Class Warfare

by D. M. Fraser

  Snake seizes the necessary pause: “Pardon me, gotta piss.”

  … Those valleys that seem to wait, in a parody of resignation, for the avalanche to come crashing down on them. Ravening wolves around the homestead, snow piling up. We’re out of ammunition, fuel, brown rice, canned goods. Dearly beloved, we are gathered together …

  “I’m back again.” Snake resumes diplomatic relations with his chair; Jamie by now is talking to the ashtray, the mirroid rim of his glass, the grey point in space, fractionally past the extremity of his vision, that invites and forgives. “This may be less irrelevant than it seems,” he says. “The train I took was late, hours behind schedule, as trains usually are. There was no lack of time to deal with the matter at hand. I ate a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches, drank whisky sours in the club car, slept crammed in a coach seat, and dreamed TV test patterns somehow involving young women, their bright uncomprehending eyes, their bounteous flesh. Woke hearing voices, gibberings in the steam pipes. Backyards heaped with automotive wreckage went by, yawning.”

  “You feel like gettin’ into some dope?”

  “Later. Why do you keep on sitting here, listening to this?”

  “If I go over there, they’ll beat the living shit out of me.”

  Mine, all mine, like some congenital ailment passed on unmentioned through dour generations too proud, too self-deluded, to speak of it. Mine, because I was in the neighbourhood.

  Snake blows smoke rings, three of them, with dignity. “I’ll say one thing for you,” he mumbles, “you sure know a lot of words.”

  “I just wish I could figure out what to use them for,” Jamie says. “That’s always been the problem. The words have to add up to something, you see.”

  The expression on Snake’s face is that of someone trying, against impossible odds, to suppress a fart. He’d like to get away from here, but there doesn’t seem to be an exit. “I thought you were telling me a story.”

  “I was. I am. Have I lost the drift?”

  “You were talking about the train.”

  “Of course. Of course I took the train, for all the proper and sentimental reasons, too. Maybe it was love, of a kind. We were all brought up to love the railroad, remember? That endless steel clothesline down which all our public wash is hung—the sooty sheeting we live behind, all manner of metaphysical towels, the underwear of inmost desire … It was all supposed to make sense. But the sense I could make of it was never the one they used to promise us. I guess I felt … betrayed. It was as if the whole damn country had arrived, piece by piece, by direct mail from some great Eaton’s Catalogue in the Sky, marked Launder before wearing. Perhaps that was the revelation I’d gone looking for, when I didn’t know what I was doing. Perhaps it was the function of the train actually to disclose this to me, to show me what I needed to see this one time only, before I turned my eyes away forever. Mind if we split this beer? … Thanks. The vision was there, all right, even if it was a bit out of focus: it was there … These oblique perspectives across our notorious geography, accidents of shadow, cacophonies of light: in all that, I could almost get hold of it. A romantic delusion, probably, the sort of thing I swore I wouldn’t fall for. You know how it is.”

  “You feel like another round?”

  “Yeah. Things get complicated. I must have realized, by then, that the enterprise was hopeless. There was no way to get back, because there wasn’t anything left to get back to. The stories were all fictions, no matter that some of them might really have happened to someone. The songs were … entertainment. What was going past outside the window was exactly what it looked like, nothing more. Anything I did with it, anything I made it mean, was my own fault. It was simply out there …”

  “If you say so,” Snake interrupts, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Closing time approaches stealthily. Gladys Gorman mops her forehead, clears her throat, wonders for the umpteenth time why she bothers singing for this crew of loudmouths. And now, by special request—thanks for the beer, boys—I’ll do just one more number. Just one more. Take it away, group … The group takes it away:

  Say farewell to the high-steppin’ ladies

  Say goodbye to the high-livin’ men …

  Snake stretches, burps, hauls himself more or less upright. “Well,” he says, “see you around.” “Sure.” Jamie’s head is beginning—beginning?—to grow muzzy, his vision to dissolve. Good ol’ Lonesome Town, he thinks irrelevantly. Listen, we will hang in here, until we die. I will hang in here, until I die. Fuck you, all of you, I’m hanging in here, hanging in, until I die. Play me that raunchy goodbye music, until I die. Play it loud and sweet for me, before I die. Play me your good ol’ New York San Francisco Galveston Detroit City Las Vegas blues, until I die. “I remember now,” Jamie says to the empty table, to the world at large. “When I was on the train, it was snowing outside. It was in the afternoon, I’d been sleeping, I’d just wakened up. The sky was exactly the colour of the snow, so there was no horizon, no visible distinction between land and sky; everything I could see through the window was one solid, impenetrable, featureless mass of white. I couldn’t help thinking: there’s nothing out there. Nothing. It was as though the entire world of objects, beyond the train, had finally disappeared, gone absolutely away, away, away, into nowhere …”

  “Hey pal, you gonna chugalug that there beer?” It’s a waiter, looking restless. “Can’t sit here all bloody night, y’know.”

  The hell with it. “The blankness returns, again and again. In Lonesome Town, outside this very building, I know it’s there, waiting to come down. When the blankness comes down, as it will, what can I do but construct landmarks? Something to recognize, take my bearings by. Grain elevators of the spirit, looming up out of the whiteness, the horizonless plain. Utilitarian structures, perfectly functional. No one said they had to be beautiful. Tall, angular grain elevators, like those in dead-end prairie towns, glimpsed with relief, with gratitude, from a speeding train … But what can I find to store in them? What harvest will ever yield enough to fill them?”

  —Fingernail clippings. Silence. Scandalous love letters in medieval Spanish, hidden for centuries from the Inquisition. One Irish Sweepstakes ticket, never redeemed. Dozens of empty aerosol cans, ticking inwardly. A deck of slightly greasy Tarot cards. The clues are everywhere. All the ten-dollar watches discarded, with such regret, when the warranty expired. Christmas cards from relatives in Ottawa, Providence, and Pasadena. Beer cans, chicken bones, used tinfoil, milk cartons, a few hairs from my first moustache, the one my father made me shave off before Aunt Letty’s funeral. Messages from collection agencies, anarchist tracts, out-of-date address books, liver pills, fishnet briefs from Joe’s of Hollywood, the operating instructions (in Japanese and English) for several standard household appliances, a photograph of the Royal Family. Anything, anything sufficiently random—

  “HEY ASSHOLE! DRINK UP!”

  The monologist goes by, majestic in her towering hat. “Okay okay okay okay okay okay,” she murmurs, as the door swings shut behind her.

  IX. Safe Passage

  Closing time’s past now, you’re the last malingerer, the lights are blinking on and off like the axons and dendrites you sacrificed long ago. For whatever it’s worth, this is where you are, doing your damnedest to gulp down the dregs before they—they, whose power in this night is absolute—take it away from you, speed you gently into the cold world outside. With luck, you’ll be allowed to finish that beer (just one more, it’s orders, sorry …), and because you haven’t been noisy or violent, they’ll grant you an undisturbed heartbeat or two in which to glug it down, guiltily. A shame to waste the good stuff, right? Right. Swill that slop, get it off the table, if you gotta puke do it outside, okay? Okay okay okay okay … It’s the same everywhere. The night is still in its adolescence. You haven’t made a conquest, you haven’t been conquered, and you seem to have spent most of your money. Dead-end folk out in the street sing songs about this hour, and so will you, soon enou
gh. If you can still wrap your tongue around the words … And knowing you, you glib bastard, you’ll find a way to do it. You’ll find a tune.

  The bar is shut down; the lights won’t come on again; you’re the one poor murky-eyed holdout in this dump … You wanna sleep, buddy, we got rooms upstairs, y’know. Okay okay. The assignment at this point is to get up from the table (with a semblance of dignity, if possible), to gather together cigarettes, stray coins, articles of apparel, to get the hell out. You can walk upright, after the fashion of Homo sapiens, and they’re showing you the path. Follow it. Try not to bump too often, or too conspicuously, into the tables, the chairs, the recreational facilities, the management and staff. Good night, good night, take care goin’ home. The door, closing, expresses relief. Try not to bump into, bang into, the buildings outside, the granite walls that line this street. (But be glad they’re there, anyway, a solid surface to hang on to, if nothing else; what goes on inside them, in daytime, is another matter and no concern of yours now …). At the corner, you can sway a bit if you must—just don’t fall—ahh, praise heaven, the light’s green and there’s no traffic of consequence in the streets. Nothing to worry about …

  Across the intersection the Heartbreak Hotel is a friendly face, grinning welcome: large eyes moist with invitation, pointy mid-Victorian ears alert, behind those walls a refuge of sorts, ol’ lady down on her luck but good enough in the sack. No demands … You could go there. But for some obscure reason, right now, you don’t want to go there. Steady, steady. The streets are quiet, in Lonesome Town.

  There’s no arguing with that: the streets are quiet. You discover that when you notice that your own feet, thudding down the concrete, are the loudest sound around. True, an occasional car goes by, with a blast of tuned exhaust to put things in perspective, an almost friendly flicker of taillights before it disappears; it must have a destination somewhere, you’ll never know where, and it seems to be in a hell of a hurry to get there. Out of town. You know (leaning here at this stoplight, grateful for the respite, collecting your wits, your nerve, for the plunge across seas of asphalt), you remember: there’s always an out-of-town, situated along, or off, the highway you came in on. Cars like this travel there, and back, late at night, at illegal speeds. People drink beer and rye in them, pass the emptying bottles back and forth, digest that air that is part smoke, part plastics, part unutterable raunch, permanently unfulfilled. Out of town there are still, mysteriously, places to go, at least some puzzle of roads to follow, gravel flying, to some rendezvous; what’s actually there doesn’t matter. What matters is the bottle salvaged, or swiped, from the night’s festivity, and someone to drink it with under the generous sky, and the radio going all the while, running the battery down:

  New York Ted

  New York Ted

  C’mon baby won’t ya gimme some head

  Well I’m yer Bayou Boobie born and bred

  New York Ted

  oh yeah

  New York Ted …

  Oh yeah. It all comes back on you, you’re spared no childish regret, here in the tranquil desolation of Lonesome Town, after closing time. You’d like nothing better, now, than to set out on another wild ride, in a car incongruously chopped and channelled, you and your buddies spinning down that blackness past truck stops and shuttered motels and gas stations closed for the night, the season … Was it ever like that, except in dreams? In the old days, your buddies went to the city, made their escape as you made yours, and returned triumphant in such cars, thereafter to tell tales of fabulous adventures, women with unquenchable cunts, all-time definitive fights, parties so crazy the cops came—heh-heh. It was a privilege to listen. You, novitiate, slouched in the Naugahyde seats, spread your greaseboots on the fur carpeting, tried to look wise at the right times, and after you’d heard the stories often enough you could sing along with the radio like everyone else:

  New York Ted

  New York Ted

  Got himself a missus and a double bed

  Well he used to be a junkie but now he’s a Red

  New York Ted

  Sure, the cars ended up rusting in backyards, weeds growing up through the floorboards, seats smelling richly of Abandoned Pontiac—not a bad aphrodisiac, come to think of it, for a dead-fish-and-sulphur summer’s night, with Mad Molly the best thing in town, the best you, at any rate, could aspire to … It wasn’t necessary to explain anything. She always knew, completely, what was being asked for, and in what fashion. You’d spent the night cruising around with the pack, up and down the prescribed route, nudging bumpers at stop signs, and when you got tired of that there was one more door you could open at will, even the busted backseat door of a wrecked and forgotten Pontiac—even that, and Molly would look at you dumbly with uncomplaining eyes, accepting (so you thought) everything. Taking it all in. The urgent frustrated struggle with stuck zippers and snaps, underwear, the intricate network of buckles, straps, things that didn’t seem to do anything but get in the way … the haste, then the ceremonies of gratitude, the cold business, when it was done, of going away.

  (Of course, nostalgia’s the local disease of Lonesome Town, ’n’ you don’t get it drinking the water. Just be thankful you never got the syph. And of the cars flashing past you tonight, the few that there are, not one is going to stop for you.)

  Quiet, quiet. You can hear, loud as birds, the buzz of your scruffy denim rubbing against itself, last epoch’s bell-bottoms colliding: no doubt it has something to do with the way you’re walking. Gotta get out of these blues somehow. There aren’t a lot of pedestrians about, at this hour. There are, in fact, precisely two: yourself, barely mobile, and someone in an untimely overcoat who’s bound to ask you for money, if you linger. Trouble is, in the money department, you’re running perilously close to the line. And you haven’t the muscle to say what you’re thinking, which is: Why don’t you pick on the rich? Oh well. Keep on going. If you stay where you are much longer, you’ll be here in the morning, and the pigeons will think you’re a statue.

  What’s called for, at this point in the narrative, is a Good Companion, a guide—as the bards of old well knew, every proper Dream-Vision includes one—faithful and helpful and, yes, Steadfast and True: that’s the convention, and at moments like this a highly useful one. Granted, it’s definitely an exotic type these days, but then you have to expect some exotica in a place like Lonesome Town; you can even request it, if there’s none there for the taking. In medieval times this companion appeared most often in the body of a small animal: a dog, usually, the trusty hound who Knows the Way. (Unsubstantiated accounts also report elephants, antelopes, gophers, ostriches.) In this age, you can’t be choosy. Admit it, any good-hearted greaser with a bottle would be welcome now, any streetwise strumpet. Come on, G.C., let’s see you manifest yourself right here in the echoing main street of Lonesome Town, okay? And bring the keys to all those lightless doors behind which—please god—the real weirdness, the secret life of things, is going on. (For I hunger and thirst after weirdness, tonight …)

  The alternative won’t really bear thinking about: probably an interminable television movie in the hotel lobby—some jingoistic Korean War Classic, more than likely, wholesome platoons of the brave dressed up in snappy camouflage, mucking around in the implausibly undefoliated jungle, dealing the appropriate retribution to the appropriate enemy. Or were they already gooks, even then? … “Ol’ pal … when you get … home … tell Mom I … oh my god the pain … it hurts, Joe, it … hurts so bad … KATIE … oh, Katie, Katie …” Well, enough of that. Good Comp, you’d better hustle your buns over here.

  These buildings seem to be mostly warehouses, rubbydub lodging houses: this must be the part of town they steer the tourists away from. No wonder. (Idle thought: where the hell are the whorehouses? Didn’t Agnes say, that first day in the hotel, that fucking’s the regional industry around here?) At hand, anyway, is an all-night café called, in the nominative custom of the vicinity, All-Nite Café. It’s almost deserted; the Girl
of No One’s Dreams is mopping the floor, singing to herself:

  New York Ted

  New York Ted

  Since you split I wish I was dead

  Miss your shoulder to lay down my head

  New York Ted

  It may be a mistake to go in. She’ll stop singing then; she’s not allowed to sing for customers, isn’t paid to be live entertainment. Better to stay outside, skulk by the window, listen. Her voice, received through the smudgy glass, is oddly pleasant, an anomaly in this night. Her hair falls dully brown as she mops, hating the work. It is reasonable, an act of sanity here, to hate the work. You can pause, knowing this, taking it (briefly) for the wonder it is …

  Because: you needn’t look elsewhere for wonders on this street, in Lonesome Town; the hooded windows and blank doorways promise other things, the murmurous rumours spoken of, haltingly, in pastel-walled clinics where the Wise Minister dispenses the new dispensation, dryly, to such as you who never wanted it. Though when you’ve got the screaming meemies you’ll accept what’s offered, what’s there, in pastel clinic or main street Lonesome Town—even if you’ll have to chuck it away later. For the screaming meemies are indeed lurking around out here in this forbidding territory, as everywhere else, and if you squint just so, you’ll see them, looking not unlike something Goya could have drawn: remember The sleep of reason brings forth monsters? Sure you do. Nasty furry little beasts, hungry as hell—and they’ll get you if FOR ONE INSTANT. you. relax. your. grip. on yourself. If you let go your pale, beleaguered, intricately scrambled self, drunk halfwitless, taking a moment’s breather against this phonepole, eavesdropping (and, of course, incorrigibly liking it in spite of everything):