by Robert Ward
“Hey,” she says again. “Like you in the bathroom reminds me of your old man. Does he still spend all that time in there? Weird. We’ve gotten stoned down here a lot of times and had many smiles about him. What a freak.”
I am staring at myself, and the stomach is turning turning, and I am seeing Glenn’s face in that mirror. Hiding. Hiding in here, trying to get away from Freda and from me, with my insane juvenile raps, and it’s Glenn putting that acne cream on himself, and then it’s my face back again. Hiding in here. Speed freak Freda outside the door. Oh Christ, I am sorry, Glenn. I didn’t realize what was going on. Go home, tell him how sorry you are. All that comes out is Phantom’s voice. All that comes out.
I sit down on the toilet, shaking. She’s out there, Susan, Freda, Baba Looie, Phantom, Taco Lily, Howard Zucker, Japanese grocer. I am back home, I am straining to get it out. My old man is cutting it all out. This is sickening. I am straining, straining, feeling sick about Glenn, throwing up about Freda. Poor poor Freda and mad slashed Glenn. What will happen? I am straining. What will I do? I’ll get it all out, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll strain and strain until I project myself right off this toilet seat, right off it, you hear. Yeah, and I’ll go spinning across Baltimore right on this seat, spinning and spinning like mad; and I will land at Kirk’s house and rap on the door, still sitting there on the seat, you gonna see it. When his mother opens the door, she will think I have come to shock her, to “gross her out,” as the college boys say; but I will take her tenderly by the hand, sit her down in her living room and tell her that I am sorry about Kirk.
“Is there anything I can do?” I will say.
“What on earth do you mean?” she will retort.
“About Kirk I can do nothing,” I will say. “It is an accident, a genetic freak. I am terribly sorry, though. I want you to know that I, Bobby Ward, sitting right here on this toilet seat, do sympathize with you. I am sorry. Really. I am sorry Kirk takes drugs. I wish it wasn’t so. I am sorry he wants to overthrow the government. He’s right, but I am sorry. I know that back there in 1945 when you had this baby, all pink and cuddly, you had no idea it would turn out like this. Admit it, it’ll make you feel better.”
“It’s true,” she sobs, holding my free hand. (With the other I am wiping like mad, but it keeps oozing forth.)
“Oh, you are so right,” she says. “You pierce the very heart of the matter. If you only knew what I’ve been through with that boy. And now, Kirk’s younger brother, Robbie. It’s the same with him. No respect. None at all. He calls us pigs.”
“With Robbie too, huh?” I say, biting my lip.
She begins to cry.
I join her.
“Listen,” I say, all choked up. “I know a lot of kids who would appreciate a nice home. Good kids. Orphans, actually. I could send them over here for an interview. You know, pick one, two, any number you want.”
“No,” she moans. “It’s just not the same. A mother loves her own.”
“Give the orphans a chance,” I say, falling on my knees at her feet.
There is a long silence, and then she moans louder. I see that there is nothing anyone can do.
“Good-bye,” I say, hugging Kirk’s mother. “I’ll go see Walter’s folks now.”
“Yes,” she says, forcing a brave smile. “Maybe they could use an orphan.”
I walk around the corner to Walter’s house.
His mother comes to the door. She sees me, all ragged and defeated, sitting on my toilet seat. A big vein pulsates in her head.
“Come in,” she says. “You’ll be arrested for sure.”
“I just came to tell you how sorry I am it didn’t work out,” I say.
“What’s happening to everything?” she cries, handing me the tissues.
“I’ll do anything to help,” I say. “Anything in my power.”
“What power?” she says.
“Too much,” yells Susan. “Totally different level.” I go home to my parents. Glenn greets me at the door with a scalpel. “I see it all different now,” I say.
I am led into the dining room. Freda is bouncing her black potatoes off the wall. I rush into her arms and console her with kisses. If I could get this turd out it would be all different. If there were some air currents in here I could breathe again.
Susan is tapping tapping tapping on the wall again. Keeping time to the Jefferson Airplane. I am straining, crying, gagging. I pick up the paperback on the toilet bowl. Revolution is plastered across the front.
“You drowning in there?” says Susan.
“I got to take a piss,” says Warren. “Hurry up in there.”
If I stay in here. If I never leave here. If I do like Glenn do, jes stay in here all de time nevah come out, they call fo’ me I tell them nobody home, jes de cleanin’ man in here, ain’t nobody home tall. If I stay in here forever and ever, and don’t fall off this flying seat, this wingding zoomin’ airtravelin’ seat, if I don’t fall off because all the king’s horses and all the king’s men ain’t never gonna let me get my shit together again.
I let rip with a long fart, pull down my pants and watch it fall, all liquid out of me. I want to put it back in. I should get Susan in here to stuff it back in.
I sit on the john here. I ain’t flying nowhere. I got no place to go.
XXXIX.
Meet Me at the Bottom
But lo and behold, just when you think you have hit rock solid bottom someone comes along to show you where the real floor is. Such a person is Faye, Walter’s new girl. Short, compact, with red-brown hair chopped close to her head, big green eyes and a wide, wide mouth. She walks into the cellar and sits down with Kirk, Susan and myself. Right away I am worried. She has that look, that look I recognize only too well. It is the look of a person with power, with her own vision of things, and I am afraid she will somehow influence me. It sounds absurd, but since my near collapse after San Francisco, I am wary of anyone with any magic. But it’s no use. Immediately, she changes my life, and how I despise her for it.
What happens is as follows. She begins to talk, stoned disconnected from the hash, but eventually the talk somehow comes around to her father. He is dead, but before he died he had been a carpenter, a Swedish immigrant who came to New York in the 1930s. He worked for “the pigs” all his life.
“But he never gave in, man. He was always organizing, you know? Always. They threw him into jail in Newark. They threw my mother into jail with him, for wearing pants and smoking a cigar, and yet neither one of them stopped organizing. They were beaten a hundred ways, but the one thing they gave me. The most valuable thing.”
I look around the room. It is late. Kirk has fallen out over the hookah. Susan is asleep on the rug. Only Walter and myself are still awake, caught in the spell of this ugly, beautiful girl, and I am afraid. Very afraid. She has awakened something in me and I don’t like the wave of nausea I am having.
“What did they give you?” I say.
Faye stands. I see her in the bad light, short, frail, but incredibly strong. Next to her I feel insubstantial, flimsy and superficial. I think of the Phantom, of the Stumps. What did I really see there?
“What they gave me was a belief in man. A belief in myself. They never were beaten because they never once … not once … identified with their oppressors. They didn’t tell me, ‘If you don’t please the teacher, you are bad.’ Instead they told me that I may have to do what the teacher tells me, but I must realize that he is wrong, that he is often oppressing me. It was great for me. I loved my parents, and I have a hard time understanding people who make buffoons out of theirs.”
Now she is staring directly at me. How could she have known? Then I remember. This whole conversation got started because I was entertaining my friends by telling the “Glenn in the bathroom” stories. How I hate her for bringing this up.
“You didn’t live with me,” I say. “You don’t know what it was like with my folks. They were the exact opposite of yours.” She is stalking ba
ck and forth across the room now, her plaid cape trailing behind her, casting a long shadow, like some horrible vampire that will suck out the truth. I wish she would disappear. I want to meet nothing but bland people. I don’t want to be pushed anymore. I feel sick for mocking my folks. Suddenly the words “my father” come into my head, and I feel faint. For now, right now, with this total stranger pacing the floor, I feel the painful humanity Glenn possesses. It’s almost magical. For the first time in my life I understand that Glenn is a person, just like myself, with his own feelings, thoughts and misery. It’s a feeling I guess you are supposed to have somewhere around eight or nine but I have never felt until now. And with that come grave terrible doubts. How much have I shut out? How much have I killed off other people in fear, in vanity?
“You and your fucking stories,” I say to Faye.
“What?” says Walter. He is drinking some wine. I walk over to him and pick up the bottle. I am shaking all over.
“I am sick of your fucking stories,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to attack you. But if you get into certain political things you can’t allow easy satires like yours to go unchallenged.”
“What?” I say. I can’t hear her right. I can’t see her right. Everything is trembling.
“What has politics got to do with anything?”
“A lot,” she says, “if you understand the dialectic….”
“What is that?” I interrupt. “A fucking disease? Help me, doc, I got the dialectic.”
Walter is standing up with me. He is trying to hold me back. I must be swaying. I know he is only trying to help, but I am so ashamed of myself, so washed through with guilt, that I push him away.
“Listen,” I say, “I don’t need to hear any of your political riffs. You unnerstan’? I been through the whole boat ride of fucking answers. I been a Ace, a Stump, a con man, a saint, and I been fucked over all the time. So do not lay any of your Marxist ass views on me.”
I am slumped on the couch, my stomach sticking through my sweat-stained T-shirt. Susan is lying at my feet with her mouth open. I am Bobby Ward, and I seen it all. I had high hopes and now I am just like my old man, except worse. Both of us in the bathroom, two snakes of the toilet, sitting there shedding skins for the American Television Hour.
I stand up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say. “I, Bobby Ward, will now shed the first skin for you. First, the inner self. Shed and discarded at age seven. After that is gone all the rest are by necessity mere hallucinations and aberrations. Fake skins. Colored nice, lovely patterns, but they crumble at the first touch….”
I am waving the wine bottle high above my head, drowning in self-pity, amazed at my own disintegration. I who had such lofty ideals. But then, I know that’s a lie too. I haven’t had any ideals. Just wanted to find a good skin that I could wrap up in, be safe in. Now they are trying to sell me another new one—the radical skin. Dare to struggle. Dare to skin …
“Bobby,” Faye is saying, “I understand you. I know where you are at. I’ve been in jail, and nearly lost my head, but the one thing you must understand is that you are good. That it’s the pig who has put you through these gyrations. Do you think any healthy society would have people going to the lengths you have just to find themselves? You have to understand that what’s happening to you is happening to all of us, and if you want it to stop you have to understand the forces that have formed you….”
I am thinking of my old man. I see him there in that bathroom. I think of me in the bedroom, turning it into a TV play so I can deal with it. It’s a cartoon. You can deal with a fucking cartoon. But what happens to a mind that reduces reality to a cartoon? Where does the body go? Who owns the heart?
“I do not want to hear any more of your shit,” I say, pushing Walter.
“You need help,” says Faye. She is moving toward me. I know her game. They will get me soft so they can use me in the revolution. Or am I reducing them to a cartoon so I can handle them? Where am I? Who is on first?
“What’s on second,” I say.
“Help me get him to bed,” says Walter.
“Fuck the dialectic,” I say. “Faye, I know you. You are the little girl in the fourth grade, the one who cries because she only fucking got a ninety-three on her report card.”
I am enraged at them. How I want to smash them. Their dialectic. Their working class. My father. My cartoon. Help a man into the bed, but please master Marx, don’t you spill the wine.
XL.
Walter Is Not My Friend
Walter is not my friend. He and Faye are out to hurt me. With these absurd ideas ingrained in my paranoid head, I take up with Kirk and Susan. They do not like Walter and Faye either, so the three of us smoke grass, drop acid and listen to records all day. We talk a lot about our “freedom.” Here’s Kirk:
“Like Walter and Faye are always talking about the Movement and how you can be free through politics, uhhh, ummmm, ah, fucking roach burn my finger … cough cough gag.” Susan: “Yeah, and like they don’t understand about freedom. I mean, like we are free right now. Really free. Whereas they jes think they are free, the assholes…. Anybody wanna screw?”
Me (feeling very profound after thirteen Dexamyls, fifty joints, some nice coke and an acid tab) : “The whole freedom thing is a question that can’t be answered unless you are into the not-self, because freedom is not freedom to consume, but freedom from personality, and the not-self is all bound up with the dwarf self inside the leg o’ mutton goat blip of the future…. What the fuck you doing, Susan, get offa ma joint.”
Kirk: “Cop my joint awhile, Sue baby. Hey, man, that not-self rap was pretty heavy … I mean, very heaaaaavy.”
I listen and participate in all this idiocy, and when I have taken enough drugs it almost sounds real. Soon as I crash, however, and the head caves in like some old mine in a 1936 Western, and the fuse to the dynamite is burning burning burning and little Bobby Ward, hippie dope freak, is racing to put it out, and he covers it the last minute because he is sure that it’s a grenade but hey ho, what you know? it ain’t no grenade but a fuse after all, and it’s blowing up up up, the top of the head coming right off, kind of like a cliff of brown charred dirt with a rug of green slime moss on top, and it’s all blowing up again again into the blue smog sky. And I am sailing along through the air, Stump Family playing, and here I am rapping this complete nonsense, and Faye is absolutely right, I don’t know shit about Hegel or Marx or anything else, so why am I presuming to judge her, who does know, and you know Bobby Ward, as sure as the amphetamine crash leg pain in your ass is coming on, that you don’t like to give that Faye no credit because she is a woman, and you do stand condemned an adolescent who ain’t so young, an intellectual what thrown away his brain, a revolutionary fast turning old and fat, and worse, oh worse, a male chauvinist pig of the high hump order. You is bad.
And I am, oh friends, sitting alone in my ghost room, the drugs swirling in my burned-out singed good brain, and there come Faye and Walter down the street, not wasted, not defeated, not mouthing clichés, and oh how I would love to race down there and have them explain the diarrheafuckinglectic to me one more time. But do I dare? Ah no, because I am still trying hard hard hard to be a saint, still looking crystal vision into the Town of Thatched Rooves where all is dead, quiet and dull, and Fernando Roush is no longer a villain of any note, no longer the threat that makes the legs arms heart pump fearful but good life. Nah, he is nothing. Runs the movie projector and shows nothing but home movies. Here is one of his flying tapir pigs, but then you seen it all before, what say, Warren? Seen it all before.
“You are truly reduced to bathos,” says Warren.
“Yes,” I say, “tired and gray and old and only twenty-three years of age.”
Yes, it’s damn sad. Most unfortunate. I am on a sinking ship called Self, the U.S.S. Self, and I am too fucking tired to swim, and too embarrassed to call Help to another captain. And there before me, like a bea
con of all I hate, but still am, is the big SEARS sign pumping useless evil vibrations of purple blue energy out into the polluted capitalist Baltimore death-ray sky.
“Poetic,” says Warren. “Poetic.”
And now I am opening the window, though I feel like a fool, and the cold cold air is whipping in over my face, and hands, and Faye and Walter are looking up at me from the street.
“You wait a fucking minute there,” I say. “I’ll be right down.”
Published in Electronic Format by
TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, Ohio 45236
www.tyrusbooks.com
Copyright © 1972 by Robert Ward
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3387-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3387-7
******
“In Which the Narrator Becomes a Mountain Man and Harvests the Grapes of Wrath” and “In Which the Narrator Meets the Phantom of Cleveland and Learns That There Is No Business Like Show Business” originally appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1969.
“A Priest For My Parents,” “Art and Celery,” and “The End of Innocence and All That” originally appeared
in The Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1971.
