My brain felt cold and weak from this war with everyone; I found most of those who agreed even less palatable than the destroyers. No matter how deeply one went into the forest or into the mountains a jet contrail would somehow appear as a wound across the sky. But I had no talent for reform and could not stop pouring whiskey into my face unless it was miles away, flatly unreachable. Those born in big cities, some of them, tried to save cities. I could not dry out my brain long enough to regard any day with total focus. Others in my generation took drugs and perhaps expanded their consciousness, that was open to question, and I drank and contracted my brain into halts and stutters, a gray fist of bitterness.
The woods were warm and lovely again with the sun on the ground mottled by the small leaves of the birch waving slightly above the tent in the light breeze. I drowsed and dozed. Once on the grass I saw the moon between Marcia's thighs, ear against leg and one cloud beneath it. May, and the cherry tree beyond my feet had lost all but a few of its blossoms, the petals were a cushion on the ground. Her tame pigeons croaked in the cage behind the garage and the noise purled in the warm air. Grass sweet eat some, face wet with her warmth. Car passes on the gravel road, its headlights sweeping above our bodies. The stains of green on my knees and back from the wheatfield across the road where we went to hide when it was still daylight. Soil was damp and I was the blanket. She sat there and one might think there was a girl over there sitting in the wheatfield. On me. Glut of aimless splendid fucking in the car, on couches, in a shower, in locked bathrooms at parties, in the clump of lilacs and beneath the cherry tree. It is so far away and makes my brain ache. And in the spring when I felt melancholy for weeks, faintly insane with pockets bulging with picked flowers. We never talked very much and I wish that I could remember more now. And only that spring of fog and sleep with her as if we were living under warm flowing water. She waited on the ground while I sat in the crotch of a tree and drank the wine, the whole bottle in two or three gulps. So it would work quickly and well. Even then.
Waking from a nap in middle evening and the light almost gone. A new moon and the wood was dry enough to burn. I ate three trout not much larger than smelt and the last of the bread. Two tins of meat left and I'd have to hike back to the car for food if I could find it. Perhaps I would shoot something or diet or walk north to the Huron River and try to catch some larger trout. That is, if I could find the river; maps made terrain so simple but four or five miles through the woods with no visible landmarks was a different matter. I dipped three fingers into the honey jar noticing that my hand was filthy. Fools drank water from a stream going through a cedar swamp and often were violently ill far from help. Unless the stream is big, has a strong current, is far from civilization, you should boil all water. Found a cool spring coming through rock on the Escanaba. I once drew water fifty yards downstream from a deer carcass half in the stream and stinking. I admired the easy competency of my older brother and father in the woods, or what had been my father before the accident. Filth, smoke and disorder everywhere. Bah bah black sheep. Fuckup. Sweat and bug repellent stinging in scratches. I almost savored my pigginess which I viewed as central to my character. Where were the pig hocks and sauerkraut and black beer? And tripe and calves’ brains and liver? Lydia, Lydia my sweet, bring me your gland. Night falleth with long hair. No soap could be found for my hands anyhow. Ashes work or fine wet sand. When we used to get weed stains from pulling weeds we broke open tomatoes and they cleaned the stains away.
II
BOSTON
I'm not very interested in my opinion of Boston. I've lived there twice and both times quite miserably. At nineteen I lived for a month on the Charles in Waltham thinking it was all somehow Boston. I heated Campbell's soup in the sink in my room and opened it only when I presumed the hot water had melted its jelled substance. I even tried the alphabet type but the can was incomplete, lacking the letters that would enable me to eat my name and be whisked to Lapland where I might consult the final shaman. I also dwelled on a prominent local suicide which had taken place three decades before. What local bridge did Quentin Compson use?
Then I moved to St. Botolph Street, the area is torn down now, and felt much better. Here would be my true hot center of anguish—January at its coldest, a hunchback for a landlady, an immediate neighbor with a cleft palate who as an unemployed merchant seaman told me that “drinking doesn't pay dividends.” But there was such warmth in Tokay or sauterne, Thunderbird as they called it, fortified sherry with the maximal alcohol, hence warmth, at a minimal price. I worked as a busboy in an Italian restaurant and ate food off the plates of others, once in famished greed getting a filter tip cigarette butt caught in my throat. Hidden in a chicken wing. The money was good when you added the portion stolen from the waiter's tips. The waiter whose area I serviced was a homosexual Arab with less than totally clean immigration papers. He suspected me of stealing but I told him I would either kick his face in or make an anonymous call to certain high-placed authorities at which point he would be returned to whatever filthy little country he came from. The jig was up as they don't say any more when his day-off replacement, an Italian housewife with hair on her ankles, caught me and I was fired by the manager. He talked to me in his office the walls of which were covered with autographed pictures of show business personalities, minor ones (Jerry Vale, Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson, Gisele Mac-Kenzie, Julius LaRosa) who rarely make the late night TV shows. He wrote a check for twelve dollars, the amount owed me, and told me I was through as a busboy in Boston. He had connections. Everyone in Boston has connections down to the crummiest night porter who bets fifty cents a week on the numbers. They think about their connections on the subway to Dorchester.
I had by this time saved two hundred dollars which I intended as a stake for New York City but instead blew it in three days on a young Armenian belly dancer who was closely watched by two enormous hairy brothers. She let me have her for thirty dollars in the back of a taxicab after my face had become familiar enough in the club. She had to be sure I wasn't a freak, that my love for her and the Levantine music she undulated to didn't conceal some dangerous fetish. I understood her precautions. Boston is the sort of city where much of the population strangles cats. Or it is easy to imagine Bostonians lashing their own feet with coat hangers, screwing holes in cabbages, having nightly dreams of back-scuttling Magdalene or some poor nun spied upon on the street. On the Common one morning I watched a priest crazily eating daffodils on his hands and knees and then throwing up a stream of yellow petals in the swan pond. A passing cop only said, “Good morning, father,” as if this were normal behavior. Much later in my life I got the same sensation walking around Dublin; a chill in my body knowing that if these dark energies were ever released the power would equal that of an unpunctured baked potato exploding in an oven.
Three days here now and I had begun to think I'd have enough to eat. My confidence in my ability to find the car with ease is nil. Touch my shrinking belly but I'm anyway thirty pounds overweight—the creeping fat started back in Boston where I drank all those numberless cases of ale. Delicious. Wish I had a case cooling in the creek, a TV commercial. And I wanted to stay at the very least seven days for the sake of numerology. Maybe I'll shoot a deer and eat it all, eyes, rumen. Make hoof soup out of hoofs.
It was uncomfortable stretched out along the top of the radiator in her apartment with each cast-iron ridge making a painful but warm indentation in my back. So warm, unlike my Botolph room. And dreaming of the Yucatan, Merida, Cozumel, which even though infested with vipers and tarantulas would be warm and steamy. I would suspend myself in a hammock to be safe from snakes and construct metal rat catchers like they do with ships to keep the scorpions and tarantulas away. Can tarantulas crawl up smooth-metal? Do they have gluey feet? I once went sixty-nine with a beautiful girl in a hammock and we became too preoccupied and violent and the hammock tipped us over onto the floor, at least a four-foot drop. She landed on top of me which made the etiquette of the acci
dent proper but my shoulder was painfully wrenched. She thought it was very funny and was still juiced up but the pain in my bruised lips and nose and shoulder had unsexed me: full mast half mast no mast. O storm and all of that. I took a hot bath and put a heating pad over my face up to my nose. She cooked some bratwurst for dinner but it was difficult to chew so I drank two bottles of wine with a straw and let her soothe me by her bobbing head which I scratched alternately in lust, diffidence and pain.
Off Newbury Street again and up the stairs where she waited. All faint and pink as a quartz mine. No aquacities here. Corn shucks. Tamales.
—Don't do that, she said.
—What?
—That.
—Why?
—Because. Just because.
Really too hot for fuckery. Room livid and airless. We lay there sweating as animals apparently don't. I heard only through their mouths: running dogs pink tongue. I ached as metal might.
—It's still hard, she said.
—A mistake.
Her buttocks were squishy but still somehow appealing. Needed rigorous exercise, less pasta and cream in the coffee.
—Your ass is like grape jelly. Did anyone ever, tell you that?
—Fuck you. I've seen dozens bigger than yours.
—No doubt. You've looked at so many. The Army Corps of Engineers said I'm high average.
Waitresses smelling of lamb stew. I dressed quickly and went down the stairs and into the street. I went into the first bar and drank two glasses of beer then a shot of bourbon dropped into the third glass as they do in Detroit. A time bomb. For hygiene. In the toilet I aimed at the shrinking deodorant puck then a cigarette butt. In youth they were Jap airplanes to be shot at. A witticism at eye level on the wall: “Boston College eats shit.” No doubt about that, Jesuits with platesful. The cook ladled seconds. Lurid goo us, they say, gimme all the luv ya got.
And more: she raises herself on an elbow. Her eyes narrow and focus in the dim light of the room.
—Why aren't you up yet? she asks.
—It would disappoint you. You come in here, take off your clothes and ask me why I'm not up. I'm nothing more than a flange banger for old lizard skins.
—Can't you be a little bit nicer?
Thirty-third repeat. She is active in ward politics in a serene way being a Smith graduate with a sensible wardrobe. She is an ardent feminist, divorced from a “phony” in advertising. She believes we are not making love but relating physically. She sees an analyst and says the analyst advises against our relationship. I tell her often that she only comes around in hopes of collecting the four hundred I owe her.
—What did you do last night? she asks, patting my shoulder.
—Buggered a beautiful high school sophomore I met weeping on the Common. She was a virgin and was afraid it would hurt.
—I don't know why I put up with you. I know a lot of men that would like to be in your shoes.
Still more and I wanted romance. I unlocked the door; there was no question about it, she was on her hands and knees with the lax look of a depraved Confederate officer, all blond stringy hair, a bit of a mustache, skin blotches, a coat of sweat on which a name could be written.
—Why didn't you come when you called? I've been waiting.
—Obviously.
I walked around behind her. She had fixed this surprise at least an hour before and perhaps resumed the posture with each step on the stairway.
—Can you fix me something to eat first?
—What's wrong with you? she choked, rising to her feet clumsily. From the bathroom her boo-hoos were crisp and defined as good smoke rings.
I fried some eggs and ate them in silence while she looked out the window at the snow-covered parking lot three floors below.
I dreamed of whiskey again and when I awoke it was cold and raining steadily. I sank farther into my sleeping bag warming myself with moist breath. So cold and it is summer; better check trotlines, run in circles, dig with hatchet near a pine stump for pitch to start a fire. I dressed awkwardly in the tent then jogged to the creek; the first line was weightless, the bait gone, but the second held a brook trout close to a foot long. Breakfast. The rain slackened and the wind began to change directions, a vague warming from the southwest.
A diversion or digression here: loving openly and nearly the beloved. Anyone's rum-soaked brain might own such a thing in his past. It scarcely matters if the loved one is an aunt with the incipient threat of incest, or the druggist's daughter behind the soda counter, or as in my own case a cheerleader in the tenth grade. And another, this one. A girl at a summer cottage on a lake up near West Boylston, Massachusetts. She was fifteen and I was seventeen. Later on, not even much later on in life, one misses this sense of life horribly. So absent when we are merely glands with small brutish brains attached. Loving as if we were fictional creatures, geometrical, pure, diamonds to be looked at through many clear and open facets, but still human; the throat constricts, the tear glands overwhelm, the world is tactile and fresh again and we return to it over and over, willfully recapturing a beautiful but senseless dream:
I awoke shortly after dawn to a ring tapping the window. I saw her framed in the darkened parlor window—I was sleeping on a cot on the porch—motioning for me to get up. I regretted my promise. I didn't ride well and was sure I would look foolish, perhaps fall off and dash my brains out against a rock or tree. It was delicious to lie on the porch a.t dawn with the chattering of birds coming up from the lake, and the raindrops falling lightly off the still leaves. I remembered vaguely a brief thunderstorm during the night: the lightning illumined the leaves of the sugar maple tossed by the breeze and the tree looked white and ghostly. She tapped again and I got up, dressing slowly as my clothes were cool and damp. The morning was darkly overcast and through the pearls of raindrops on the screen I could see mist move in coils across the lake.
She waited impatiently while I drank some instant coffee, made before the water had come to full boil. I had to explain in a whisper that it was inconceivable to leave the house without coffee. We paused to listen to her father snore then someone turn in a creaking bed then back to silence. She was dressed in a loose-fitting pullover sweater, the sort Irish peasants knit to earn their mashed potatoes, and light tan riding breeches. When she stood at the stove trying to scrape a teaspoonful of coffee out of the jar she dropped the spoon and I was brought out of my drowsiness by the sight of her stooping figure, the breeches pulled tightly across her buttocks, and the lines where the panties pressed into the flesh. Only fifteen years old.
I closed the door softly and followed her up the driveway to the gravel road. Still a light sprinkle of rain but mostly off the trees and the mist drifting now across the marsh and into the woods. The dampness entered my bones and I shivered.
She bent to pick up a stone, the breeches drawn tightly again. Let's play dog or doctor or something, I thought.
—Here. Throw this at the birds, she said, handing me the stone.
I threw at a blackbird sitting on a mailbox some fifty yards away.
—Why didn't you dance with me last night? I said, watching the stone sail into a thicket.
—Because you were drunk and disgusting and I'm going steady.
—You're a bitch.
She turned to me, shocked. —You swore at me.
We took a shortcut, crossing a field and wetting ourselves to the knees with rain-soaked grass and weeds. I began to feel lightheaded, loony, with a hangover but still somehow exhilarated.
I stopped to light a cigarette and she turned and paused looking at her wet boots.
—If we don't hurry you'll get a bad horse.
—All horses are bad.
God protect me from large animals that cause pain. I could already feel the inevitable shock waves of pain up my spine, my head joggling or my neck snapping like a snake's if the horse jumped over anything higher than a footprint. Riding wasn't totally unpleasant if the saddles had horns but this was to be “Englis
h” and I thought of them and why they hadn't won the war by themselves. No saddlehorns of course. Bad food and teeth though I had never met one. Back home they were more sensible and rode “Western” and had no pretensions and had things to hold on to when they were up in the air.
Later in the afternoon after we returned I put on my bathing suit and walked down to the dock. My hangover had gone to my stomach, rather my stomach shared in it, both head and trunk queasy and faintly ringing. The goddamn horse had run to keep up with hers no matter how hard I jerked at the reins. In fact the first time I jerked, the horse had moved sideways with startling speed and I thought I might return to the church and not drink any more beer or smoke if God would get me off the horse and home safely and in my own bed without pain. My mother would call me for breakfast and I would say an invisible grace over the bacon and my brain would be as pure as the moon.
She was sitting at the end of the dock and I walked past her without a word, my legs unsteady and aching, and let myself off backwards into the water. She said nothing so I swam head down out toward the raft watching the light sandy bottom disappear, the water growing darker. When I got to the raft I let my feet trail downward into the colder water while the warm encircled and glistened around my chest. I imagined a water of perfect coldness that would be solid ice near bottom in reverse of illogical nature. I saw that she wasn't watching so I swam idly back to shore, partly on my back, looking directly at the sun. In grade school there had been an albino who could stare at the sun longer than anyone else. This trick was his only token of respect and he bored everyone with his “Come watch me stare at the sun I bet you can't.” He disappeared in the sixth grade, some said to the school for freaks in Lapeer, others said to the school for the blind in Lansing.