In the Shadow of the American Dream
Page 9
After I tried to stuff the subject when he said he felt funny about leaving so soon, me pretending that it was all understandable (it was) and that that’s the way things go (really I felt sad to see him go) and there was a look in his eyes that made me feel it’d be best to put my heart on my sleeve and not pretend it wasn’t affecting me so I said, Ya know … I feel … and I couldn’t articulate it so I stopped, he turns and looks up and says, Yes? What do you feel?… I said, Ah, never mind it’s nothing … He said, Tell me what do you feel, do you feel cold? Ah no, I said, It ain’t that … well it’s just that I really enjoyed you being here for the last two days … it was really good, ya know?
December 11, 1978
Jean-Pierre and I went to the sea again, this time in an area I am familiar with, the ride slow and beautiful weaving in among stone towns and high walls and labyrinth roads and coasting through tunnels of trees in the approach to the rise overlooking the sea—time measureless as usual in situations where all my concern lies within a palm on my knee or softly caressing the belly and it was getting on towards evening cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths and slow-motion coasting up the hilly road with dark shadows spreading out over the roads from the trees and we pull over onto the bristly grass dunes and walk down to the sea … shades of Fellini with young painted-face girls in blooming fur coats walking with a waggle of the hips down the sand past old weathered fishermen and couples sleeping curled in the sand before their incredibly long poles stuck down into the beach with lines trailing into invisibility in the surf … the water a very strange blue ratty dogs barking from different spots at us … the sky turns pale blue rosy and the sun forms into a flowering ball with fissures of flame and colorless jets streak pounding the air and after collecting some stones for me and walking the surf we head back to the car right around the time the sun disappears and ride back out through the tree-lined road and through the towns and up around hills and stretches of asphalt in the gathering light … I have his cock out of his pants and stimulating him in a crazy scene and it’s getting intense we roll down a hill past a cop van with whirling blue light and we turn into the road that leads to Hauteville la guichard and it’s pure night blooming along the thick spread of trees and scraggly bushes and we pull over to the side of the road the erotic sense too strong to continue and lock into a deep wet kiss and bodies thrusting and my pants find their way down to my ankles his tongue tracing cool wet curves over my throat and neck and shoulder-wells and down to my belly and my hands are wet with saliva and caressing his cock and rubbing his chest and my eyes half-closed with passion from his face and skin I see the mosaic trees emitting soft blue steely glints of rapid night last light sky and white spots of black cows moving glacierlike behind the trees and the gullies shuddering patches of blue-black and sounds of crickets and night birds looming among the trees and he’s down near my ankles kissing slow trails up my legs over onto my hands and back to my sides and over my cock the unbelievably warm sense of his mouth over my cock up and down and brush of lips and up to my throat again and I repeat the actions for his pleasure and his stomach is hard as a rock thrusting under my palms and lips passion as an elevator in the shape of red lights rising beneath the steel surface as a needle thrust into veins canalling the arms and legs and throbbing temples pulse, like the heat of nests and bellies of birthing creatures and needles of night shooting from surfaces of unseen things into red ruby eyes, as the taillights of this coasting vehicle having come to a final stop among the trees rolling over dead leaves burst of color behind my eyes and breathing becoming fog-dense and uttered sounds slick as stream stones and algae tongue coasting down the valleys and structure of flesh in a movement of frenzied life before the advancing wall of flame, of forest fires and aging and dreams having uttered before the plains distance of the eyes and the heart, coasting machines of complex media-flash and smiling assholes winking from the doors of brand-new Cadillacs and smoking brand-name cigarettes an ad like on highway billboards and all that drifts down in my skull with wind rising and consuming this solitary vehicle in the rasp of forestry and lonesomeness of men and the desires the world sees behind the soft spots of its knees so suddenly that the reaction is to blot out and deny but the world can go fuck itself as far as “humanity” and “need for law”: outlaws drift in every vehicle of thought coming down this hillside—cars ride way down the valleys of sunsets and gathering night where the world is laid out in dark shadows of color behind and in front of the windshield in the ruts that line the roads and the gullies that attempt to climb from their places of the earth and extend themselves to the sky and reach the dying sun before chance comes in the morning to claim their movements and momentary freedoms and send them splashing back down into places all outlined and set within the manmade history of things …
November 25, 1978–March 17, 1979
Paris–xsNormandy
December 2, 1978
Sent off manuscript to Sylvia. Cost me 7F, which I really could not afford. Felt like shit afterwards as she laid it out pretty clearly that she had no intention of using it, maybe just for Gasolin 23 but otherwise no dice. Shouldn’t have given it to her, putting myself in a position for semistarvation. That fucking 7F coulda bought three cans of soup or a package of chicken or a huge piece of Gruyére or two chocolate bars or stamps and envelopes or six yogurts or two packs Gauloises filtres or …
December 3, 1978
Walked among the tomb-silent buildings, marble structures pushing up from the ground with glass squares nodding sections of airless winter sky, rusty cans and newspapers drifted across dirt lots and the surfaces of walkways, a feeling of nausea at the soundlessness of things, at hands surging from the ends of my coat sleeves. I realized for a moment what madness is or can come from—the unstable relation of the body with the environment, a sense like a knife poised forever a centimeter away from the wet surface of your eye, a sadness mixing with all that. At the lines engraving themselves into my forehead and palms, a time of aging when I feel I have not yet arrived at the unmarked X of my desires, the vortex of senses in relation to the world that always, elusive and indefinable, waits beyond, around the corner. I had a strange vision, don’t know how or why, whether it was a product of the moment or a culmination of the threads of physical chance, turning a concrete angle of the overlapping walkways I saw up on a dirt mound high above the leveling of the field a bristly piglike animal scratching at the earth, pummeling it with its fore and hind paws, raising clouds of dry dust which immediately disappeared in contact with the slight and sudden rain. But somehow it seemed right. After all, here I was in the center of Paris, in the center of life itself, my life, a foreign animal who seemed not to belong anywhere anymore: the irises, retinas, the spherical orbiting balls in this head seeing everything now from a strange and unimaginable distance, like the distances of the forest in the eyes of the fish, in the sea swirling round within the thick blue heart of the horse. I wanted to embrace that hyena, that spotted bristled pig, lay down and pummel the earth alongside it, looking for the door, the door that leads away, the entrance into some semblance of recognizable and believable environment, something soothing for this weary heart, this weary head, something that would enable the two of us, foreign brothers in blood, brains, and sight, to lay back drifting, drifting on a huge and warm vellum of polar ice, in the Ferris wheel of night and do nothing else but stay up and trade blood with the stars, with the showering tails of lonely comets while a fragrant blue veil of life drifts through the night and makes us its own.
December 4, 1978
Picked up my certificate of attendance from Alliance Français with Jean-Pierre this morning. We went on to the police station up behind Blvd. St.-Germain/Notre-Dame. They will send me an appointment within three weeks to get my Cuit de ses jours. We walked through St.-Michel together stopping at a German bakery for a cheese/raisin Danish pie and I split from there at the Odéon metro to return to St. George and the rue Laferrière apartment. Worked a bit more on
Jimmy Romano’s tape, been playing with the circuits of the radio which has a number of different bands, brings in England very well. Been doing a cut-up experiment with different music and English talk shows, also with the electronic frequencies that come through at different points on the dial. Some unbelievable words trapped on the tape, a section of a talk show on terrorists in which some pig “explained” the sexual thrill women get from armed revolution. Couldn’t believe the woman heading the show, who sounded slightly progressive, would let him get away with that. I’d have slapped him rightly across the kisser. Am feeling a bit nervous concerning this afternoon’s meeting with Nidra Poller, wondering what’s gonna come of it all, in regards to my working here in Paris and also in regards to the manuscript. Christ, I wanna have the thing published bad. It’s important to me in a number of ways. I guess acceptance is one of them, the publishing of it being symbolic acceptance of the importance of it, that which I feel is evident. When I get my typewriter, a job, an apartment, I wanna work on a new manuscript of my semisurreal writings and send it to C.B. [Christian Bourgois].
6:10 P.M. Just got back from meeting Nidra Poller. Showed up at her apartment and was met at the door by a fella, I asked for Nidra and she came out of a room nearby. A fairly short woman with beautiful frizzy brown hair, intense knowledgeable eyes, she’s somewhere in her thirties. She invited me into a room stacked with great books—American and French publishers. We talked for a while, she didn’t know of any prospects for work but that didn’t matter so much after I talked with her more. She explained her interest in the manuscript as she had not too long ago finished a big novel constructed entirely of voices: two characters holding the arena for whatever length of time they walk and then replaced with two other characters. She tried to remove herself as much from the act of writing as was possible, thus the characters were not as well written as she would have liked but they had much to say. Much freedom in that. The manuscript was read by senior editors in a load of publishers in America but all said it wasn’t something they could sell. Recently another woman wrote a book in France that was all voices and was received with much ado: “First time in literature,” etc. She asked me what I drew as a conclusion from the manuscript I wrote and I said, I didn’t conclude anything, that it was an act to place outside myself the responsibility of having been the receiver of the related tales, that it was an uncomfortable feeling being in contact with family and friends and having that knowledge of events taking place in faceless characters’ lives, that no one with stability or routine would ever have the chance to meet these characters. She said she was happy with her stability and so would never be in the position to meet these characters, thus an added interest in the book. She served me coffee and let me check out a copy of WOZU[?], an anthology of writings just out from Soleil Noir. It looked pretty impressive, one poem in it by Ferlinghetti which surprised me, it was very good and connected with a lot of my senses of searching in life and writing, surprised me as I haven’t felt too much for his writings in a while, his later stuff being to me more repetitious word output. She talked about a novel she was wanting to write about the relationship between mother and daughter. Sounded like a fantastic piece the way she described it, saying that she was waiting for her position to change so as to start, that she did not want to write it out of anxiety or nervous energy or any sense that would come from a definite approach. She talked of developing her erotic writings, that nothing she has read has ever appealed to her erotic senses. She wanted to get away from seeing characters in writing from a distance, getting close up in order to write the erotic senses of the “intelligent body,” the “thinking body,” not the usual body separated from mind. We talked about much more, which I won’t bother to relate here as it was about senses I received in the course of conversation that hit well and hard in connection with me. I leave all that inside me—also have to rush off to class at Alliance Français.
I GOT LIVIN’ ON MY SIDE
(lyrics—work in progress)
I got livin’ on my side
but it don’t buy me a place to sleep
not a place to lay my body (head)
don’t buy me food to eat
it don’t buy me no wheels
it don’t buy me ma pills
it don’t buy me heaven
it only buy me hell
it only buy me hell
it don’t buy me no meals
only what I go out and steal
unless I go on out and steal
whatever I go out and steal
dreams come fast in the summertime
but baby it’s goin’ on winter soon
I broke as a hanged bandit
like kickin’ a rock in the river
it ain’t ever comin’ back no more
got living on my side
but it don’t buy me a set a wheels
don’t buy me my pills
only what I go out and steal
oh time time time got your shoulder
leaving me nothin’ to cry on
I got livin’ on my side
but it don’t gimme someone to lie on
it’s so easy with whiskey whiskey
so easy with amphetameenze
my rooms so cheap it ain’t got windows
makes it hard to figure out my dreams
in the town square they talk like dogs
up in the offices they grunt like hogs
it never really is what ya figure it’ll be
unless ya figure out the drunken key
unless ya got a copy of the sideshow key
March 18–June 1, 1979
New York or Ocean
Journal de L’Homme Ordinaire—
Journal of the Ordinary Man
April 11, 1979 (Wednesday)
Looking through this sparse journal dated from mars 18, I see so little in the way of internal mapping. Most is external as usual in all the journals, the internal is stuff that isn’t threatening/embarrassing. Well, have to stop this, the words cryptic and symbolist on page 16 of this journal were referring to my meeting a young Englishman my own age in the jardin des Tuileries. What was extremely funny (not in hilarious sense but in amusing coincidental realizations) was that this mirrored my last days in New York before arriving here. I brought the fellow home and we made love and afterwards talked about getting together again, he suggesting that I come for dinner on Tuesday the tenth. In lying together among the tangled sheets we talked while I smoked a cigarette and dreamed towards the white ceiling watching the smoke whirl through the sunlight. I felt somewhat relieved in going to bed with another person other than Jean-Pierre especially in light of the fact I am leaving, it was sort of a removal point, difficult to deal with my leaving him and also there was some sort of breakthrough in lying down with a boy of my own age. Most of my growing up since my first sexual experience with a man has been in the arms of older men, men in their thirties and forties, not so much that I desire older men for age but for their grasp on life, the settling down inside of themselves, some kind of calm and reassurance and proof of life; dunno how to make this clear as I’ve never pondered it much except in odd moments and now as I grow older I desire younger and younger men though I don’t usually sleep with anyone younger than me and rarely someone my own age or even close mostly because of their awkwardness and my desire to relate to someone who has a lot more thinking and reflecting behind him. It also occurred to me that possibly I have always slept with older men because of some kind of inherent security, that the age difference separates me from them to an extent, thereby giving me a sense that I can say what I want and if it’s not accepted by them I can always attribute this to their position in time and aging; this is not to be unfair to myself, it’s just a slight possibility and I don’t know if it is invented or real. There is something a bit frightening to me about relationships with someone my own age in way of lovemaking, etc., but now with this Englishman I felt relieved of any thoughts concerning the whole subject; it no
longer exists with the intensity it once did. I even felt an infatuation with him after he left, similar to meeting Phillip while involved with Randy, with Phillip it drove me against the wall that I was leaving after meeting such a down-to-earth guy, him and his childhood Stetson camping out in the rolling hills of Montana … that kind of suburban innocence hmm … so the problem was in explaining to Jean-Pierre that I wanted to go to dinner and possibly we would have sex, me and this English guy (Alan). It took several days to work up to the subject; in the meantime I was alternating between feelings of possibly being very wrong considering that I was involved with J.P. for this long and that it might hurt him if I was to do so. Then came senses of myself as a human being who needed freedom to do exactly what he desired in way of contact, sexual or otherwise … I always am consumed in this sense that I should be able to move where and when I desire; I wouldn’t give up my relationship with J.P. for another person in the way of commitment, just need to explore things as they move my way … images of floating from room to room and bed to bed and country to country and time to time … just moving as chance brings me and at the same time being involved with one person who I feel comfortable with for a period of time, someone I can relax and be myself, allow any thoughts changes, etc., to come forth.