Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  Foolish and dreamy men (boys) took love from where it used to be, before marriage and romance, to where it is now. This might have been the end of it, except that foolish and dreamy women (women) tugged and urged and conspired with men to make the whole thing as complicated as it will never stop being. Flawed aptitude for love is a normal preexisting condition in human nature. Since the aptitude is precious, we'll have to live with the flaws.

  7

  King of the Cleveland Beatniks

  I believed from childhood on that part of my job in life was to be a proper big brother to Sid. We escaped the neighbor boy in Lakewood together, but there were demons that Sid never found a way to evade.

  He is years gone now and the novel he spent nearly fifty years writing, never finished, sits in four sagging boxes in my bedroom. I try and keep trying to read it. I carry a crate out into a sunny room, take out a handful of paper, admire some of the sentences and paragraphs, and can't go on. I follow a story until it stops without coming to an end and then start another story. There is a search going on here, a sadness, explosions of wrath and fantasy, and then an abrupt halt, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. I put the papers back in the box and carry it to my bedroom.

  “Sid passed.” For a moment I thought our brother Bob in Cleveland was calling me in San Francisco to tell me Sid had taken a driving test.

  “What?”

  He repeated the words and I was irritated by the language. Bob had telephoned Sid for three days, he didn't answer the phone, and finally Bob went to his apartment. His car was in the parking lot; he had to be there. The custodian wouldn't open the door until they called the police. They found him sitting in the bathroom, and Bob said, “Why don't you answer the phone?” The cop took his arm, held it, and said, “Because he's dead.”

  He was the kid brother I bullied, nagged, and loved, the one who remembered the childhood we shared. He was the one I took long confiding walks with. We became restless boys again in our hometown, or sometimes in San Francisco, and even in Paris the one time I managed to persuade him to use his passport.

  He tended to stay with his uncompleted business in Cleveland, but he kept a passport ready and travel plans in the works. First, though, there were things he had to do. He wanted to spend more time with my children and me as soon as he finished his novel. When The Novel would be finished, just a little organization needed, pretty soon, maybe a whole completed section ready by the next time we talked; then it would be great to take it easy, go on a trip, relax with folks who had preceded him in the very interesting techniques of just enjoying life… I keep nearby the boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, clippings, three-by-five cards, menus with scribbled phrases, scraps. He started writing The Novel during the part of one year he spent at Ohio State University, during most of which he kept busy riding a motorcycle, writing his novel, and not going to class. In a journal in a loose-leaf notebook, he wrote that the dean who expelled him informed him that he had the ability to do college-level work at OSU, but that it was a requirement for freshmen students that they occasionally attend class, show up for exams, write assigned papers. Sid understood perfectly and thanked the dean for his invitation to return at some future date.

  He spent the next three years keeping busy not communicating with anyone in his family. Dead silence. From hints before he left, hitchhiking out of Cleveland with a cardboard suitcase, I had an idea of where he was, working in carnivals traveling the southern circuit, running a midway game called the count store, thinking about his novel. As a seventeen-year-old, I had hitchhiked out of town, taking the same suitcase, and attached myself to southern road shows. After trying to wait him out, I used an occasion to put an advertisement in Billboard, saying: Sid, I'm getting married, I want you to meet my wife.

  He reappeared, weathered and tan, bringing gifts of Pendleton shirts and an Indian blanket. “Sid, what have you been doing?”

  “Writing my novel.”

  “You should have let us know where you were, Sid.”

  “I was gonna.”

  When he died, he had been writing his novel for fifty years. I keep watch over the four cardboard boxes filled with it. He was gonna finish it and let the world know where on earth he had been.

  Talkative, companionable, but with a gleamy opaqueness behind his glasses when he was orating at table, emitting ropy streams of opinion, reminiscence, fiats about politics, religion, health food—whatever engaged his attention—he gathered followers to listen and pass the time at Arabica, the café where he held court. He sat at the center of a group in Cleveland who knew that they really belonged on the road or encamped in a dramatic outpost of Bohemia. Ibiza maybe, or perhaps Bali. They were only temporarily in Cleveland because of the convenience of picking up the welfare check, or they had a family who demanded attendance for dinner on national or religious holidays, or their A.A. group decided they weren't ready to travel just yet. This didn't mean they weren't explorers in the farthest expanse of the bohemian archipelago. Little-known fact: Cleveland embodies the Left Bank, North Beach, any of the new or old Greenwich Villages, just as Walt Whitman contained multitudes. Hart Crane and R. Crumb had lived in Cleveland before the Arabica bohemians, and they were pioneers for those who would surely follow after.

  Sid was a sovereign in this democracy of wish. His novel was on the verge of finding its shape tomorrow or next month or soon. In the meantime, to rest from his expectations, he took on all comers at chess.

  The King of the Cleveland Beatniks ruled gently, although after he stopped playing for money, he became a killer at the chessboard. Chess moves were no mystery to him; since it was only a game, rashness and impatience were allowed in Cleveland. Sid preferred presiding to ruling. He sat with coffee, nervous hands, and patchy beard over his table at Arabica. His friends gave deference, laughed among themselves at his repetitions, enjoyed his stories, liked the way his stories expanded and evolved in the repeating, cared for him. He was their guy. Once, visiting Cleveland, I heard him tell a newcomer to his table that he was “semi-retired,” and while I thought, Semi from what? one of his friends called him sharply to order: “Sid! Your novel! You're working on it.”

  In a dusty apartment in an anonymous apartment block, alone, needing help, he was found half-sitting among the blood heaved up in an explosion from his heart. The apartment was dusty because he didn't clean it much and didn't want other people to come to clean, either. They might disturb his manuscripts, the long narrative that wound like a snake through the years of his life.

  “Let me see some of it,” I would ask on my visits to Cleveland or when he visited me in San Francisco.

  “Next time,” he would say. “Next time, I promise. I've just got to pull some things together.”

  “Let me see a few pages. Sometimes a reader helps.”

  “It's going good. I want to get it organized first, Herb.”

  “When?”

  “I'll send it to you. I've got the mailing envelopes already. It just needs a little more work.”

  He worked as a cabdriver, as caretaker of a laundromat, and in a Ford factory. As a cabdriver, didn't like the scams of hookers, johns, and pimps; as a laundromat operator, got bored with the smell of detergent, left the place in a buddy's charge, went off to drink coffee and make notes; as an auto-worker, left his paychecks in his pants until they expired (in the meantime, had no money). For a while, he ran a poker game. That worked okay; he took his share of the pot, gave advice, bought sandwiches, and made instant coffee. During the years traveling through the south in a carnival, he wanted no contact at all with anyone back home, wherever home was for him. Later he said he planned to write or call, but it just got away from him. He postponed. He was just gonna do it, maybe tomorrow.

  When I married, I put that advertisement in Billboard, in the Traveling Show issue, asking in capital letters for MY BROTHER SID GOLD to come meet my wife. Maybe he hunkered down in a boardinghouse near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for some relaxing reading of classified ads; maybe
someone said, “Hey Sid, that you?” It must have been the right time for him to leave his silence, this perturbed abstention. Along with the Pendleton shirts and the Indian blanket, he brought stories about sheriffs, gypsies, addicts, a down-home American foreign legion. We talked about the midway, about carny life and language, the interrogatory that went: “Are you with it?… With it and for it.” I was sure he was planning to write about it. “Naw,” he said. “You do it, Herb. I got something else in mind.”

  I wrote a novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, which I dedicated to him. I thought the book was fantasy, my own dream of wandering and escape, built out of the carnival of my adolescent dreams, but a review in Billboard accused me of giving away the secrets of the midway, and words I made up appeared in glossaries of carny argot.

  Sid explained that this was because carny folks didn't know what was real and what was their dream. “Their world is made of sawdust and smoke, Herb. The same for me. Like it is for me, Herb.”

  That's why he was writing something else, he said, something that wasn't sawdust and smoke. It would be ready soon.

  “What is it?”

  He blinked behind his glasses. He drew on his pipe—he'd given up cigarettes because any fool knew they were bad for the health, but he inhaled deeply from his pipe. He could tell me this much about his novel: I shouldn't crowd him; he was writing about the radical splinter movements of the thirties. He was interested in the Schachtmanites and the Love-stoneites (Trotsky was too mainstream for him). He was writing about the dark poor of the Depression. There was a Croatian coal miner in Appalachia, a man who had run away from a city slum. He and his friends lived without women in rural boardinghouses and sent money home. “It's complicated, Herb, but I'm putting it together.”

  In the late fifties, when he was broke as usual, just fired from one of his jobs, I wrestled a story away from him, a tale about a stubborn thief in jail at Christmastime, and it was printed in one of the Playboy imitations of the time. There was a dreamy longing for love in it, and the editor of Nugget (or was it Dude or Gent?) had a sentimental streak. It appeared in the December issue with a collection of nude girls next door under mistletoe or wrapped in red ribbon. Opposite his story, a cutie, naked except for roller skates and some discreet fifties airbrushing, was pursued by a panting Santa. By the time Sid was holding court at Arabica for the beatniks of Cleveland, the roller skater was probably a grandmother. The story of the lonely thief during the season of celebration is his only published work.

  I told him it was a good story. It had his devotion to adventure, and in the pain of a soul behind bars in a small-town jail (was it in Georgia or Alabama?) at that holiday season, which haunts everyone for different reasons, it gave a sense of the general isolation. He wondered what those who bought the magazine for the roller-skating cuties would make of his story, and I delivered a little lecture about the ways of commerce, the need of men's magazines to avoid trouble with their mailing privileges, and assured him that the editor of Nugget (or Dude or Gent) really valued literature above everything except his job and staying clear of federal, state, or local obscenity experts. “That's not what writing is about,” he said.

  Agreed, and he shouldn't have to think about it. So I told him I could help him find an agent.

  “Naw,” he said. “That's not what I want to write. As soon as I get the novel together, you'd like to read it, wouldn't you?”

  “Let me see what you've got.”

  “Good idea. Right, right. Pretty soon, Herb.”

  Over the years I expressed my exasperation with his floating, postponing, late-sleeping life by criticizing his language, as if a better explanation would resolve matters. When I telephoned, he would say, “I was just gonna write to you, Herb,” or “I was just gonna send you part of my novel,” or “I was just gonna call you.” I told him he had invented a new grammatical form, the Future Conditional Imperative Subjunctive, the I-was-just-gonna.

  I knew he was staring, perturbed and gray, squinting behind his thick glasses, needing to clip his beard. His face was permanently furrowed with worry. “I'm gonna finish a section of my book this weekend. Next time I see you, I'll show it to you.”

  “Why don't you send it to me?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I'll do that, good idea. I was just gonna say that's a good idea.”

  As soon as his allergies let up… as soon as he got through his dental appointments… as soon as he finished some research about glaucoma he was doing in the library… as soon as he could get it typed more neatly…”Good idea, Herb. Yes, I want you to read it. I'm working on it every day.”

  As children, we slept in twin beds in the same room. We took turns telling stories to each other at night, the usual ones—flying over houses to escape monsters, swimming under seas to find lost continents, battling in jungles for justice or for our lives. When we were told by our mother to be quiet, tomorrow was a school day, we continued in whispers. I frightened him or he frightened me, and then we faded into the miracle of sleep, continuing our adventures without companionship because that's the way the world often was.

  This busy dreaming may have set us permanently into the storytelling mode. Although the stories go on and on, some find ways to end them and he never did. His dreams wandered the skies and swam the seas and gazed at monsters and never reached a state of mere meditation upon the partial wholeness of the world. That acceptance of shapely incompleteness is the paradox of finishing. For him, nothing ever finished.

  I remembered something of the spirit of our sleepy adventures when it came time to tell stories for my children. They also liked to walk with him and listen to his ramble, his explorations, his far-fetched dartings into anecdote and fabulous inventions, sometimes ending in bursts of unexpected laughter. They made links where he made none, or perhaps they didn't need links, since the adventures were exotic and his grin was reassuring. “Did that really happen to you, Uncle Sid?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, maybe…”

  “So that's why I'm telling you.” And they preferred that it did happen; the sea lion must really have carried him under the ice, it was much better to think so.

  Among his papers were photographs, faded brown, of the two of us in short pants, probably three and four years old, sitting proud in a cart pulled by a goat. In our hearts we were fighter pilots, or perhaps fighter goat riders. I am holding the reins. Surely both our mother and the proprietor of the goat and the cart are standing nearby, begging these solemn boys to smile. But we have our own intentions, we don't smile. This is our serious business, too important for us to waste energy listening to a mother and a gypsy with a goat. I'm sure Sid wants to hold the reins. I'm not sure if I let him.

  Our youngest brother, calling with the news, had cleared his throat and said: “Sid passed.” Something mysterious had happened, and I hated that he was telephoning from Cleveland to pronounce this verb without a direct object. I was irritated by the language, but maybe passed was the right word anyway. It's familiar habit in families—the words “familiar” and “family” are close relatives and often as troublesome with each other as close relatives are—to fall into patterns of vexation.

  When our mother caught us fighting (translation: I was beating Sid up), she reached for the telephone and asked for the police department. “Hello, Officer Cecil? I have a very bad boy here.” Next I would be going to jail, and it would serve me right. I folded my arms and looked my best hardened criminal, waiting for the swift chariot of justice to carry me away, but Sid begged piteously, “Don't, don't, we were only playing.”

  “Playing? Playing? You call that playing?”

  “Herb was showing me how to wrestle.”

  “Boxing,” I muttered. “Didn't grab him by the neck.”

  “Just a second, Officer Cecil.” She paused, the telephone in her hand. “Promise you'll stop with the funny business?”

  While I stood there, arms still folded in defiant miscreant mode, Sid said, tears streaming, �
�Yes, we promise—please?”

  “Officer Cecil? I think we may be able to deal with this.” Reluctantly she replaced the receiver.

  But then soon enough I was again pushing him around, this time because he wanted to play with my friends and me and didn't he understand that he was nearly two years younger and ineligible for our big guy baseball? He deserved a lesson, but again it was interrupted by our mother with the telephone. “Okay, that's it, now you go,” she said, and I arrived at an early poker move. I reached for the phone and said, “Mom, you're tired, let me call for you.”

  She stood there, stymied, and muttered something about our father coming home with a big fist to drive some sense into my head. When she disappeared, Sid and I stood giggling together, and then I grandly spoke up for him as a right fielder on my team. We had been afforded an early preview of adult life in the category entitled Calling the Bluff. While sharing my knowledge with him, I basked in his admiration and told him he could put Officer Cecil in his story that night. I felt emotions related to gratitude, brotherly love, even sympathy—complexities of feeling due, with luck, to come later—and never shoved, poked, hit, or tackled him again. Except maybe during neighborhood football, and then only because he was clumsy and fumbled easy passes. He was my brother, and I wanted him to view matters as they were, learn coordination. Officer Cecil became our secret friend.

  Years later, when I fled to Sid for comfort, and I did, it was because of trouble in a marriage. When family shipwrecks, a welcome from family is salvation for a drowning man. He listened to me as I repeated the helpful nonsense of a surgeon friend who said, “Cut off a leg and it's gone forever. But psychological pain doesn't last.” He knew better than most that this is helpful and untrue. It lasts. He walked with me; he listened to my troubles until they repeated themselves into post-marital whining, as repeated pain does; we went to all-night movies together; I slept on his couch, my head buried in a tufted mohair Goodwill pillow.