I have finished the concrete slabs your glass and steel building rests upon.
I’ve done the shit work, the work the fat-faced red-neck whiskey-gutted blue-collar grunt has done. I’ve watched seven men die on construction sites, seen men flopping on the ground like fish in the dirt, their pants fouled, seen men with their skulls split and splattered like hammer-beaten watermelons, seen the way the corpses’ eyes clouded and ceased to see. I’ve passed out from exhaustion before lunchtime. But I’m not one of them, I never have been, and I hereby declare it, unabashedly, without reservation, without guilt. You see, I’m not a postal worker, I’m not a milkman, and as poor as I might be, as little money I might have to spend on VCR’s and wristwatch-televisions and ice-making refrigerators, I still haven’t become one of the bucket-headed middle-class television-stupored clots of ignorance that today’s writers claim to be and fraternally embrace. In my fiction, the first person, the “I” of my narrative, is the most important character. The occasional “you” is an implication, a chastisement, an insult. I don’t want to hear about your pain, I refuse to listen to your laments: I’ve howled myself and I have no sympathy. Eat your own excrement. I didn’t do it. I’ve looked out of my window at night and seen the smog, I’ve breathed the same shit in the air that you have, I’ve walked out my door at three in the morning and smelled the stench of the great American armpit. I know it’s there, and I don’t claim to embrace it. I condemn it. And I condemn you.
But don’t get me wrong—I’m not without compassion. If I had no compassion for the human condition I wouldn’t bother to write, I’d sit in a crowded dark hovel and laugh, laugh like a deathly complacent green-faced ghoul in an amusement park haunted house at the ridiculousness of your plight, your woeful eternal suffering. My compassion has nearly ruined me, and it is only by objectifying that compassion that I can utter a single syllable. Perhaps it’s the human condition as an abstraction that I sympathize with rather than the individual man. I can know the abstraction because I am part of it, but the only individual man I know is T-Bird Murphy. So I’m not going to tell you the story of a plumber who has left his plunger on the job and finds an analogy between the plunger and God, or a story about a bored housewife, a preacher’s wife, a jealous wife, a midwife, an ex-wife, etc. I’m not going to waste my time writing about a professional lawnmower whose blades are stuck and therefore contemplates the origins of the cosmos. I’ve got better things to write about—like myself.
Not so many years ago, when I first began writing, I wanted to grab the testicles of the great dick of humanity and squeeze until it screamed, then squeeze some more. I wanted to sing the song of the downtrodden working class, the oppressed minorities, the millions of people who have lost control of their miserable destinies. I wanted to change the world. I saw myself as a teenaged visionary, a prophet, a man who saw more in the world than everyone else did, and I saw it as my calling to open their crusted eyes. I didn’t see the world as the mindless, peaceful Seine, flowing ceaselessly through the hills and cities to the ocean. Its course may have been fixed, I thought, but it was the Nimitz freeway at five o’clock, the Jersey Turnpike at rush hour, it was the sewage canal that ran silently beneath us all, rotting, stinking, festering, but always ignored, put out of sight and mind. I wanted to dig up the streets, to uncover the sewers, to let the people see what they were made of. Just because they hadn’t looked between their legs before they flushed didn’t mean that I intended to let them get away with not taking a chomp out of the fruit of the tree. I was going to leave the torn up streets wide and gaping like a great whore’s worm-eaten cunt, and I wanted everyone to fall in, and when they finally smelled the stench, they would know that they were alive. I was tired of happy endings, and I wanted someone to show one to me so that I could laugh in his face and spit on the last page of his manuscript.
Of course I was young and foolish then. I didn’t know that my song had been sung before. I didn’t realize the folly of my young taut gonads. My friends and neighbors loved my writing, and I didn’t realize that the worst indicator of the worth of writing is universal approval, which is the resultant opinion when a work does no more than reinforce preconceived notions. If you want everyone to like your work, just say what they’ve already said themselves. I didn’t know I was a silly ass, that people are downtrodden because they choose to be so, that our great slums and sprawling ghettos and grease soaked tenements are perhaps the greatest achievements of our country, the freest domains the human animal can inhabit. Where I live, in my flat overlooking the dead end and Oakland, I am more free than I have ever been. If I want to break windows like I did as a boy just two miles from here, if I want to lay blubbering in the gutter drunk or stoned or frying on hallucinogens, if I want to starve myself and sit decomposing in a heap of academic residue, if I want to stand on the cracking concrete floor and howl like Ivan Ilyich for days on end—anything I want to do I can do, and no one will bother me, no one will interrupt my life. I have never spoken with my neighbors—haven’t even tried.
The morning I walked out onto my porch and watched the sun come up, watched it rise into the fogless day like a great white ulcer, an ulcer that seemed to be both etched into the heavens and etched into my soul, it took me a long time to do anything but think and smoke cigarettes and try to heal the ulcer. But the wound wouldn’t heal. The more I thought the more it opened. The sun became brighter and brighter, and as its intensity increased, as the shadows darkened and stretched across the city, as the dirty windows blazed like mirrors and burned my eyes, the ulcer grew and seemed to be a condensed sun ready to explode in my chest, or as Beowulf would have said, eager to burst my heart-coffin. I’d never before seen Oakland or the bay or San Francisco lit from the East. Whenever I’d had the chance before, I had always been lying in bed awake or on the freeway or on a jobsite submerged in the bowels of the city, below the water table, below the asphalt and concrete crust of the earth, and I’d never considered anything more than my current distraction. I’d always seen the buildings and the wires and the telephone poles from beneath the noonday sun or scattered through the afternoon and dinnertime fog and haze as if refracted through a celestial smokestack prism. I clenched my fists in front of my face and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened my eyes, I looked through the space between my fists as if looking through a telescope, and I thought about what I needed, what was missing, how, if possible, I could remain a man and not revert back into the compost pile of erudition I’d become. And what I wanted to do, I realized, was something that wouldn’t be the same as something I’d read in a novel—I wanted to live a new plot, speak sentences no one had written before, I wanted meet people who weren’t characters in Chekhov’s short stories, women who weren’t poets’ muses or Faulkner’s whores and bossy old hags, men who I could talk with and drink beer with and range the country with and at the same time who I could not place in a text I had read before taking my Code 64 GRE’s or comprehensive exams. But I feared that it was impossible, that I’d been corrupted to a life of novelistic comparison. I feared that I was condemned to see people as characters, characters to be compared and contrasted with any of the thousands of characters I’d memorized for identification questions.
When a person reads too much, when he lives many vicarious lives in a short space of time, he becomes old when he is very young. I tried to think of something I could do that I had not read about, something I could do and not feel like my life was one plagiarized scene after another, and I could think of nothing.
I walked down the stairs and into the street, stood at the iron barrier at the end of the dead end and felt the gravel beneath my bare feet. The sensation was queer, almost vertiginous, the way my skin conformed to the contours of the earth, the way I could feel the air hugging my clothes and my exposed skin. I could feel the pulse of the planet wrapping me and nursing me, and I felt nothing sinister, no demon or god; rather I felt as if I were being invited into a world that had been
waiting for me to have the consciousness to comprehend. I had an impulse to dash back up to the john in my flat and finish Proust. But I resisted the impulse to finish the book, and I remained on the street, looking at the city from ground level instead of from two stories above. I had not often left my apartment since I moved in two years before—I had had no need to work because I had saved a good deal of money from doing construction, and for the first year, I received bi-monthly unemployment checks from the generous State of California Treasury. In the beginning I had walked the streets often, but the occasions became less and less frequent, and the less frequent my expeditions became, the odder I felt, the more out of place I seemed to be. The Victorian houses, the shops, the sidewalk and the battered cars and graffiti-walls of the stores seemed less real, more phantasmagorical, more like an urban scene from Call it Sleep or Berlin Alexanderplatz. The more I read the less I found a need to see the world myself—the world of fiction was far more real and infinitely more revealing than anything I could sense myself. And I wondered if there were anything left for me to do. I was certain that there was nothing to write about, and that didn’t bother me, as long ago I had given up the hope, and more importantly the desire, that I could further clutter the overburdened Dewey Decimal system with another card-catalogue number. I had already resolved to be a writer of the mind instead of a writer of the pen. What bothered me was that I felt more like a character in a poorly written novel than like a man of flesh and bone.
I would have done nothing if I hadn’t turned back and read the graffiti and the bumper-stickers again. I would have dropped my head, walked backed into my flat and shut my eyes, or perhaps picked up a book of criticism. But instead I noticed a child, the child who usually teased the three-legged collie, spraying on the wood-slat wall of Pete’s Market and Liquors. Pete is a small thin Chinese man who owns the market and sprays the urine and the cigarette butts out of the doorway and into the gutter each morning at eleven when he opens the store. On Pete’s light green wall, the child wrote, “FUCK YOU,” and when he stepped back to look at his handicraft, he did not consider the history of the phrase, how many times it had been uttered and inscribed, the Nobel Prize winners who had used the words at precisely the perfect juncture in their tales, he did not paint over his words and revise them and step back and reconsider his revision: rather, he crossed his arms over his small thin chest and saw that it was good.
I turned back to my apartment and looked at it, looked at the sagging roof and the peeling shingles, the blood-like rust stains beneath the rain gutters streaking the dull white paint as if the building had been suffering from an ancient wound and had been steadily bleeding ever since. And I knew that to escape the bondage of Aesthetics I would have to leave this place, that I would have to once again get into my car and drive, leave my books and pens and postcards and paper behind and live my own version of the Great American Stereotype. I went back into my flat and closed A la recherche du temps perdu and lay down in the middle of the floor, my back heavy against the cool concrete floor, and I sighed a very deep sigh.
I did not adhere to my resolution. When I finally had my car packed the back seat was piled with books, every book it would hold. I had intended only to bring the best, the writers who inspired me the most, the visionaries of my academic memories, writers who had changed my perception of the world. Not very often does one meet a person who, when he is speaking to you, says something so profound, so poetic, so beautiful, a person whose words quake your soul so deeply, that you ask him to repeat his words, to re-speak what he has said so that you might attempt to assimilate those words into your very consciousness. More likely, a speaker’s words enter the air and disintegrate into the backdrop of the noise of the universe, no more distinct than the hiss and crackle of interstellar dust. How many of us ever get a chance to be a Plato and hear the words of a Socrates? or a Boswell with Johnson? St. Mark and Jesus Christ esq.? Today, it seems, we can only be shaken by the words in books. There are only paper prophets. I began by merely packing a Gideon’s Bible, intending to read through the book and steal quotes for later use. But then I decided that if I were going to take a Bible, I might as well take Proust. What a treat it would be to read the book in the context of freedom and motion, in a distant field or hotel room or woman’s house, rather than in stagnation, mildew, and my sagging Oakland ceiling! And after I allowed myself this luxury, I took Moby Dick from the shelf. Then I tossed in Ulysses and the Odyssey, and then Paradise Lost, and my Riverside Shakespeare and Kafka’s journals, Poe’s tales and Balzac, Wallace Stevens and Whitman, Tom Jones and Dante, Beckett, Faulkner, Aeschylus and Euripides and Three Trapped Tigers, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Suttree, and the box was full, and I needed more boxes, and the back seat of my car was packed tight and I put my clothes in the trunk.
My migration, I decided, was to be eastward. I’d grown up in the Bay Area, been spawned in the breeding pools of the early sixties, I’d spent my time living in the sumptank of urban California, the mockery of every New York Jew and Bostonian prig I’d ever read or come across. I grew up, as Henry James said, “in America, in Texas, in Nebraska, in California or somewhere—somewhere that scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce.” The Oakland ghettos I grew up in, the gunfights between Mexican low-rider gangs at my high school, and the acid and quaaludes and crystal that killed my brother Owen when he was thirteen, the black children beaten daily to death by their overburdened parents—these were the products of the so-called land of sit-coms, of Gilligan’s Island, of Soap-Opera love, of Three’s Company and every low-budget police-drama the writers could scrape out of the bowls of their hash pipes and hookahs and bhongs. The writers’s happy cops always had a handicap—Cannon’s was that he was extremely fat; Ironsides chased down crooks in his wheelchair; Barnaby Jones was always on the verge of having a coronary arrest; McCloud was surgically attached to his cowboy hat. I was supposedly as bad off as the California-studio-produced TV cops—my handicap, I was repeatedly informed through literature, by professors, by every pompous column writer in the Sunday Times, was that I was a barbaric Californian, and as a barbaric Californian had had the mistaken notion that San Francisco and Los Angeles and Seattle were cities like other cities, cities with roaches in the kitchens and muggers in the parks. According to the easterners I was a foolish simpleton because I thought that New York was no more than a San Francisco with Puerto Ricans and Italians instead of Mexicans and Chinese, and when I either grew up or took a crash course on being civilized I would certainly understand that New York and the rest of the East is the glowing zenith of the intellectual and urban eternity. How could I be so ignorant as to think that we California folk, riding around in our four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and wearing holsters and chaps and ten-gallon Stetsons and singing the disco version of the national anthem, have any real problems? How could I have the gall to think that I, an offspring of that great alkali desert, could become an intellectual, let alone a writer, if I had not spent the greater part of my days in New York City, or Poughkeepsie perhaps?
Before I had loaded the car and packed in all my books, I’d been resolved to remain a writer of the mind, but now, as my indignation grew and I felt myself teetering on the verge of voyage, the writer of the pen began to rise once again. I saw myself travelling across the great Nevada wasteland, over the Rockies and into the plains, I saw myself stopping at small towns and truckstops and hick villages in Nebraska and Kansas, and I imagined all of the character sketches I would be able to draw, the descriptions of terrain and medieval tribes in the prehistoric states of Texas, Kentucky (does Kentucky even have a city?), Wyoming; I imagined stopping at bookstores and buying hand-bound journals in which I would record my no doubt stunning sociological and geological observations. I was going to show the New Yorkers and the Parisians and the Londoners and the Dubliners that it was possible to, as Ferli
nghetti would say, Start from San Francisco, that Chinese-built railroad tracks were hammered into the earth with the same sweat and dreams as Irish tracks, that Harlem is but a sister of Watts and West Oakland, that the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate are kindred souls. But, in the height of this reverie, I stopped and clenched my teeth and I looked back out over the bay, over the factories and warehouses and freeways and tenements—and I realized that I was back where I’d started, living the bloodsuck life of the lowest form of literary parasite, ready once again to bind myself between the covers of a rambling narrative, ready to dispatch my soul and live for The Text. I had come full circle, and was dangerously close to negating my epiphany of the night before and canceling it out into the null of syllogistic academic suit-and-tie oblivion.
I quickly unloaded the books—hauled them back up the stairs and into my flat. Then I unloaded the rest of the car, unpacked the provisions I had so carefully tucked beneath the spare tire, under the seats, in the trunk. I opened the glove compartment and took out the road maps and threw them in the dumpster across the street.
I turned the key and felt the low rumble of the engine, the steady massage of pistons and valves, heard the sound of air being sucked into the carburetor, the fan flooding the engine with a stream of dusk. The dashboard clock showed six o’clock. Across the street I could see the boy who had painted “FUCK YOU” on the side-wall of Pete’s Market. He was sitting on the curb eating a sandwich and looking at his inscription.
14 Fictional Positions Page 7
