—The poet is morte.
—What?
—This guy is dead.
She looked at his face, drawing back the sheet.
—Right you are. Are you his doctor?
—In a very real way, yes. I practice only in special cases.
She took two twenty-dollar gold pieces and placed them over his sightless eyes and left the room. I pocketed the gold pieces immediately and tried to pull down his eyelids but they snapped back like rubber bands or a condom rolled down backwards. Finally I settled for a nickel and a rabbit's foot I had been carrying for years. The rabbit's foot looked a bit strange; it was from a snowshoe rabbit rather than a cottontail and was long enough to stretch down to his nose tip. I replaced the sheet.
Goodbye dearest friend, you till the farthest field now. Say hello to Villon and Yeats. I'm sure you would want me to have the gold pieces. These snazzbo hospitals go over-board.
A wordless yes to the gold piece question seemed to fill the hallowed room as I left.
I once years back had an older but much unwiser professorial friend who told me after his seventh bloody mary:
—All you have to do is tell it like it is.
—But nothing is like anything, I replied with a very precise Oriental smile.
My compass wasn't in my pack or jacket pocket. I dragged out my sleeping bag and found it wedged in the ferns I had put down to absorb moisture. The dial was steamed up like a cheap watch often gets. It was a very expensive German compass given to me for Christmas. Not very subtle sabotage. The krauts are losing the touch, I thought, staring through the glass-encased fog, the red needle wavering. When I finally got a reading I didn't believe it and had known four days before that I wouldn't. But I put a package of raisins in my pocket, filled my World War Two canteen at the creek and set out for my car which I estimated to be about seven miles south-southwest. When I would reach the log road there'd be the question of which way to turn, left or right. Or maybe a Finn pulp cutter had broken a window and hot wired the car. A strange people, the Finns in the Upper Peninsula. They feed entirely on pasties—meat and rutabaga and potatoes wrapped in pie dough. They drink a great deal and when angry fight with axes and deer rifles. They aren't very inventive—even the pastie recipe was brought over from Cornwall during the copper boom in the last century. The Finns were imported as coolie labor and stuck to the area because of the snow and cold and short summers. It reminded them of another uninhabitable planet, their homeland. I met one in a bar who had chewed down a small cedar tree on a bet the year before and had pictures to prove it. He was virtually toothless having left his teeth in the wood to win his case of beer. I also had danced with a Finnish woman who showed me where her left tit had been shot off in a deer-hunting accident. The scar was an exact, a mirror image replica of the extinct Lassen volcano crater. I asked her if she would be willing to be shipped to the Smithsonian for verification.
What would happen to me if there were no woods to travel far back into — or when there is no more “backcountry” what will I do. Not that I am competent at it or feel truly comfortable. It is after all an alien world still existing, though truncated, in many places but its language largely forgotten. Someone has suggested that the will toward this world might be genetic. One of my grandfathers was a lumberjack, the other a farmer, ergo, when I am in New York seven or fifteen floors above ground I get vertigo. I simply can't adjust to layers and layers of people below and above me. I suffer excruciatingly in airplanes though I'm scarcely unique in this; but I crashed in a small plane at Meggs Field in Chicago when I was twelve or so. A strong cross wind off Lake Michigan caught us, tipped the plane and it cartwheeled down the runway shearing off the wings and settling finally a few feet from the breakwater upside down. A fire truck covered us with foam. I was hanging by my seatbelt, my shoes torn off by the impact and my brain pinwheeling in technicolor. We got our picture in the Chicago Tribune for surviving.
There is no romance in the woods in opposition to what fools insist. The romance is in progress, change, the removing of the face of earth to install another face. Our Indians were and still are great anti-romantics. Anyone who disagrees should be parachuted or landed by float plane in the Northwest Territory for a dose of romance. I'm not talking about Wordsworth's Lake Country which is beautiful, cute, cuddly, winsome, entirely housebroken. On Whitsun a hundred thousand Englishmen trip around those hills bumping into one another and pissing on one another's boots.
If I were an arrogant heartless billionaire it would be amusing to “plant” a hundred or so grizzlies or Kodiak bears between Windermere and Penrith. But we don't have many left ourselves, at least not enough to spare on a nation that gobbles horsemeat, lets dogs get fat on candy and subject to coronary attack.
I was especially desperate and lonely one week in April. Boston was swimming under three feet of rain in two days so I called an acquaintance in Vermont, a teacher at one of those small colleges in New England that turn out a distinctive brand of adult by the cultivation of a certain style of inclusive discipline. The point is not like the Marines, to make “a man out of you,” but to make a gentleman with isolatable characteristics. Later, after they graduate, these young men recognize each other, without previously meeting, as “Tulipberg Men.” They avert their eyes and blush, then slam together in an arcane embrace yelling secret words and exchanging earlicks. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth are less obvious about such things. The superiority is assumed and they are “old school” until they die, even if in secret while masquerading as radicals or poor people. A Dartmouth junior on a United flight to San Francisco told me that “Rocky” had been a Dartmouth “man.” It is this splendid, worthless sort of camaraderie, Teutonic in origin, that lets these jerks mentally clusterfuck in the State Department while the world dies somewhere in the distance. Anyway I took the bus up to see Stuart and his wife. He told me on the phone, happily, that he was already an assistant professor with tenure. I said I was happy for you and yours and that I was currently living in Boston to straighten out the psychic knots in my life. I knew this would get me an invitation–Stuart is one of those people who like to talk things over with people and help them get up on their feet so they can meet the shit monsoon face to face. I bought a ticket with the last of my money at the bus station, telling the agent that there certainly seemed to be a long, long road winding to the land of my dreams.
I slept all the way up to Vermont forgetting to look at the heraldic, storied countryside. We stopped in each little village to pick up auto bumpers which the driver would slam into the baggage compartment and perhaps a single passenger. The streets of each village would be lined entirely with antique shops and the people, the few I could see through the blue-tinted window, reminded me of Georgians or Kentuckians. If you fuck your cousins for three hundred years something goes awry. This is true in parts of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania too where couples have been known to breed a half dozen albino dwarfs. When we finally reached Tulipberg I asked the driver how to get to the college and he pointed over my left shoulder and said, “Depends on how you want to go.” These smartasses have read about themselves in magazines and like to affect the sort of taciturn dignity that they imagine their pilgrim forefathers had. I thanked him in a slow Texas drawl and said something to the effect that you Yankees “shore are chucklebait.” And that down home even a greaser would have the sense to kick the shit out of you for a stupid, impolite answer. His hazel eyes flickered like a mink's at knifepoint.
I began to walk up the long hill to the college after rechecking my billfold for the address. It was hard to imagine the school existed; the buildings were so covered with ivy that they formed a single huge green mound if one squinted. I asked a student for further directions and he called me sir. A boy with a future.
I rang the doorbell and Mona answered saying you look so skinny while pecking my nose. She said he's teaching now but will be home for lunch and that there was a couch in his study where I could rest from my tr
ip. I lay back on the couch and had a long, exhaustively boring fantasy about what it would be like to screw Mona while the papa bear was off teaching English 304. The worm failed to stir. The prospect was lard. I got up and went over to the desk delighted with the idea of snooping through the business with an ear toward the door in case Mona should check on me. Perhaps she had thoughts of using my poor body for a morning hog wallow.
Stuart's really the same as before, I thought. The desk was covered with check stubs and dental bills, a colorful ad for a socially reliable reading plan, and under that in a red manila folder what looked like a play but turned out to be a movie scenario written by the assistant prof himself. Visions of spreading out into the “media” I bet. Told to no one at the faculty club of course because tenure had been gained on an unfinished manuscript dealing with William Dean Howells’ boyhood days. I began reading the script with forced interest. There was to be a close-up of children trampling snow behind a billboard, then a young man locked in a kitchen and asking plaintively for his mother. I read with insufficient attention to keep the story organized, remembering parts of the script as one remembers a collage looked at hastily. Outside the window a forsythia hummed with bees, the curtain billowed in the warm spring air. Through the door small-craft warnings could be heard on the radio. “Thunder rolls over Lake Winnipesaukee” as a Harvard poet once said. I read on until a shot “rang out” and I had to turn back several pages to find out who was in the room other than the leading man. No one. Suicide. Curtain, rather “pan” to the dead man's nostrils which will never again flare in anger. It all fitted back into the folder, packed full of modish grief and academic surrealism. I grabbed a men's magazine off the file cabinet. There was a three-page foldout of an emetic, extremely top-heavy blonde. Gargantuan tits. The girl-next-door look on her face assuming next door were a sideshow or whorehouse. An accompanying statement said the girl loved music, both classical and Dixieland, pizza, Kahlil Gibran, cheeseburgers with extra pickles, and intellectuals who wore Continental clothing and drove MGs. Startling contrasts. An evening with her beginning with Cozy Cole and a cheese-burger pizza, then in the cramped MG, flubbering and mooing between the huge udders. But then on a hot afternoon the week before in Cambridge I had seen a girl in engineer boots and a mu-mu fixing her Triumph 650-cc. motorcycle.
The radio now blared a hip version of “Greensleeves” and then the phone rang and she turned it down. It seemed strange that such a song would persist through the ages, coming into the twentieth century with its full weight of melancholy intact. The melody was muted by the walls of the study but with the odor of forsythia and sea rose and blooming fruit trees in the yard I saw feudal England with her forests of primary green and a woman, her finery faintly soiled by the smoke of war and the dust of carriages but still lovely. Irrelevant along this seaboard glutted with people, not an acre of free soil between Boston and Washington. I cautioned myself about such thoughts, their weight of utter pointlessness. The humor in the new bridge that collapsed, seen on television. The bridge writhed and bucked like a rattlesnake with its head freshly cut off, then collapsed into the river. Small engineering error. The stress of the times. Struts akimbo, cable whipping.
She came to the door of the study and told me that Stuart would be another hour. It was preregistration week at the college and his advisees had to be counseled. Take four courses of flummery then take it in the ass. I could smell her motherhood through the door—baby food, piss, Pablum, the pail of diapers in the potty. Takes so much less time to housebreak a dog. She had modeled for a large department store in Milwaukee before marrying Stuart. She deftly brought up her “modeling days” in conversation again and again as if it ameliorated the horror with which she regarded her two children and the shabby rented house. She was still attractive in a retired show girl way, but the floozy in the future was clearly visible in the fat she was putting on.
The evening's dinner terminated the weekend. After Stuart returned from school hours late and I had had a nap ruined by his little daughter poking a dirty finger in my eye, we launched into a long cocktail hour. At least six martinis apiece and she mixed herself doubles. She blabbered on about her lineage, Estonian nobility, who had flown the coop as always on the eve of the Great War. She was hurt when I giggled at the idea. You know all the phrasing, refugees of high birth trotting across the Carpathians through Transylvania, past the ruins of the Baron von Frankenstein's castle, always with their pockets stuffed with jewelry and Sèvres eggs, and alabaster dildos polished with use. She became angry at me and asked about my ancestors. I said that I had none who had ever set eyes on so much as a crypto-duchess. My ancestors were pig thieves and herring eaters who worked as little as possible and burned cow dung in their pot-bellied stoves because wood chopping was too onerous a chore. They often sat in barrels of potato and raisin wine, drawing the liquid osmotically up through their asses when they were too drunk to lift a glass.
She wasn't amused. Through all of this Stuart continued talking about his students and his progress on the Howells book. Some truly little-known facts about the boyhood of this fabulous author would be revealed. The book would “shake” to its foundations Howells scholarship in this country and abroad.
—Do you really give a fuck about him?
Stuart blanched and took a long drink.
—Somebody has to set the record straight.
Then porky chimed in in defense of her husband. How could a bum question an ambitious man? And in his own home. I apologized. My years since college were fraught with mental problems, anxieties that made me forget the grandness in our traditions of scholarship. We then sat down and ate Bengal curry which was tepid and a chocolate cake covered with stale grated coconut on the butterscotch frosting. She looked at my plate.
—Aren't you hungry?
—Sure but that curry was a belly packer and I've never been a dessert man.
Then a protracted argument about ghosts began over brandy. And astrology. She believed and he didn't. As the brandy bottle emptied, they were drinking it in gulps, the argument grew heated.
—You're a stupid cunt, Stuart said.
—That word! she screamed leaping at him and slapping his face.
He grabbed a wet diaper beside his chair and snapped it at her knocking off her glasses. Then they slapped at each other with a general windmill effect until she yanked his hair backwards over the couch and his mouth opened wide in a voiceless scream. She released her grip and they cried and embraced. I went to bed on the studio couch to the noise of their lovemaking on the dining-room floor.
From a promontory in a grove of birch trees I took another compass reading: by my own reckoning I should have covered a little over half the distance to the car. I had not stopped for even a short rest because a small cloud of deer flies were following me and I had forgotten to apply any bug dope before I left. These little mistakes can cause great pain—a deer fly looks like a rather large common house fly but their sting draws blood. I understand that only the female has a stinger and that the male wanders around sucking on leaves mutely hoping for a mid-air collision with the female. After their little fun in the sky the female eats the male, rather draws out his small quantity of blood through his soft underbelly. I've invented the latter bit of information to substantiate the old Hollywood “kiss of death” idea. If Lana or Faith Domergue kisses you there's no chance for survival. My compass reading gave my position as thirty degrees or so in the wrong direction. But it was easier walking that way. I aimed my tired body again, the empty pack flapping on my back, the day unpleasantly warm. My down-hill imaginary path would, I knew, lead me to a swamp or a marsh. There are hundreds of them in the area, at one time they were lakes but over the years they have gradually silted, become weed-choked, and the cedars took hold of the spongy soil and some tamarack also grew. I wanted to find a small creek and walk parallel to it on higher ground until it led me inevitably to the headwaters of the Huron River where my car was parked off a log road under a ma
mmoth white pine tree.
It occurred to me that all my miseries in Boston were invented and geographical—a simple move to New York City would change everything. I would meet a Vogue model (a trifle fleshier than the usual) and she would take me into her very pleasant though modest three-room apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street and keep me forever safe. Daily rubdowns with coconut butter and drone bee excrement would keep me young and attractive, and a diet of steak crawling with wheat and other vegetable germs would assure my health and consistent potency. She might be a few inches taller than my five ten so after a hard day's work splayed before Avedon she would let herself in with her own key and I would jump up and down to kiss her much like a toy poodle greets its master. After she had a snack of poached broccoli lashed with native crude oil her large eyes would darken, dart to my silk bell bottoms wondering if I were ready to administer the hot beef injection. Sometimes I would prove kittenish and she would have to chase me, her long legs and big feet flapping over the carpet in pursuit.
Too homely to be a kept man. The last time I had been in New York I had worked for a small building demolition company at non-union wages. Sledging plaster.
I walked across the Charles Street bridge with a thirty-cent box of caramel corn. If you drank from that river death would come convulsively within the hour. The caramel corn was a little stale. Last night's. Don't buy caramel corn in the morning or you'll get some from yesterday's last batch. Too chewy having absorbed some Bostonian moisture during its night alone. I was headed for the Oxford Grill and a budget lunch with five glasses of ale. I would read the New York Times want ads to see if my future was waiting for me in Manhattan.
Up the avenue past MIT where secret very important killing machines were being invented almost daily by unscrupulous but very honest scientists. They commute daily from Lexington and Concord, Weston and Lincoln, where they live in colonial exactness. We've been told so often what their wives conceal under the skin. And I don't mean the PTA though that's part of it. A tear shed for the grocery boy. Cantaloupe with ice cream at mid-morning coffee and a heavy use of the telephone to exchange chitchat with soul sisters. Past the Necco plant with many wafers for a nickel. Then the dangerous streets where young wop thugs beat up students. Often deservedly I think. If you're unemployed and your head is weighted down with hair grease you resent those slumming fops with five-hundred-dollar watches, long hair, five-dollar trousers and hundred-dollar sport coats who call the subway station a “kiosk.” Lucky I was dressed anonymously in a Marimekko jump suit. Really stinking Levi's and a black T-shirt with cigarettes rolled up in one short sleeve and hair cut close to the scalp. Looked like an unemployed busboy which I was.