Channeling Mark Twain
Page 6
“Actually,” I said, “I waited once, one time, for someone I’d bailed out to appear. And a woman eventually did show up. Her name was Carmen Reyes, and she was grateful to be out, but not interested in who made her bail. She was nice, but she looked pretty butch. We rode back into Manhattan together on the bus and then we got off and she shook my hand and said, ‘We go different ways now.’ And just vanished around a corner. Couldn’t wait to lose me.” I shook the cereal box. “Other than that, I’m a hit-and-run bailer.”
“Then let somebody else hit and run for a while,” K.B. said. “Time for these serious bailers to check out the House of D.”
I laughed. “Hey, I joined the serious bailers because it seemed so simple, so realpolitik—whammo, just getting people out!”
I took a sip of hot chocolate, then sat back. The towel slid from K.B.’s head and he ran his hands through his wet hair.
“And okay, it’s not like AfterCare is such a huge improvement over random bailouts,” I said. “But at least you feel connected, at least you feel like you know the stakes, who you’re working with.”
K.B. pushed away his cereal bowl and drank the dregs of his cocoa in one long gulp.
“Speaking of which,” I added, “how can you stand working with some of those incompetent doctors they hire out there? There’s a guy at the Women’s House who calls himself a psychologist, Dr. Vincent Bognal—have you ever run across him? The women call him The Bog. He calls the women ‘hopeless cases.’ He’ll yell out, ‘Here comes that loudmouth from 3 Upper—Hopeless Case Number Twelve!’ I mean, who is this guy? Where did he train? He couldn’t get a job anywhere but Rikers—he admitted that to me once. He believes that all the women are retarded or regressive or he says that they hate men because of penis envy. Not because they have pimps who are beating them or stringing them out on drugs. It couldn’t be that.”
K.B. shook his head and laughed. He had grown so pale with exhaustion that his washed-out freckles stood out suddenly like a flurry of rust-red raindrops on his face and arms. He ran a quick hand over his eyes and shook his head again.
“Listen,” he said. “Then there’s the other extreme. Some of the guys from Radical Health Watch just got back from China….”
He got up and poured himself more cocoa and held out the china pot to me. I shook my head. Our kitchen was tiny, barely there, but it was friendly, with dirty blue-and-white tiles around the stove, some broken, interspersed with empty gaps like missing teeth. Neither one of us really knew how to keep house, but we cheerfully indicated it, I thought.
“They were in Peking visiting some major neurological/psychiatric hospital there—and had been welcomed by the staff as the young radical American docs, blah blah. Tom and Vanner and those guys had decided not to wear their white coats or carry stethoscopes—they thought that that would be an elitist statement in the land of free universal health care—so they were in jeans and sneakers. So then they see that all the Chinese doctors are in starched white coats with name tags: very formal. The Chinese docs start their presentation: the group observes a few psych patients first. The Chinese very politely ask our guys what their diagnosis would be in each case. Tom tells me that once again they didn’t want to be ‘traditional medical establishment’—so they say they’re not sure, though they’re looking at, for example, a classic case of, say, manic depression or paranoid schizophrenia. They tell the Chinese that they’re not into Freud anymore—they give them a kind of R. D. Laing creative interpretation rap—I think they suggest that maybe the patients are having a shaman crisis. The Chinese docs start looking at our guys like they’re fucking crazy. Through the interpreter they say, ‘Hey, you guys can’t tell a classic case of schizophrenia?’ And they pull out their textbook—it’s Freud. Every goddam clinical description of symptoms is right-on accurate, they say. They use him all the time.”
K.B. laughed wearily. He rubbed his hair with the damp towel again, then bunched it up and lobbed it in the general direction of the bathroom.
“So fuckin’ much for R. D. Laing.”
Conversation had wound down. We both stared, flagging, at Tony the Tiger boinging up and down with ghastly energy on the Frosted Flakes box: an orange-and-black-striped hypnotic, flashing his big atavistic tiger grin.
K.B. yawned, then I yawned in response.
“You know,” he said, “I was thinking that we might ask a few people over and announce our…wedding. What do you think? Serve some champagne—like that? Just Rick Myers and maybe Tom and also Sasha Brownstein and a couple of the other residents…”
I kept my gaze steady on Tony the Tiger.
“No,” I said. “I mean, like, maybe not. I just think it would be really hard to squeeze it in right now. There are so many things going on, you know?”
I felt K.B. trying to get me to look at him, but I extended my moment with Tony.
“What things?” he asked.
“I don’t know. You’re at the hospital or the clinic all the time and I’m running around. Besides which, I couldn’t invite the Bail Fund women. They disapprove of bourgeois capitalist mergers.”
I laughed and looked at him at last. He didn’t laugh.
“We wouldn’t want them here anyway,” he said.
There was a silence. We listened to the sirens outside and the clang of garbage cans, the roar of a sanitation truck, a shout in an airshaft somewhere close by. The crank-up and shuddering synapses of the City’s huge brain, the city-brain in the body of America, the great orange-and-black-striped grinding rumination—tigering on all day and all night.
“My mother,” I said, aware that I was changing the subject, “wasn’t all that happy with the poetry we recited at the wedding.”
K.B. lifted his hands, palms up, and closed his eyes.
“She didn’t like the T. S. Eliot?”
“No,” I said. “She thinks he’s a surrealist.”
He laughed and I quickly ducked away to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth and commented loudly, cheerfully, on the paucity of fresh towels. Then, despite the towel situation, I turned on the shower. Under the pouring hot water, I told myself I should seriously contemplate why I didn’t want to lift a flute of champagne to toast our new marriage. But I didn’t listen to myself—my mind strayed to the poetry we’d spoken at the ceremony—and then I thought about my mother.
My mother was of that last generation of Americans who had learned, in their youth, poems and orations, by rote, in classes dedicated to the art of elocution. Out on the prairie, in the 1920s and ’30s, in the obliterating dust storms of the Dakotas, she remembered writing her name in the dust on her desktop at school. She spelled out ELSIE K. TALLICH, 192—Then the dust stirred and her name sifted upward into the air. I saw her name floating before me in the mist of shower steam. I shook my head, shut my eyes, let the hot water erase me.
She was taught Aristotle and the classics, and in English and American literature my mother read Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Byron and Shelley; John Greenleaf Whittier; Longfellow; Dickinson; and Whitman. The students of Elocution held the books in their hands as if the pages were spun from gold: they memorized poem after poem, solemnly, joyfully. They stood up and recited, then bowed their heads for the wreath of laurel.
She lived in a world where ordinary people “quoted” from scripture and inspirational thought, a world in which they recognized rhyme and homily and lines from the great odes. They nodded and smiled in recognition as they called up Shakespeare or Milton for one another in farmhouse parlors or town meetings, at funerals (most held at home, after the body had been “dressed” and laid out on a table covered with flowers) and weddings and births, at the schoolhouse or the local bar.
There was a quote for every occasion, ordinary or exalted. People knew this, relied on it. Standing in line at the post office or somewhere, desperate and bored, I would look up at my mother—and she would glance down at me, raise a finger, arch an eyebrow, and intone: “They also serve who only stand and wait!” When I r
efused to eat an overboiled vegetable: “How like a serpent’s tooth, an ungrateful child!” Or when the alarm clock went off at six A.M. and I burrowed back down deep under the quilts, dreading dressing and pulling on high boots and sinking deep into the snowdrifts—she would appear, luminous, in my doorway: “Let us then be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate!”
She had to kind of rear back before entering a conversation, because she was always readying quotes from her arsenal, her great personally inflected canon. This gave her a preoccupied aura, which turned into steady distraction. She rode roughshod over meter and breath stops, yet never failed to convey, reciting, the mysterious powerful thrill of a poem’s emotion.
I reached up and turned off the shower stream, shook my hair out of my eyes, and felt around for the one remaining semi-fresh towel hanging on the rack. I dried myself, hearing my mother’s marginal shouts interjected into the body of a poem (“Do not go gentle—Don’t sass me!—into that good night”), adding a curious secondary weight to the lyric, as if the announcement of a country’s decision to go to war bled into another, less portentous radio broadcast. When I learned to read, I discovered, for example, that the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” did not include the observation “You’re going to put your eye out!” I noticed that I felt a little sad abandoning my mother’s version—and a little disappointed in the original.
I turned and bumped against a cabinet door, which yawned open. How she would appear in doorways or turn swiftly from the stove, hawklike, her eyes alight, her hair in disarray, her index finger pointed skyward, shouting: “Sunset and evening star / And one clear call for me / May there be no moaning of the bar / When I put out to sea!”
It had taken me a little while to understand, as a child, that poetry was not a cause for panic. Poetry, I gradually came to believe, was a kind of salvation. I peered into the still-steamed-up mirror. Poetry was indeed, I thought again, a kind of salvation. It had not occurred to me yet—standing before the opaque mirror, holding my breath—that in saving yourself, you might betray your past. The mirror still resisted me, my image. It had not occurred to me how it was also possible to betray the present.
I found a clean knee-length T-shirt in a cupboard. I pulled it over my head and opened the bathroom door.
Not much later, K.B. and I were in bed, nearly asleep, nose to nose. My WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS T-shirt and his shorts and scrub-top were cast off on the floor by the bed. We had made love, quietly, as always. As quietly as if we were a pair of teenage lovers in the bedroom of parents, the house of elders. Perhaps this near-soundless lovemaking triggered, in its tamped-down style, the dark heat and confusion of my dreams that night. The last thing I remember seeing was the round phosphorescent glow of my diaphragm case on the bedside table. I closed my eyes. Later a vision of the pimp’s piratical eyes behind his tinted aviator glasses rose up, leering at me, then gradually morphed into Corinna’s sour expression, then another face, resembling that of Sam Glass, grinning at me ironically, holding up his wrist, pointing to his watch: Late. His face receded into a red sky filling with planes—descending, ascending—as I stepped off the gritty ledge on the twelfth floor of the projects (or was it Sam Glass’s penthouse terrace?) trying to catch up to a baby with wild clear telegenic eyes, holding in her small hand a small glass of champagne, spilling it glittering out and away as she dropped it, screaming Mama, Mama, and fell suddenly, just beyond my grasp. She held out her hands to me, pleading, as she dropped downward swiftly away from me—just one small length of quickening breath out of my reach.
“See, Billie Dee wrote this poem about what she knew, in her own voice,” I said at our second meeting. “Which is why it works so well.”
Roxanne–Liza Minnelli made a face at me and chewed the pink eraser on her pencil.
“So Billie Dee does know she’s fuckin’ crazy?”
Billie Dee looked up from doodling on her Rainbow tablet. She was sketching many smiling toothy rabbits with large collar bows, I noticed.
“Who’s sayin’ I’m crazy?”
Sallie Keller laughed out loud.
“You think your baby set to fly out the window? You throw her out like you throw out dishwater—and girl, tell me—you normal?”
Billie Dee crumpled up the page before her and shouted, “My baby fly, I told you! You sayin’ Taneesha don’t go up like I said?”
I heard Sallie muttering under her breath, “Taneesha done gone the other direction.”
Darlene began repeating her single prayer under her breath: “Have mercy, Lord Jesus; Lord Jesus, have mercy.”
I touched Billie Dee’s arm and she turned to me, her terrible loose eye rolling, her breath ragged.
“It was true in your poem,” I said. “In your poem it was true.”
Sallie, and the others, all looked unconvinced. Aliganth had stepped away for a minute and I felt bold. I gathered up my strongest arguments for the mystery of art.
“Poems are about what you think is true. What you feel is true. They make emotional sense, they are emotional truth—they’re about feelings as much as thoughts. In poetry there is no One Truth. It’s good, as I said, to write about what you know—but sometimes what you know is what you don’t know.”
Billie Dee put her head down on her folded arms, panting. Baby Ain’t patted her back, then pointed at me.
“Billie Dee,” she said, “don’t know she don’t know.”
“That’s exactly what her poem tells us,” I said. “That a poem can know more than a poet. And communicate that.”
Skeptical looks again. Billie Dee began to cry softly, slow tears rolling down her face. Her quiet grief-heavy exhalations became counterpoint to Darlene’s steady repetition, “Jesus. Jesus.”
What, I wondered, am I going to say now?
Suddenly Polly Lyle Clement, who’d been completely silent, sat straight up in her chair as if it had zapped her with Death Row voltage. Up till now she’d seemed lost in a drugged haze of Thorazine, “penguined,” as they said, walking the walk, her face a dull mask. But now she looked lit up, her odd light hair framing her strangely radiant face as her eyes glittered.
“Taneesha had nothing to eat—her brothers and sister neither. I see now clear that you couldn’t feed those children, Billie. I see them eatin’ paint off the walls. Peelin’ paint and chewin’ it. Those your children? Eatin’ paint off the walls?”
There was a long silence. Even Darlene slowed down, then stopped, her Jesus prayer.
“I see that clear,” Polly Lyle Clement repeated, then smiled oddly and lowered her head.
Billie Dee pushed away a tear and nodded at her slowly.
“Social Service come up, but they don’t give enough stamps for four my baby mouths—and then they start talkin’ about takin’ my Tyrone and Janeel. Takin’ Taneesha. Take my babies to Foster.”
There was a low murmur of recognition: Foster, Social Service, food stamps. Billie Dee leaned over and touched Polly Lyle’s arm and Polly looked up into Billie’s rolling eyes. They sat like that for a minute and then Polly said: “And I see you sometimes raisin’ your hand against your babies, Billie. Your little boy in his blue pajamas, just got the bottoms on there—and the other? Sometimes you come to that.”
Billie’s hand twitched but stayed on Polly’s arm.
“Sometimes,” Billie Dee repeated very softly. She and Polly stared at each other.
There was another pause. Sallie Keller pushed her ripped face toward Polly Lyle. “How you see what you see about Billie? How you do that? Girl, you got the Sight?”
Polly turned very slowly away from Billie Dee—so slowly the move seemed menacing. She drew herself up and looked straight and steady back at Sallie.
Billie Dee smiled beatifically to herself. “The day Lady die, the night before, I dream a white dress. You know how they say Dream a white dress mean a funeral?” She nodded to herself. “My mama name me for her, for Lady Day, sweet Billie.”
Polly and Sallie had still not broken their odd locked gaze, but Baby Ain’t shook things free at last.
“Let’s go back to how you say you sometimes up to write what you don’t know.”
Never Delgado, seated next to Gene/Jean, who was breathing heavily on her, asked, “Could Gene make a poem about why she don’t know how nasty she is?”
Gene/Jean waggled her tongue at Never, then belched loudly.
Baby Ain’t tried again. Acting fast, I thought, reversing the mood. A sweet-faced courtesan, used to pleasing drunk or stoned or angry men, used to cajoling them out of their cruelty, their violence, their impotence. I marveled at her deftness, her backhand diplomacy—I’d never sipped champagne from that ballroom slipper. I’d never acquired a minute of that cynical grace. Not, I thought, that I’d wanted to. Still, it was undeniable Baby Ain’t had real left-handed power.
“What I can write strong about is how I be in The Life. Look at this: I be in a bar with a john and he know I’m a ho from the giddyap. So that part I got down. But my poem now is got more strange and different. I ain’t writin’ the love or cuss stuff I wrote last week.”
Billie Dee resurfaced, smiling a wan toothy smile at me. She’d begun to look like one of the rabbits she’d been drawing: she was all ears as she began listening again.
I put down the copy of “Good Times,” by Lucille Clifton, that I’d just passed out and read aloud. The workshop had been going pretty well; it was the second Friday night we’d met. Was it because things had been going smoothly that I blew it, that I lost my focus? Because I couldn’t leave a good thing alone? I knew it wasn’t considered proper prison etiquette to ask an inmate why she was incarcerated—yet all at once I couldn’t stop myself. Aliganth was back in the room, but even her presence didn’t hold me back.