by Jim Harrison
Here’s to the Kaiser, he’s on his last hitch.
We’re after his ass the damned son of a bitch.
We’ll enter his palace, and shit on the floor,
And hang Old Glory right over the door.
Then out of the palace and up the brick street,
We’ll piss on all Germans we happen to meet.
We’ll eat all his sauerkraut, and drink all his gin
And kick his damned ass right out of Berlin.
And when all is over
We’ll go home en masse
And tell all our friends
That old Bill kissed our ass.
I’m pouring another drink. The song has a strangeness now that I never noticed before. Great-grandfather caught the nasty tail end of the Civil War, and was on the periphery of the Indian Wars. Grandfather tried to sign up at age twelve to fight in Cuba after the Maine was blown up and was rejected, then later survived three years in France in World War I. My father, of course, was a willing participant in World War II and Korea. And there was Duane in Vietnam. What a neat bundle, no doubt repeated in hundreds of thousands of family histories. What an irony if my son were an “adviser” in Central America. Ruth said her son, Ted, Jr., couldn’t wait to get out of the Air Force Academy and see some real action.
I just called Bill, the Australian graduate student, instead of pouring another drink. He also was packing and I offered to take him out to Guido’s for a goodbye dinner which he accepted with enthusiasm. Actually he acts more English than Australian—Australians often seem helpless parodies of gusto. I lay down for a nap to sleep off the drinks. I began to think of Grandfather’s last three weeks—he died on Thanks-giving morning—but I pushed it all away. I was the nurse and I don’t feel nurse like now. I’m nearly twenty years older than Bill, while my perpetual five-year-old is only a little his senior.
Once when I thought I needed therapy, in my early thirties, I went to an analyst in New York. After a half-dozen meetings the analyst said I didn’t need any help despite the fact that he needed patients. I had gone to him to check if I wasn’t being a little promiscuous. He said most people drink merely because they began drinking, and some people are especially attuned physically and mentally to making love. I thought this was simple-minded and told him so, though without venom. He said most truths are utterly unremarkable. This stopped me cold and I immediately tried to think of something perverse and terribly complicated to say. I blurted out that I had made love to two men at once. He replied that I no doubt did this out of curiosity and affection. I was stopped again. He said he thought of himself as merely a “balancer” and the impulse behind his practice was mainly to stop people from destroying their “selves” in the thousand or so manners available to all of us. He said I came to see him because I thought I might be fucking too much and his initial impression was that I didn’t seem to be. If I wished, we could have a number of sessions to be absolutely sure. Meanwhile, and this is what I’m getting at, he asked me to talk to him about my family history which I did over a number of weeks. He made an observation that didn’t seem particularly noteworthy at the time: the entire history of my family was tenuous, hanging by the single thread of parenthood from a great-grandfather to a grandfather, to a father with two daughters. Both Great-grandfather and Grandfather were relatively old before they were parents. The lesson here was how tentative, how evanescent my arrival was. I had told him that I was without a specific talent, other than that of curiosity, and he saw that as a large item. It is terrible to assume life is one thing, he said, only to discover it is another. A highly mobile curiosity gives you the option of looking into alternatives. His was the lightest shade of melancholy I ever witnessed, making me permanently suspicious of those self-improvement projects, the Hip soul-tinkering our age is afflicted with. He didn’t bill me for the last fifty-minute session which we spent asking each other questions. As a Polish (Warsaw) émigré to the U. S. in the mid-thirties he had never been west of the Mississippi except for two flyover professional visits to California. He and his wife were thinking seriously of moving to Israel and they wanted to see the Western states first. I outlined an itinerary including, at his insistence, Route 20 in northern Nebraska so he could drive the same route I had taken with Grandfather on our night ride. I was going to ask him if he had any living relatives but veered away from the question because I suspected strongly that he didn’t. On the wall was a print of Hokusai’s painting of a group of blind men fording a stream. This was the year after Duane died. When we said goodbye he advised me that grief is an often fatal but treatable disease.
Up bright and early at 6:00 A.M. in order to make a few notes before I take Bill to LAX for his long flight to Darwin, and me for my PSA hop to San Francisco. Like the baby itself I am avoiding what happened to Duane. I awoke in the middle of the night after eating too much cioppino and some nonstrenuous lovemaking. I was sure I heard someone fiddling with the door. I took the .38 Andrew gave me out of the dresser, stood at the door, and said “Go away” in an even voice. I heard footsteps moving away, then stood there for a minute or so to regain composure thinking how awful it would be to shoot him. I had seen the blue, protuberant wounds of a gunshot victim years ago in the emergency room of a Minneapolis hospital.
Professor Michael standing there at the airport baggage curb looked as battered as the front end of his car. We embraced lightly and he smelled vinegarish, his aura dense with tobacco, alcohol through the pores, a ruddiness from the flush of illness rather than health. His appearance was so appalling that I paused overlong getting in the car. He read my thoughts.
“I’ve been out of sorts.”
“Perhaps we can drive straight to the bridge so you can get it over with.”
“That’s not funny, dear.” And behind the wheel he began to shake.
I kissed his cheek and said I’d drive. When I got out to trade places a cab behind us began beeping and I found myself at the driver’s window screaming “You asshole.” The cabbie was a large black man who thought this was very funny. “It can’t be that bad, sweetheart,” he said.
Back in the car I smiled though Michael was still shaking. I waved at the cabdriver and moved off, thinking of all the exacerbated adrenals at airports, the neutral fetor in the air that is worse than a dead skunk in the path.
“I haven’t been able to keep down food,” Michael began, “unless I have a few drinks; then I can keep down soup. Also I can’t sleep so I have headaches. One of my students gave me a Percodan but I fell asleep across my desk which was rather embarrassing. I was worried you’d change your mind and not show up. I didn’t want to call you again so I called Ruth who said she and your mother were due tomorrow. But I couldn’t believe anything until I saw you. Now I’ll be OK.”
“After a few months in a clinic you might be OK.” It had occurred to me that this destructive behavior was a male substitute for the weeping used by women. “You could have gotten the same results by beating yourself with a hammer. I’d say you were up to a fifth a day plus three packs of cigarettes. And whatever else. Probably a bottle of wine with dinner. Is that all?”
“A line of coke or two from rich graduate students. This is scarcely the time to kick me in the balls. The heroine arrives. With salvation comes punishment. The weak man needs to be thrashed. That sort of thing.”
“Given all the evidence it’s hard to see myself as a bully.”
“I’m sorry. I’m clearly deranged. You came here out of pity and kindness.”
It was a difficult afternoon. At the hotel he insisted he had to go back to the university but was so wobbly I took him up to the room. While I was in the bathroom he located the small fridge in the closet that held soft drinks, bottled water, wine, and liquor. By the time I caught him he had already finished two of the two-ounce bottles of whiskey. Out of guilt he went on the offensive, complaining about my “pricey, piss-elegant” quarters. I took out a piece of hotel stationery and drew up a one-paragraph contract, stating th
at his habits were by my permission during the period of our work together, or the papers would be withdrawn. That did the job. He gave up then and began crying. I brought him a sedative from a first-aid kit I always carry in case I want to go hiking. I helped him undress, put him to bed, then waited beside the bed holding his hand until he slept. When he began to snore I unpacked, freshened up, then went out to buy him some clothes that didn’t smell. At the last moment I called his chairman at Stanford and explained we were busy ironing out details and Michael wouldn’t be in today. After shopping for the clothes I walked long and briskly, thinking of Naomi and Ruth, Pawnees, Chippewas, and how at age forty-five my tolerance for cities was waning. It was a beautiful day and San Francisco was a beautiful city, but my heart wasn’t moved as it used to be except by the sight of Alcatraz, which looked pure and Mediterranean in the middle of the bay. There was a tinge of regret that I had relented with Michael to save his neck, but then I have tried to keep my tendency toward escape within manageable bounds. When Ted warned me that if I wasn’t careful I would become a lonely old woman, the notion sounded very attractive. Some poet whose name escapes me had written, “The days are stacked against what we think we are.”
Back in the hotel room I tried to read but found myself watching Michael sleep. He was sweating and odorous and the sheet had slipped from his body. He lay curled with one hand cupping his penis and the other on the furze of hair between his breasts. Of all the naked men I had seen in my life he was the least appealing in the usual terms of judgment. His head was too large for his neck, his chest and arms too small for his belly; only his legs were normal and reasonably well formed. At one point he hummed in his sleep and his penis grew erect in his hand for a few minutes before receding. The support system wasn’t very promising for so large a brain.
I went back out into the living room that he had complained about as being “pricey.” My grandfather had included a joke in his will meant to occasionally shove Naomi, Ruth, and myself out of our Nebraska nest. He had left an assortment of stocks in a fund administered by a bank in Omaha, the dividends of which had to be spent yearly on travel or the dividends would be sent to the National Rifle Association, Naomi’s bête noire. She never minded Father’s bird-hunting but as a girl growing up on a farm near O’Neill someone had shot her pet deer and she was relentless on the subject of hunting mammals. The fund hadn’t been that large in the beginning but had grown over the years to the point where in 1983 Naomi had taken three schoolteacher friends on a Lindblad tour up the Amazon. One year when a trip had to be canceled due to a bout with pneumonia the NRA had sent a thank-you letter, to her disgust, for the ample contribution. Ruth was a homebody and I wasn’t much help, preferring travel in recent years to areas where accommodations were cheap. We had recently sought legal advice to break the terms of the trust in order to split it between the Audubon Society and the Indian school in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It had served its purpose.
I fell asleep in my slip in a chair beside the window. The light always seems autumnal in San Francisco, whether in May or October, and I watched the sky darken while drifting in and out of sleep, conscious that I was listening to Michael’s breathing as I had my grandfather’s so many years before. There was a natural impulse not to nurse Michael to health but to grab him by the hair and shake him. One evening he had talked in elegant paragraphs about alcoholism—there was nothing new to me in the data but the presentation was beautiful. From alcohol he went on to the specific neuroses of history, the different masks of God in our waking and sleeping lives that are extended into our public, collective life. Nothing was amiss except that he seemed unaware that his head was connected in any meaningful way to his body. He told me he once nearly drowned because he simply forgot he was swimming. Only a month before when his head was in my lap he had fainted because he forgot to breathe. Rather than a cliché or a parody he was a throwback—contemporary professors tend to resemble M. B. A.’s embarked on no-nonsense careers.
When the bellhop rang with the altered clothes Michael answered the phone. Out of curiosity I listened to him talk to the operator before I went into the bedroom.
“The day went away. It’s dark outside,” he said.
I knew he might begin talking about other days when this had happened so I sent him off for a bath, then called housekeeping to change the bed. While his bathwater thundered I poured myself a drink and speculated about his secret life, his concealed ideas about himself. I’m sure this is equally true of most women—it is certainly true of myself—but I’ve only really studied the phenomenon in a half-dozen or so lovers. The secret life can be based in the childhood mythology of cowboys and Indians, the outlaw, and rambling gambler, or more recently, in the popular culture of detectives, rock music, sports, gurus, religious and political leaders. The roots seem always connected to sex and power, and how free they felt as children to enact feelings that ran counter to the behavior they were taught. It is usually deeply comic but also poignant: thus an outwardly loutish executive is inwardly a Southern gentleman who should have been a medical missionary (he thinks) to Africa, and is helpful to a fault in the kitchen; the defrocked Episcopalian intellectual becomes an inept Robert Ryan on a camping trip and the lovemaking, which was too polite in Santa Monica, becomes rowdy and wordless in a sleeping bag; the young cowboy becomes a stern father at dawn in the Wyoming motel room. Even the voice patterns change. He calls out from the tub for a glass of white wine, which is reasonable. I discover him covered to the eyes in bubbles.
“I found the packet in the cabinet. I’m thirty-nine and this is the first bubble bath in my life. I’m doing something truly different! I feel pretty good but I’m hungry. Join me darling!”
Three A.M. by the travel clock. He became rather manic from raw nerves so I gave him another sedative about an hour ago. I can’t sleep because he’s holding my hand rather tightly and grinding his teeth. He smells like bubble bath and the Chinese food we had for a late dinner. I limited him to one bottle of Pouilly-Fumé at dinner and he found it impossible to sleep on such short rations; thus the sedative. Just before he slept he said he could see the entirety of the United States topographically against the ceiling, and everything that happened throughout every area and state in history was whirling right before his eyes: with his arm he pointed out Duluth as a permanent settlement in 1852; how Fort Lewis became Fort Benton between 1846 and 1850; Yankton when it lost its title as capital of the Dakota Territory; he saw some friends of Cochise strangle themselves in jail; Wovovka dancing his ghost dance frightened him, and he turned on his pillow to face me.
“It’s sort of like three-dimensional television only larger. That’s why I usually sleep with the lights on. I drink because I’m excitable.”
“I understand the lights part but I’m not sure about the whiskey volume.”
“I’m going to ask you a personal question. Why didn’t you ever have another baby?”
“My illness in the hospital when I was pregnant made me barren.”
“I’m very sorry. Perhaps you have more reason to drink than I do, and that’s a hard thing for an alkie to say.”
“I know it is. I like a drink once in a while when I’m sure it’s going to be a pleasure. Usually I prefer undiminished consciousness.”
“Dostoevsky said that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased. It’s troublesome statements like that that got me out of literature and into history. It’s a mystery to me why white wine and Chinese food give me a hard-on. Maybe you have something to do with it.” He turned around and squirmed under the sheet. “I hope so.” I was left with part of a very ample penis in my mouth when the sedative kicked in and his nuzzling turned into a snore. I moved a leg to avoid a repeat of the suffocation problem. I turned on the light and rearranged my one-hundred-eighty-pound hairy baby. I couldn’t help laughing.
It actually had been a wonderful evening, starting with the bubble bath, during which we made love for almost ten seconds on the edge of the tub. “I must h
ave overrevved,” he had said apologetically. He was stunned by his new clothes, then became dreadful in front of the mirror about paying me back. I stopped him short of prating about his lower-class upbringing by saying that in equivalent terms to his salary the clothes had cost me only a hundred dollars, and that if he continued I’d pitch them out the seventh-story window. He put on a Misoni sweater and some soft wool trousers, then said his first expensive clothes were giving him a hard-on. Since I was dressed for dinner I said that right now I’d prefer something to eat over another run at his hard-on. “It will only take a minute,” he said, with more than a trace of sarcasm. I knelt on the couch and he lifted my skirt. I admit it went on forever and was quite nice.
Before we could have dinner we had to find some vitamins for him. Luckily, our young cabdriver was a fitness type who worked nights in order to exercise all day, and knew of a nutrition center that was open late. The cabbie and Michael talked excitedly about decidedly Off Broadway vitamins and minerals with miraculous recuperative powers. “With apologies to the lady with you I can ball all night on three capsules of Nigerian Yohimbe,” the cabbie said. I remembered Michael lecturing Ted and Andrew on the wonders of trace minerals with a Calvados in one hand and a cigarette in the other, forcing himself to put one down so he could snort a line of cocaine.
At dinner Michael passed himself off at the expensive Chinese restaurant as a food critic probing the establishment’s abilities with duck. He ordered a whole Peking duck; as an afterthought I slipped in a fish for myself. When the maître d’inquired what magazine he worked for Michael faked a huff, saying he worked “anonymously” and paid his own bills. The intent of the ruse was solely to get carefully prepared food.
