He moves another ball to the edge, sets, and swings, watches the darkness and listens for the plop. When he hears it, he moves another ball into place. Carnwad sets and he swings.
He sets, and he swings.
Set.
Swing.
A Wise Man is Known by his Laughter
With every line I write I kill off the “artist” in me.
It’s always dangerous for a writer to read too much, for a writer to spend his days and nights and dreams hashing over the works of other generations, waking up from a sleep with someone else’s sentence on your lips as if speaking in tongues.
For a long time I used to keep my Proust in the bathroom next to the john, and one day, near the end of the book, I read a sentence—what sentence I don’t even remember—but when I read the sentence it gave my soul a hardon. I didn’t think about what a great sentence it was, how well it was constructed, what the giggling chimps in the semiotic circle-jerk would deduce about the ornate sign system; I didn’t pull my leatherbound notebook from underneath the sink and copy like the sober Bartleby. No. I read the sentence over and over, and it was like an indictment, a howl from the sump-tank of my soul, a dying moan from a part of me I’d forgotten had ever been there. And I wondered what had happened to me, why my passions had withered like so many sun-shrivelled apples, why when I looked in the mirror I saw layers of perspective and vanishing points and Manet and Magritte and Velasquez and Parmigianino instead of a man of flesh and bone. My years of study rose before me like a militia of unleashed malevolent phantasms, spectres of the dictionaries, of syllabi, of humid stormy evenings that never saw the soles of my shoes.
I used to walk late in the machinery of night, and I’d walk not to examine the langue of the onyx-eyed natives, not to jolt myself out of an academic stupor, not as if I were on an anthropological expedition to prove a hypothesis that the world was out of whack—I’d walk because I needed to. I needed to move, I needed to feel my muscles heat up and stretch and feel the sights of the long dark streets that never revealed more than at night. I felt alive like I’ve never felt alive since, my neurons firing like hundreds of tiny gatling guns in my sinews, bulletspray of the brain. I didn’t have to try to hear the rustling of paper bags blowing down the street, or the urgent spring-squeak of the lovers’ rocking car. I’d walk with a sense of imminent peril, not for fear of being attacked by muggers or policemen or the Oakland stray hounds—I wasn’t charged with the electricity of a virgin on a ghetto street alone, I didn’t expect a car to squeal around a corner and run me down. No, I was afraid because I was alive and I knew I was alive, and because I was alive I could die any instant, not necessarily at the hand of someone else, but by the will of the gods. And I knew there were gods then: it never occurred to me that through semantic calisthenics I would someday be able to eliminate them, that I would be able to reason them out of history and out of existence. And while I was sitting there on the john, Proust on my lap, I began to weep, and I don’t remember what happened next, but I ended up outside my flat in the Oakland night, standing on the creaking wooden landing, smoking cigarettes, pack after pack, and, for the first time I could remember, I watched the sun come up like a blood orange and spill its indifferent flames over the bay. And I knew that I would not sleep for days, that I’d watch the sun rise and set and rise again until my body crumpled to the earth like a heap of dirty laundry—but my mind would keep going, racing through my slumber with hooves of basalt and granite that would never let me sleep the sleep of a dead man again. A man who is alive remembers the time he is asleep as well as the time he is awake. An artist never sleeps.
Nights I lay awake wishing I were somewhere else. No matter where I am, no matter how little dissonance my domestic situation might seem to be producing—I could be camping in the Alaskan forests, low gauzey clouds and pale blue sky, the salmon browning over birch embers, or spending a night with a starry-eyed woman in the St. Francis on Knob Hill, blowing snow, standing naked in front of the 32nd floor window, exposed to the bay and the lights and the cabbies and God—it doesn’t matter where I am, I always wish I were somewhere else. In this I am American. I’ve watched too many movies, I’ve listened to too many sixties weekends on the FM radio, I’ve read Kerouac and Huckleberry Finn and Melville and Henry James and Whitman. No different than any other educated American, I’ve vicariously lived the life of the expatriate and subvert, I’ve taken Odysseus as my role model, but I’m too much the coward to spend ten years adrift on the wine-dark sea, and I know that the gods of today are luetic and have crabs.
Instead of seas, I’ve fallen in love with asphalt and rubber; I’ve learned to relish the time I spend behind the wheel, at night, the windows down and the road desolate, just the air and the land and my car and me, driving.
When I was a boy and my father used to come up from Oakland and take me from my mother’s in Sacramento once a month, instead of taking me to the zoo, or to a park, or to an overnight travelling carnival or to a weekend of Walt Disney movies, he used to ask me where I wanted to go. Before we’d even left my mother’s apartment, he’d pull out the worn, grease-marked California map from the glove compartment of his ‘59 Ford and unravel it across the long bench seat. “Where?” he’d ask, and I’d close my eyes and concentrate, then raise my hand and then stab down on the paper with my index finger. And wherever my finger would land, San Diego, Alturas, Eureka, the great Sequoia forest, the wastelands of the southern central valley and its psuedo-civilized settlements of Bakersfield, Buttonwillow, Fresno, Weed Patch and Arvin, the northern California coast, or Scotty’s Castle, the Tehachapi Desert, the glacial pie-slice of the Yosemite Valley, the bikini beaches of the smog-stink southern coast—wherever my finger landed that’s where we’d go for the weekend. Unless, of course, my finger landed too close to Sacramento, in which case I’d have to try again. Usually, though, after at most one try, my finger would land far enough away from Sacramento that Pop and I’d spend the entire weekend driving—we’d drive a full day in one direction, turn around, and take another route back to my mother’s place. We never got back before bedtime on Sunday.
Since then, I haven’t been able to stand being in one place long enough to hook up the phone. When I was a teenager I’d get into my stationwagon and drive, just aim the car in a direction and go. I’d never tell anyone that I was leaving, where I was going, when I’d be back, because I didn’t know myself. I saw the entire West through the windshield at seventy miles an hour, seen it bending past me and receding slowly in the rear-view mirror. The misty coast all the way to Portland, the volcanic Cascades, farm towns with new and used tractor lots instead of car lots. I’d become bored with the highway and turn off, one time finding myself on a marijuana plantation in Humboldt County, old rusted tractors and trucks placed carefully to give the impression of a logging camp, the distant barking and yelping of hounds cutting between densely packed trees. The interstates, the crumbling county roads, every winding dike road in the Delta. And as long as I was moving everything was fine. As long as the mural outside the windshield was changing, as long as the dashes on the road slipped beneath the left-front tire, I was OK. But whenever I stopped, whether it was for food or gas, or whether it was at a dead end dirt road in the farmlands, great fields of grain or vegetables fanning out and disappearing into horizon—no matter where or when I turned off the key and listened to the engine diesel a few times before coming to rest, it was always as if I had never been moving at all. Nothing had changed, nothing had gotten any better. I always feared that the car wouldn’t start back up, that I’d be stuck wherever I was for the rest of my life, get murdered by some half-witted farmboy or lumberjack. But the car always did start, and I always got moving again, faster and faster, as if I were escaping from some invisible demon that always knew just where I was heading and would be waiting for me when I got there.
My flat has no furniture, only a single mattress I found next to a dumpst
er and a ghetto-blaster I bought long ago. As I write this essay, a cassette tape featuring Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Blue Train plays over and over, reminding me of the days before I was corrupted by the disease of Aesthetics, the days when only passion and the endless succession of primal screams constituted Being, the days before I read my first novel, when I was a trumpet player travelling the West with Mexican bands playing cumbias and rancheras and salsa, always the only gringo in the band. The walls of my flat are white, streaked with dried stains of moisture, remnants of sweltering East Bay Summer days—the curtains are thick and heavy. The floor is wood-float finished concrete, tiny ripples and streaks swirling beneath the feet, the traces of calloused hands gripping the tools of the mason. Sunrises and sunsets the walls and floor turn orange, gray rainy days, off-white when there’s fog. Toilet’s down the hall. I never cook, and therefore I don’t need a stove or a woman. I’ve lived in my Oakland flat for two years now, the longest I’ve ever lived in one place, long enough for ex-girlfriends and creditors and relatives to find out where I am, but I still haven’t hooked up a phone. I refuse to admit that live here. Habitat is a temporary condition. I’d still like to think that I’m only overlooking a dead-end temporarily, that the roar of the freeway interchange and the toasted chemical odor of the air are sociological specimens, fictions that I intend to write about someday, labors to endure—material for a novel that I’ll never write. I prefer to think of my quarters as a kind of window-laboratory from which I study lower life-forms.
My window overlooks the end of a dead-end street, second floor, people above and below. There used to be a flashing light on a wooden pole to warn cars at night of the steel barrier. But drunks are drawn to flashing lights. The city of Oakland replaced the light twice before they gave up. The last person to ram into the barrier was my brother Clyde. He’s dead now.
We had been talking about our crazy mother (she has 55 personalities and lives in a nut-house somewhere in Texas) and finishing the second liter of Chivas. There are some cheap things one can tolerate—Dutch Masters cigars, generic macaroni and cheese, women, Richland cigarettes—Scotch is not one of these things.
We got in a fight about something and he kicked my chest with his steel-toed work boots, broke three of my ribs. He didn’t drink the fresh Chivas I poured him. He got up and left when I told him I was going to kill him.
I drank his drink after I finished the one I’d poured for myself. I didn’t hear his car hit the pole at the end of the dead end. Nobody else must have either, because when I got up in the morning, many hours later, I saw the two tow trucks dragging out the wreckage, the medics bundling him up. The city sawed off the light pole at the base. Wrecks are more frequent, now, but less severe.
Past the dead end fourteen sets of railroad track string across the ground, some smooth and brilliant in summer noontime sun, most rusted and coarse beneath a bare foot. Old rotting railroad ties, eaten away by decades of rains and winter storms, countless loaded cars rhythmically pounding their weight down on the thick dark wood, driving it against the gravel, forcing it into the earth. The pulse of the Chinese immigrant, the black shipbuilder, the pulse of the executive, the boss, the rhythm of work, the time of jazz, the sweat of rhythm, the tracks they give, the tracks bend and bend, and just before they break there’s less cars to run, and no one needs them now, and now they rust. Beyond, the Port of Oakland, its cargo cranes dominating the rim of the bay like immense girdered robots, slowly moving back and forth over ships, lifting, releasing. Trucks and ships and trains, cargo cranes and steel, smoke issuing steady and insistent, dispersing into the fog and clouds, steam rising across the railroad tracks, pumping and pumping, hanging thickly outside my flat’s window, coloring my walls.
At night the bay is a black velvet cloth, shimmering as if speckled with the sequins of a giant bellydancer.
The asphalt street is no longer black, rather it is colorless and shiny, an ancient hazy mirror, frosted and webbed with tiny fractures. In the street a child stands watching black windows. A three legged collie hop-hops toward him two legs in the back one in the front. The child sees the collie coming, calls him, here boy, here boy. But the dog knows this boy. It has played with him before. The boy has held the bread above the collie’s snout and circled the dog, and he has made the dog hop in a slow circle on his sturdy forepaw. They stand looking at each other, the dog strong on his tripod, the boy legs spread, ready for the showdown.
Summers the ice-cream man stops at the end of the dead end. He is a bearded man, thin and greasy, hair tied in a pony-tail. He always wears the same purple and yellow tie-dye shirt. He has never spoken a word to any of the swarming children. They pay and he hands over sidewalk sundaes and ice-cream sandwiches in silence. In a blaring tin-foil screech comes the music that announces his approach and arrival.
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings,
These are a few of my favorite things.
Stand at the iron barrier at the dead end and look away from the railroad and the port. Look at what you see. No matter what time of day the view looks like a withered black and white photograph. Clothes droop from the nylon stringers like gutted fish gathering soot and exhaust from freeways and factories. Porches and weed-strewn lawns, cars without shine, dull windshields, tar-shingled roofs peeling, a crushed paper 7-11 coffee cup settled next to the curb. You see California plates, Oakland A’s bumper stickers, TV-20 KTVU, KFRC Plays the Hits, a pale styrofoam Union 76 ball on a car antenna. And it continues, it goes on as far as you can see. The street even seems to bend downward in the distance, it’s as if you can see the curve of the earth. The street is endless, rippling and cracking. If you had a giant stick you’d run it against the houses like a kid runs a stick against a picket fence. The sound it would make would be like the shuffle of a deck of tired over-used playing cards. And you’d keep running that giant stick against the houses, feeling the rippling against your palm. And when you look back to see where you’ve been, you can’t see the dead end anymore, nor any of the houses. There is a cloud of dust coming at you, rolling toward you, filling the street, swelling into the sky. You want to drop your stick, ditch the fucker and run, but you don’t. You just stand there and let the dust come. You stand there and let it come.
This is what it’s like on the street where I live. It’s like this because I am a writer. Someone else might see it differently.
I am an educated academic writer. I confess. After seven years of college it’s hard to not pull the theoretical pud of academia, to not write with the critics of the future in mind. I see no point in lying to you, leading you to believe that I’m operating in a literary vacuum, that I am not a writer surrounded by scores of used paperback books and any semblance of culture I can gather—monetarily or otherwise. If you are a person who has not labored through the great literature of the ages, if you are a truck driver or a Management Information Systems specialist or a Safeway-novel housewife following the life and times of some soap-opera couple, then this indulgent rant is not for you and I apologize if you have purchased it with your beer or lottery-ticket money. And what, then, should I make of this work? Should I use collage? Montage? Should I splatter the pages with contemporary references and leave the Norton Anthologists something to footnote? How about some theory that contradicts my journal entries? Or a structure that parallels the structure of a novelest’s novel I may have read? Should I give the Ph.D. candidates something to research in their dissertations? How about some Joycean diarrhea for the workhogs to decipher and present at their next MLA conference? Was I really smoking three packs a day and drinking a liter of Scotch, filling my academic wastepaper basket with the burned-out butt-ends of my days and ways and the drunken dregs of a chemically induced imagination? How can I not think of these things? And how can one be so naive as to imagine that all post-Aristotelian artists were not thinking the same thing? If you see a parallel, dear workhog, it’s the
re on purpose. I too have been corrupted by the history of my craft and by the institution of Aesthetics. And there is, mind you, nothing more crippling than the institution of Aesthetics, nothing that can destroy the bliss of indifference—and it is only through indifference, passionate homicidal entrail-ripping indifference, that Art can swell up like an encephalletic balloon and burst into being—like a program of aesthetic values. But aesthetics, however, does not belong to Art, it does not jive with my scotch and my cigatettes.
Aesthetics belongs to Associate Professor Einfache, to Professor Emeritus McKwiddit, to Professor Swineherd and Professor Dipshit.
Aesthetics is worth about twenty-five thousand dollars a year plus benefits.
Aesthetics reads papers at conferences in hopes of getting into Modern Language Notes.
Aesthetics burns my asshole like Texas chile.
Aesthetics is the film of crud in my eyes when I wake up hungover in the afternoon.
Aesthetics is a herd of spirochetes stampeding through the veins of Art.
I spend my time reading novels, history, philosophy, and, when I am feeling especially generous with my time, even modern poetry. I watch public television, I go to museums, I try not to secure gainful employment, and although I sympathize with the uneducated class, I am not a member of its ranks. I attended the university, I ate macaroni and cheese and various dried bean concoctions for nearly ten years, I am not a milkman, a postal worker, a cab driver, a ditchdigger. Indeed, I’ve delivered newspapers, I’ve poured concrete, I’ve scrubbed the coffee stains from bosses’ mohogany desks, from plush white carpet, I’ve had my skin burned off by hot tar and asphalt, I’ve manufactured health-food, I’ve built freeway overpasses, I’ve mixed drinks at seedy bars and at bars where I had to wear their starched uni-colored uniform. I was a caretaker, Pinter-style, in Marin County, watching over private tennis courts, protecting nylon nets from theft in the night.
14 Fictional Positions Page 6
