The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  The Creedence Clearwater Revival had finished their set. The Grateful Dead were at the halfway mark, jiving for an audience connection. But the young earthlings were not into it. They prowled around the arena, clowning, taking pictures, searching and copping things such as other earthlings’ empty seats. It was like Marat/Sade in Disneyland. They were trying to zap the moment, the night, as if, come morning, they’d be extremely old and wasted. But now, the Grateful Dead was getting next to them with a little theatrics. And suddenly it occurred to me that the swinging ’60s will not be remembered for assassins, drugs, pseudo-revolutionary sweat, but for hair and costumes—façades obscuring Andy Hardy interiors and the Girl Next Door.

  Between sets, popped the last pill. All those seats like blood ice cubes and red carpeting underneath. An endless collage of cigarette butts. Black faces are rare. There are no young blacks in Philly, I told myself. Perhaps they have gone to the country for the weekend. I counted five interracial couples. “Philly is the northern Atlanta, Georgia,” a black told me, adding that a rhythm and blues radio station was now “acid rock” and owned by the University of Pennsylvania.

  Another Coke. The Iron Butterfly. A drag, watching them move in and out with a van of electronic equipment—a space-age cortege. I am not a rock frontiersman, as my Village Voice readers know. A third-string convert, my interest goes down like Dow Jones. Now, Janis Joplin was one of the eight wonders of rock. She was the only artist capable of making unreality real. She pressed sincerity against her bosom like a contemporary Cleopatra with a humane asp.

  Iron Butterfly gave a controlled performance. Mucho things working for them: a light show, fire, the drummer’s hypnotic solo. Sly: a tough act to follow. One fact checked out: whatever followed had better offer more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and milk. The crowd’s mood had changed. Let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road! Little put-down remarks, peachy hands simulating megaphones. Twisting and turning in seats like the nursery-school set at a Saturday matinee. An orgy of fingernail biting. Two-fingered whistles. The gaiety of floating balloons cooled the action in my section.

  Sly? I had watched the family arrive, single file. I caught a glimpse of Sly’s father, little brother Sidney. Sly’s aide-de-camp, loaded with cameras, directs the setup. Watching them drag out the electronic equipment, rock fans look bored. Young earthlings go on unorganized patrols. Then Sly & The Family Stone move through the semidarkness like secret agents boarding a ship at dawn. The spotlight doesn’t hit Sly until he is at the edge of the revolving stage. Applause is polite. Guarded, as if the waiting, twenty little anticlimaxes had dried the applejack on the fans’ hands.

  Another delay. A cord, a connection, or some goddamn thing has been misplaced and the Family cannot perform without it. Two earthlings on my right look like the sons of prosperous farmers, but they have a good knowledge of rock. Resting their booted feet on the back of the chair in front of them, one says, “The fucking bastards are gonna take all night. Have you got the keys?”

  The lost writer scans the lower arena. Primed with saliva, hoarded energy, they seem to rehearse sons-&-daughters-of-the-Lion’s-Club retorts, handed down from generation to generation as the last heirloom in the American attic of—I am white and right and will not be kept waiting! Yes, a hard line separates this mood from that of a hard-drinking black crowd in an East St. Louis dive, or the silence of black balcony girls at the Apollo as blond Chris Connor comes onstage and scats, or the raunchy revolt of the Fillmore East audience. No, this unrest blew from the carved horns of legends, was removed from minds, lips by the second number. Sly & The Family Stone delivered. Through talent, a touch of sorcery, they grabbed the Spectrum fans. They did not have to crack whips, lock exit doors. In the top tiers, earthlings danced. Groovy, man, bravo, swinging; right on became a litany. In the row opposite me, a group of prep-school boys aped wrestling fans. “I hope Sly & The Family Stone makes more money than the other groups,” one boy said. A very hip-looking Chinese couple turned around and laughed softly. Three over-thirty couples stood up and ritualistically let it all hang out. But they were dressed like swingers who go to bowling tournaments.

  Sly & The Family Stone marched off and around the revolving stage. Hundreds of earthlings rushed to the main floor. Security guards were lost in the shuffle. Incredible. This was rock power, and it had left me exhausted. I did not stay for the last set, Steppenwolf. A good slice of the crowd left with me. It was almost one in the morning and we needed air, fair or foul.

  Tuesday before Philly rock night, returned from gigging a fashion show luncheon. At 4 P.M. the last dish had been washed, and we were paid until 6 P.M. All right! Take me higher, as Sly would say.

  But I’m waiting in the lady’s pad to get laid; she hasn’t showed.

  “That is history,” said Mae West, pointing toward the Hollywood bed, the headboard, tufted in lime-green plastic.

  Hell, “That’s history” is my line. Sprawled on the blue-tiled floor, higher than a blimp. But together, noting the blind-woman’s knitted circle of a rug, folded in the corner like an apple turnover.

  I was fingering my worry beads when the lady arrived from Manhattan labors and immediately passed out. She had had too many drinks. Heavy, radical conversation at the Cedar Tavern.

  Down, boy. Pop, smoke, and drink.

  Meanwhile, the floor had become the Straits of Gibraltar. I could almost hear Moroccan voices. But the voices below the window belonged to illegitimate Boy Scouts breaking whiskey and wine bottle. ¡Olé! Stoned images. The blue-tiled floor, the Mediterranean. Where are the ships at sea? The Algeciras ferry? Molly Bloom has disappeared on Gib. The rock, a rock. Fang? Phyllis Diller. A guest shot on tonight’s telly? No. The Falangists, celebrating their thirty-fourth anniversary. The Spanish Civil War. Hemingway & company. Communism. The late Joseph McCarthy conducting the last or the first concerto since the Salem witch hunts? A 21-gun salute to that fantastic broad, Miss Virginia Hill. Dorothy Parker, Ayn Rand, James Poe, and the smiling, talkative Elia Kazan. The cold, righteous years. General Eisenhower pirouetting into Korea that winter. We sawed open the wooden floors of our tents and hid the White Horse (white lightning) gin, were forced to march in the rain because our officers were afraid to let us relax in our tents, and our latrine slid down into a ravine when the ground thawed. Hysterical, stoned, bored, frightened, some of us shot holes in the roofs of our tents, tried to shoot bullets at the stars, shot heroin, sniffed cocaine, and went to the whorehouses with the zeal of aspiring politicians. Death had spared us; America was begetting a nation of zombies, or so we thought. “Back home,” “back in the world,” our countrymen had heads shaped exactly like golf balls. Years passed. I remember a brief moment of splendor and hope. Fail and enter the age of assassination. J.F.K., Malcolm X, R.F.K., Martin Luther King. Men and women protest, march.

  They are still marching, according to The Village Voice. I’m losing my high and look at the Voice photographs: the pseudo-Nazi: upchuck pop art, and below it the chilling, precise portrait of the white-Right, advising: FIGHT THE JEWISH-RED ANARCHY! (Collegiate and apparently serious, the minted middle class are unaware of the Ronald Reagan South African waltz and as upright as backwoods Baptists.)

  Next, a group photograph, notable for a girl resembling Susan Sontag. MP’s frontlining. Ditto: Black MP’s. An accident, or did the Pentagon believe uniformed blacks could cool the liberal white temper?

  Norman Mailer with a part in his hair. Robert Lowell, Sidney Lens, Dwight MacDonald—a group photograph, intellectually heavy. The last photograph: another crowd scene with a banner reading: NEGOTIATE WITH THE NLF.

  Smell the hot bacon grease; or are you waiting for it to congeal? Try a side order of cole slaw, dished out to the masses at a box supper. I had roast pork, rice, and beans with the neighbor’s nine-year-old son. We clowned over wine and beer, then I chased the barefoot boy out into the street: we ended our cops-and-robbers game. On our block, real bullets ripped the air. The nine-year-old and I witnesse
d a Saturday-night double murder, a near riot. But by this time, we had become accustomed to the sound of bullets. They seemed unreal, a drag. We raced back into the lady’s pad and sipped lukewarm beer.

  The next day, Sunday. The New York Times arrived (you can never be sure in Brooklyn). Drinking my second cup of tea, I thought about the man with the part in his hair. Norman knows the whole fucking scene, I told myself, looking at his Voice photograph again. What the hell is he doing in Washington? Taking the temperature of the Vietnam protest?

  Honestly, I can’t remember when the Vietnam War began. My little police action had President Syngman Rhee of Korea. Drafted, indifferent to the military, I wanted to emerge from the action, blasé as Hemingway’s stepson. Why, protesting, burning draft cards was unheard of. In my time, regardless of personal beliefs, young men did their thing. After all, Korea cut the familial cord. The possibility of war offered escape, excitement. Death offered a free tour, a trip. Fear curdled our Korea-bound ship. And there were the Dr. Strangelove inspections. Standing on deck in the cold and rain. Vomit peppering stairwells, baptizing heads. But we were very religious and attended Protestant and Catholic services with the same marvelous indifference. Old marine Phoenix ship rocked at night, plus Bronx cheers from crap games, drunkenness, arguments, fights, nightmares. Hallowed be Thy name and—please let me sleep.

  On the seaborne asylum, most of us tried to stay high. Fear knighted many of us. Fear was alien to me, and although I loved the sea—when was I going to see land and trees? Wading ashore at Pusan, I was grabbed by something that would not let go. This was not basic training, bivouac at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood. It was a bright autumn morning, and silent, efficient young soldiers advancing, wading through muddy water with M-I rifles held high. Breathless, crawling up the sandpaper-colored beach. The unreal knowledge of arriving. Homeward-bound GI’s laughingly telling us: “Joe Chink is waiting on your ass.” “Buster, you’ll be dead before the sun sets.”

  But there was no fighting, only an uneasy truce. The majority of us were fortunate young men in Korea. We soldiered, worked, screwed, and got high. A nitty-gritty Cinemascope setting, the script courtesy of middle America’s veterans from World War II, a script that had to be shot at Universal or Allied Artists. Without realizing it, the GI protégés, we were rehearsing for the ’60s.

  Ah . . . the moment has arrived. Vietnam, our cancer, or life’s booster. A television corn flake commercial, or shall we hum an abstract hymn to the liberal’s menopause?

  Another angry glance at the Voice photographs: Jiveass motherfuckers. Faces I have encountered in person and on the printed page.

  A few years ago their kind were marching for the blacks. But nonviolent marching produced sore feet, fear, and the suspicion that one might truly, truly die for the “cause,” and, too, perhaps the movement lost its kick, and like those beautiful rich women, who riding sidesaddle creamingly ejaculate, the liberals had quite simply, ladies and gentlemen, found a new cause, fresh with the scent of discovery. A challenge, a map of a situation on which they could embroider Peace & Love.

  What should the peace-loving earthlings do? Marshal their forces and elect a President in the forthcoming election who will guide them toward a peace-loving future. That is our only salvation. If they are able to mainline moral reality into the American way of life. If. If. If—

  At the moment, mothers, nothing’s shaking. From the Pentagon whirligig, right on down to you and you. We are freaking in and out, in and out of the reality around us. But oh, what a marvelous show!

  THE GREAT DROUGHT has arrived. Dusty pollen falls like snow over Manhattan. Anxiety moans, obscures the sun; the sky seems tinted by a cheap detergent. Listless, suspended days, baked streets. An insane jungle of voices, day and night. Le malaise grips St. Marks Place. Earthlings seek not love, drugs, but a straitjacket for the mind, or at least an act of violence to release emotions. A legacy of sundry gifts has been handed down to them: war, pollution, corruption, hate, venereal disease. All of us are involved in the first four bequests. But it seems VD is the province of the young. Ah, Alice! The looking glass has microbes on it—an infected twelve-year-old girl.

  You will find VDers in the morning (9 to 11 A.M.) and in the afternoons (1 to 3 P.M.), Mondays and Thursdays (4 to 6 P.M.), entering the public-health centers like members of a secret society. But I want to tell you about the Chelsea Health Center at 303 Ninth Avenue. At one time, I lived near the center. Viewed on a humid afternoon, the Chelsea Center is like a setting for a working-class The Third Man. Bureaucratic and faintly sinister. Situated between a public school, a warren of housing projects, and a devastated block that ends at Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River—this small two-story brick building seems so asexual. One would think that men and women went there to relieve themselves, bathe, or sleep after a sexual quickie or a feast. Yet this small building is the salvation of that dandruff-like disease, gonorrhea.

  Mondays and Wednesdays are extremely busy, I was told, plus holiday aftermaths. S.R.O. But first you check in with the receptionist, avoid the children going to the dental clinic, the elderly waiting for X-rays. Male VDers go into a small, crowded waiting room with pale, pale green walls, almost the exact shade of gonorrhea semen. No smoking, please. Bright-colored plastic chairs. Bogart and Marx Brothers posters. Before interrogation and tests, you read, sleep, or watch your fellow travelers. Tense young men who usually acknowledge each other with a sly/shy you-got-it-too grin. The promiscuous earthlings are cool. Conversation between a teenager and his slightly older friend.

  “What we gonna do after you get straight?”

  “I don’t know,” the VDer said. “Go to the movies, I guess.”

  “Are you gonna take Marcia?”

  There was no answer. The teenagers were seized with boisterous laughter.

  Clapped by the same prostitute, two young mailmen also joked and laughed, crossing and recrossing their legs. An occasional elderly man (looking as if he’s on a permanent down), homosexual couples—their faces a portrait of togetherness like expectant parents—are given the nonchalant treatment. But what intrigues me are the young men who arrive with luggage, knapsacks, sleeping and shopping bags. Some of them are from out of town and give false names, addresses, as do Manhattan males. I overheard one longhair give a Washington, D.C., address, complete with apartment number, then ask if a friend could pick up the result of his blood test.

  “No,” the smiling health aide said.

  “Could my sister pick it up? She lives in the city.”

  “I’m afraid not,” the kind, smiling health aide told him, “but check with your doctor.”

  From my observation, the majority of longhairs are not the supply clerk and other nine-to-five types. Heavy radicals and Marx you I Ching.

  I’ve been down, much too black about the Chelsea Health Center. In the narrow corridor, in the cubicles, occasional funny vignettes.

  A male voice (like a recording device announcing time):

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take it out.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes” (wearily). Does it hurt . . . burn?”

  “Yes, Doctor. It burns like hell.”

  A conversation in the back room.

  “Well. What have we got here?”

  The tall blond was silent.

  “Jesus! Al, come over here and take a look at this.” The penis inspector and Al made no further comment about the discovery, except to tell the blond to return to the waiting room.

  Another cubicle conversation.

  “Dark field, Miss Norse. Now, young man. Would you like to lie down or sit up?”

  “Sit up.”

  “I think you’ll be more comfortable lying down.”

  “I’ll sit up, I think.”

  “Very well. Now take it out and turn it toward you.”

  “Toward me?”

  “Turn the head of it toward you.”

  “Toward me?”<
br />
  “Yes. Turn the head of it toward you. Sort of swivel it a little.”

  Heavy silence during the test. Then: “How long have you had it?”

  “About a week, sir.” (An ex-army man in the cube?)

  “Does it hurt?”

  Deep breathing, confiding tone, “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m sorry. Dark field, negative. We’ll have to do it again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes,” the voice of the doctor drones. “Now take it out so that it faces you. That’s good. Hold still. Hold it . . .”

  Indeed. Toward you. Indeed. It is in you. Gonorrhea, chancre (the primary stage of syphilis), or advanced syphilis with its nearer-my-God-to-Thee fear.

  But the waiting room is bright, congenial. Fear: subtle as dust. After the blood test (strong-hearted men break into a cold sweat), the penicillin shot, VDers are in a holiday mood. But—wait. It’s not over. The social-worker interview. Everyone gets uptight. You are supposed to be very honest and name names and when and where. But there are the white lies, the loss of memory. Many VDers do not remember who they slept with and give the name of a foe/friend. You will never know the anonymous friend/foe who volunteered your name and address. Fake word-of-mouth also helps spread VD. And, too, it is much easier to detect VD in a man than in a woman. An ancient, misunderstood disease, often hereditary, VD is the thing this year. Our future. Aren’t we promiscuous? Swingers in and out of bed? Aren’t we top-of-the-morning Americans, seekers of fresh territories, and ever so mobile?

  The drift? It continues. Frenzied days and nights. All I want to do is stay stoned; despair is the masochistic lover, chained to my feet as August spends itself slowly; time the miser with the eyedropper. Summer. Summer’s end. Will the summer ever end? Will I escape this time?

  Returning from another dish gig, I bought the Sunday New York Times and read the Book Review: You made the news today, boy. But that failed to ax despair. The frustration, the peasant’s labor of the night before were still fresh in my mind. After showering, I feel less tense, prime myself with ice-cold beer. It’s a mother of an afternoon. The sullen sky gives no promise of relief, rain. The murmurous St. Marks Place voices drift up as if begging for something which escapes them in this elusive city. But booze won’t elude me. No. There’s half a pint of vodka, and I made a pill connection on St. Marks Place, bought three pints of wine from a “doctor” on the Bowery.