours but pretended I was asleep. There was talk about having a nightcap and I spied the lover in his nifty clothes putting on a record. Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin. Then my friend said, “That bitch finished everything in the house.” I closed my eyes as tightly as possible sensing shoes near me. Poor wanderer has drink and suffers abuse. With only cheese and celery in the refrigerator for dinner. Worn out celery at that. They pattered through both sides of the record and I waited to hear something bad said about me whereupon I intended to jump up and tell them to fuck off but they only talked about their dinner host. And what part did the French girl play in their dark pursuits and may I watch. Farm boy molested by three-some, one toothsome. Can't tell what these dirty savages are up to behind my back—maybe she'll look at the pictures and attack my sleeping body. No luck. I slept before the mandarin struck home.
Mumbling in the room, coffee perking and teeth being brushed. I opened my eyes and stared up into the bare ass of the French girl who was leaning over the sink. But then my friend entered from the bedroom and glanced at me and told her that her ass was being started at by a gin pig. She tripped out of the room and I got up, yawned, and asked him why he had to ruin my small pleasures. He only laughed. We had coffee and I said I would replace the gin. He wondered how long I was going to stay and I said I was going home in the afternoon. He told me I would never be an artist if I stayed in the brutal Midwest. We all had a pleasant breakfast together—the lover had gone out to a bakery for croissants. I told the girl she had a beautiful ass but they shrugged in unison and looked at the Tiffany lamp above the table. A conspiracy against me. Cinch I couldn't work into their combination nohow as farmers say. Then I said that oddly enough her ass resembled those owned by American girls and that you couldn't tell by looking at it that she lived on snails and the Marshall Plan. This statement elicited an “Oh lordy” and a shush from my friend. She was embarrassed and I felt that I had forever lost my place in the art world.
I stopped at the fish hatchery again but got out this time and walked around the cement-wall-enclosed ponds and watched the huge trout slide along beneath the surface, gliding slowly, effortlessly with slight strokes of their tails. Someone shouted “hey” at me and I turned—a green-suited man told me officiously that it was six and the hatchery didn't open until eight. I introduced myself and I saw his face brighten up. He told me that he went to grade school with my father; we went into the hatchery building and looked at the tanks of minnows most of which were rainbows. They're a pleasant fish to catch but don't compare with brown trout for intelligence. We went into a back room where there was a coffeepot on a hotplate and a card table with a lunch bucket on it and some chairs. We sat and talked and he said that everyone was sorry about the accident. Fucking cars. The world's not fit to live in. Fucking war and politicians. Seven years since the accident. Yes. What do you do? Not much. Oh. Well back to work, you know.
I drove south again toward Big Rapids and turned east on impulse toward the other farm. May as well say hello to my grandmother who was eighty-three and lived alone now. An old black-top road with many potholes, a few meager-looking farms to each section. I passed a driveway into the woods where a great-uncle had lived as a hermit for fifty years. Drank a lot. Ate animals freshly run over on the road and trapped some, tilled a large garden and canned his food. He was always very jolly at family gatherings and liked to be teased about a near miss with marriage and responsibility that had taken place in 1922. He ate and drank himself into a giggling somnolence when food and drink were available, and then accused the others of cheating at the pinochle games that always followed dinner. Nelse, Olaf, Gustav, Victor, John, all over here by 1910 to escape the draft in Sweden. Tables turned now. Difference in that they don't chew tobacco any more and some of the Populist spirit is missing. And crazy gaiety about life. No three-day polka parties with tubs of herring and barrels of beer. I turned into the driveway with a terrible pull of homesickness in my chest. A shabby small brown-shingled farmhouse and are the cattle skulls still out there at the edge of the pond? I hope she's up but then she has been getting up at dawn all her life. The barn wasn't there but the granary and the remains of the pigpen and the chicken coop were. I turned and she was looking at me out the kitchen window. I went in and she fixed me breakfast and we talked slowly about the living and the dead. Her ancient blue liquid eyes and Norse accent. The house still the same except in 1956 my father had installed inside plumbing and there was no longer a wood stove in the kitchen. They had later rejected the gift of a TV set—too late in life to start something new. Some relatives had thought them thankless. I went upstairs and looked at some of the Seton and James Oliver Curwood books and then an entire shelf of Zane Grey novels. I opened a Swedish Bible and wished that I knew the language. Christ in Odin's language. In the attic I looked out at the granary and then at my feet saw the heavy brass spittoon my grandfather used and in the corner there were two steamer trunks that had carried belongi
ngs to America seventy years before. Never a cash income over a thousand a year. I went back downstairs and out through the barnyard to the granary. In the corner on a pile of old shelled corn was the harness for the two Belgian horses my grandfather once used, never having raised the price of a tractor. I dragged the harness back and threw it in the car—might bring it back to useless life with saddle soap. I said goodbye to her. We never kissed. Perhaps she had kissed me as a child.
Jim Harrison, Wolf
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