The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  And so we fell in love and that night slept side by side in a large bed while another man slept in another bed in the same room. We did not fuck. I felt we had anyway, that his body had moved into mine. And then he did move in. I met all the English concrete poets and learned to drink tea from morning to night. We invented Fluff, a kind of joke about how we were existing, which turned out to be our relationship. When we made love he refused to go down on me but wanted me to suck his cock. And when he looked at me I turned to lava.

  I went to Amsterdam to tell Jos it was over. In true romantic fashion I did this from a sickbed; I’d sent him a telegram the day before saying that I was too ill to come to him. Jos came to me and sat on the edge of my bed for an hour as I spoke about why we couldn’t go on. He was silent. (In the excess of my passion for John, I met another Englishman at one of Amsterdam’s canals and we made love too. I threw away his telephone number and regretted this later.)

  I returned to London and crazed days and nights with John. We shared a room on Lancaster Road near the Portobello Road. Our life was made of tarts, tea, cream and constant visits. One young man we visited, a poet, died the next year. His girlfriend later made love with John. I later made love with a close friend of John’s. We all were trying to continue connections that had once been.

  John wore a thick wool robe and I wore a Japanese kimono that was always open to him. My thoughts were Spenserian; I was the true love and even if I were to go he would know the false from the true. I went to New York and stayed two months, sleepwalking around the city, seeing friends, going places, possessed. Nancy hardly knew me. I earned money to return, and when I did, went to Susan and David’s. They told me John had been acting very strangely. So I phoned him and he hardly said hello. The next day he phoned me and asked me to come see him. He told me he was encased in glass. We spoke for more than an hour. He refused my presents and presence. He had gotten very thin and cut his hair short; he looked like a monk. I left his room and spent two months, waiting, in a Victorian nightgown. Anyone who has ever worn a Victorian nightgown knows its meaning, it is the gown of an inmate. I took Valium and waited, would see John on the Portobello Road on rare walks out.

  Over an Indian dinner a friend of his told me John was living with another woman. It was just after I’d bitten into a piece of food wrapped in silver paper. It was the beginning of the end of true romance, a fall that lasted two years.

  I dreamt that I was with my father in my home town. We are driving around the 20th Century Fox Estate. My father asks if I can settle down again and I say I don’t know. Suddenly I am running wildly, wildly, down a wide path with trees lining each side. A man on horseback approaches and I leap out of the way only to hit a smaller horse, a pony. The pony drops to the ground. The man dismounts. My father reappears. The horseman looks very sad. “He’s not dead,” I cry. “I merely hit him.” “No,” the horseman says, “he’s not dead, but he is blind. We’ll have to shoot him.” I scream.

  I told John’s friend the dream—he is the one I, woodenly, make love with in the future—and the friend said that there are lies in dreams too. I avoided speaking to people for a while.

  CHAPTER 9: Suspicions Confirmed

  By now everyone knows that Valium is one way to get over a love affair. After taking those pills long enough, life becomes intensely fair: everything is the same. In this condition I visited friends and acquaintances with equanimity. Even people I didn’t like. At one home I met Tim, a fringe Hollywood exile, actor and public relations person for something or other. He was also a photographer. I met him and went home without expectation of particular interest, this being one of Valium’s cachets.

  One week later the phone rang in the middle of the night. He said he’d been trying to reach me for a week, had even wired an office in New York at which he thought I worked. His enthusiasm only intrigued me.

  He arrived with flowers and bought me steak. We got stoned and Tim called his friend Harold, a black Englishman who seemed to represent to Tim all that was cool and noble in the world. Harold invited us to his girlfriend’s house outside London, and drove us in his car. I sat in back which was all right with me as I had become morose and paranoid. We were all very stoned, and I assumed we wouldn’t arrive at the home of the ambassador from, I was told, a small African nation. Harold was dating the ambassador’s daughter.

  Sitting alone in the back seat of the car, I kept thinking that Harold was driving sideways, that the road was giving way at every turn, that the car might fly into the air. I distrusted Tim inordinately, and Harold was looking at Tim, and not at the road. Their laughter encouraged my worst fears.

  We arrived at the ambassador’s house and were introduced to his children. Harold’s girlfriend was the eldest daughter. She led us to the basement which had been converted into a game or conference room. It was filled with six oversized leather lounge chairs. Like every ambassador’s daughter I’ve ever met, she had been educated in a French convent. The four of us sat in chairs much too big for us. I grew more and more alarmed. I hadn’t the slightest desire to fuck Tim but there seemed no way out. There was an inevitability about the night. I was being driven places I didn’t want to go. The mode was ineluctable.

  Harold drove us back to the city and dropped us at my place. Tim and I smoked some African grass. I stared at him, and he became recognizable. “You look,” I said, “like my father’s charcoal gray Perry Como sweater.” He looked at me quizzically but still advanced. I couldn’t understand why, I thought my remark was devastating.

  Tim’s stupidity was dangerous. When finally we were fucking, he was given to calling out, “That’s some cunt. That’s some cunt.” In my condition his love-talk became absurd exaggeration. He made too much of a good thing (I thought). His enthusiasm grew as I retreated inside, and as if to draw me out, to reach me, he whispered bloodlessly, “I’d like to kill you with my cock.” That was it. I knew it—in bed with a dangerous maniac who wants to kill me with his cock. All my suspicions were confirmed. This whole evening I was hanging on the edge of the fence, rigid with suspicion that was now given credence.

  I drew back from his embrace and looked at his eyes which had narrowed. “That’s horrible.” I said, “I can’t continue.” It was impossible to prove to him that I was not crazy. The blind leading the blind and other such homilies come to mind. Besides I was in no position to argue.

  It turned out that the wife I didn’t know about was coming back from her vacation and I wouldn’t have to see Tim ever again. When he left the next morning he gave me his sweater to keep.

  CHAPTER 10: Just an Accident

  I was staying away from men and lived and worked in Amsterdam where I found it easy to do so. A Dutchman let me use his back room and I camped there for the good part of a year. The Dutchman was depressed and cynical. I knew he wanted me to leave and, when Carla suggested I join her and George Maciunas for a trip around the Greek islands (George wanted to buy one), I had to get there. Jos found me some money, a six hundred guilder scam, and I went by train to Greece. Three days and two nights on the Athens Express in a compartment with a Greek man from Thessaloniki who fed me feta cheese, bread and olives. I read Jane Austen while on the train and feared that I might have to marry the Greek man, as several Greek women would pass our compartment and give us knowing smiles. I’m not one not to smile back and was relieved when he got off at Thessaloniki and I was not with him.

  Carla and I settled again in Xania and she left before I did. I got very brown and into a little trouble, saying goodbye only because my money had run out. I returned to Amsterdam.

  Jack Moore once said, “We are all going to be in Munich for the 1972 Olympics.” I nodded, “Oh, yes?” and found myself there in the summer of 1972, along with twenty or more actors in Jack’s theater company, The Human Family.

  The hill of garbage, the rubble from World War II outside Munich since the postwar cleanup, is the site of the O
lympiad. An artificial lake separates the games from the Spielstrasse, play street, where artists from Western Europe, Japan and America are to perform. The lake is polluted. The Olympics committee spent millions of marks to make Kultur at the games.

  The Human Family was a participation theater group, using films, music, video and slides. I helped organize the production and directed some of the films. In Munich I also became a performer in the theater group, something I would ordinarily never do, having a horror of appearing in public, acting on a stage, but this was an extraordinary situation, more surreal than Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Teacup and Saucer. I wrote postcards to friends, extolling this quality, and mentioned the thighs of the athletes.

  The Spielstrasse abounds with German romantics who never die. Every tourist has some piece of equipment around the neck, arm or back. Busloads of varying nationalities embark, disembark, to watch theater pieces, clowns, conceptual artists, and then cross back over the polluted lake to see the games.

  The German romantic I met was called Karl. He was political, did yoga seriously and ate macrobiotic food. We spent several evenings in The Human Family’s common room. Karl whispered and blew in my ear for three hours.

  Our theater company performed every night. The piece began on the top of the hill. We ran downhill, each with a flashlight in both hands, waving our arms in the shape of the infinity symbol. I spent a good part of each day anxiously awaiting the run downhill. Even with our flashlights on, I was certain we couldn’t be made out and I was afraid of rolling down the hill. But my fear about rolling downhill was small compared with what I felt about jumping onto the stage and going into slow motion. We were wearing overalls, too. Twenty of us in gray uniforms. After moving very slowly, we were directed to stare out at the audience which should have gathered at the foot of the stage. From this bunch each of us was to choose a person to encounter and bring him or her up on stage. It was, for me, the worst kind of popularity contest. At the end of the piece we handed out donuts—the piece was also known as the Donut piece—and everyone danced around gaily to Shawn Phillips music written especially for the production. Our group earned the reputation for being very high, happy people, and often other Spielstrasse workers joined us for the dance.

  Charley was one such worker. It took me some time to consider Charley seriously. Thinking in the midst of the Olympics, and while a member of a theater group that makes donuts its symbol, thinking was hardly possible. Charley just entered my life. He smiled a lot and so did I.

  Then the Israelis were murdered, and everything stopped. I didn’t know what was going on. No one did.

  Charley came to see me. I was alone. The rest of the company had gone to the country. We spread all the pillows on the floor and lay down. The door opened and three members of the West Indian steel band—they lived rhythmically across the lane—walked in. We were both naked and the men stood over Charley and me. They seemed to have no intention of leaving. What with our group’s easygoing reputation on the Spielstrasse, this might have been expected. We asked them to go, and they did. A few minutes later one came back and asked if he could be next. That’s the way it began.

  The Spielstrasse was closed because of the murders, “the political situation,” as it was called, but the games were allowed to continue. All the theater groups and artists met to protest the trivial way in which Kultur was treated. The meetings ended in futility. The Japanese director Shuji Terayama and his group, which performed in costumes of black, red or white, succeeded in getting back on to the Spielstrasse. They started a fire and burned down their set, they burned everything. The flames could be seen for miles.

  Everyone was going home. Charley asked if he could come with me to Amsterdam. I was surprised. Even more surprised when I discovered he already had a child, whose mother was a smart and crazy amphetamine-head. They lived in Paris.

  We returned to Amsterdam and lived and worked together for more than a year. I hadn’t lived like this for a while, and it was healthy to be fucking regularly. But Charley and I never did have much to say to each other. One day he came to me and said we shouldn’t live together anymore; I lost him to a commune and his best friend, whom I couldn’t stand to be around. It was hell for a couple of months and, when the hell was over, I rarely if ever thought of him again. This alone struck me as demeaning. A physicist once told me that one view of our universe is that its stability is an accident, that thousands upon thousands of relationships are unstable and that chance alone holds ours together.

  CHAPTER 11 : Lean Times

  Watching an English television play reminds me of life with Roger, an English actor I lived with for two months. Charley and I had split up, work at the film cooperative was impossible—no one cooperated. The book I’d finished editing a year before still wasn’t published and into this hole came an English acting company. The play they brought to Amsterdam was adapted from a novel a friend had written and the author being a friend, the cast became friends too. Of course no one makes friends that easily.

  It was Edward whom the author told me to look up, but I looked instead at Roger who was playing pinball after the play. It was, oddly enough, Valentine’s Day. Two years before I’d written a short story on this day about the day and this year I found myself falling in love again. It is safer to stay indoors.

  Three nights later Roger and I walked around Amsterdam, drinking in several bars, walking around and around, the way one can in Amsterdam, the city having been built in a semicircle. “Not tonight,” I told Roger. We ended up at four a.m. in an Indonesian fast-food joint on the Leidesplein and ate peanut-covered meat. Shaslik.

  Economics affects our life specifically: I had no money and no place to live since leaving the film cooperative. I had been living off the fat of the land and now, further into the seventies, there wasn’t so much excess. Everything was getting tighter. After all those flowers and assassinations, optimism had died. Business went on as usual. Lean times. Roger had a small house in London and a rented cottage in Norfolk.

  Our third night in Amsterdam we smoked and ate some hash. We took a walk and as we walked I felt we weren’t getting anywhere. There may be no progress, but still I felt we weren’t moving at all. Roger was staying in a small hotel, the one set aside for English actors when they came to Amsterdam. They came often—Dutch theater is lamentable. He said as we got closer to the hotel, “How are we going to get to my room?” The usual question of getting past the room clerk. With all the wisdom I could muster I replied, “We’ll just walk up the stairs.” Roger was amazed at this profundity, so simple, so direct, and indeed the way to his room was just past the room clerk and up one flight of stairs. The route to Roger himself was not so direct.

  The next morning he left the hotel to stay at Mimi’s house. I couldn’t tell from the way Roger described Mimi and her situation if he was in love with her or she with him. In any case he described her primarily as a friend and an older woman, as if that would invalidate her. Later she and I became friends, and Roger’s deviousness was reflected in phrases like “an older woman.” It was hard for me to fuck Roger with Mimi below us in her solitary bed. The next night Roger agonized about whether or not we could make it with each other.

  That Roger would leave town soon made our week intense, sweet. There’s nothing like the promise of absence to make presence felt. When he left my bed to cross the Channel, Charley came to see me and asked me to live with him again. We could squat a house, he said. I figured his coming to me had to do with smell but he was two weeks late and I wanted to get the hell out.

  Spring in London. I filmed Roger in Hyde Park and in the garden. I baked apple pies, wrote poems about making apple pies—rhyming pie with die—and took to watercolors again. What an interesting couple we made. We went to his cottage in Norfolk. Listened to Stevie Wonder on the radio and I wrote letters about cricket, actors, country life; my letters were shaped with Jane Austen in mind. She was my model for the gente
el English country life. The English have got cottage life down, like having tea at four. We visited the neighboring Lord and had a discussion about tied cottages. The pound may have dropped as we spoke.

  We returned to London. I took a job in the neighborhood, making twenty pounds a week for a five-day regime. And we shared the cost of living together. I continued to cook. Susan visited from Amsterdam and noted that she thought I was playing house. I was very serious when I played, though. Roger thought my friends were weird and I thought his superficial.

  My book was up in the air and my plan was to return to Holland, read the proofs and come back to Roger and our routine life. Roger’s heart, about which I heard a great deal, made it hard for him to be honest. He never wanted to hurt anyone. And while he liked me, he was still in love with the one before me. The day I left for Holland she moved right back in. Roger didn’t let me know this, his heart was so big, for months and months.