Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But Charlie did not say what I found on Smitty’s tape—that you were obviously into the unconscious and it was chemical.

  So then I knew, you see; but, the first three, four sessions, I held off broaching this with you. You see I knew maybe more than you.

  The South American in question; yes?

  I had known he might contact me. I knew he might need me. Even me. But I could not say this in short when the workshop broke up at eight-twenty and the guys crowded round the desk.

  Now why did I think that you were unaware of the message you were being used to convey from the South American to me? Your interest in the kernel of corn Juan had picked up in the yard seemed more than your interest in me, a bearer of other things.

  But no, you were no go-between, Jim. And would not use someone, though I feel that first letter is getting scrambled with my longer second— and shortened, especially after your hoped-for visits.

  But I know when I’m being treated like a person!

  The guys felt this in you. Efrain came out with things I didn’t know he knew. Like the guys thought of you as a friend. Hang loose; no sweat; the guy’s in the business, he wants to share some of his shit, give something back. I could have told you they’d be saying before you knew it, Hey Jim you ever need someone taken care of on the outside, you let me know—hey did you ever cover a contract? how about armed robbery? Ever cover a war? (But you knew the Cuban contact of our Chilean gentleman had asked where you in particular were coming from.) One guy who never said a word before tells of sticking up a drugstore with a piece of wood and a Volkswagen waiting outside. I had never seen you before. I said, "Were you ever in Brazil?"

  You turned at me and said hard factual stuff, but I felt that the messenger might be hearing double signals; and I know the message was meant for me while the response here must, in kind, include the cover: so do you recall you said quick-like, "I met Goulart before the coup. Some revolutionary he was!" All dollars and cents was what you said it was, the middle class losing their wages advantage over the working class, Goulart refusing to stabilize at the expense of the workers, so U.S. development money went to provincial anti-Goulart groups, the CIA went ahead via AFL-CIO to infiltrate Brazilian labor (listen, we ought to have a union, let the Teamsters take us on)—but it was all dollars and cents, you said, and liberals in Washington you said thought it was beautiful, undermining Goulart. ("A liberal," said Ahmed Williams who came one time in four, "is someone who wants for others what he doesn’t want for himself"—the talk gets abstract in here but penetrating.) All bucks, forget the change, you said.

  Something’s wrong with that view, Jim. I sound like my mother, who always had high hopes for Miriam, whose own young mother had shared at least the Catholic faith.

  Tell the South American he can get in touch with me direct.

  (Thanks for filling out the correspondence form.)

  He will understand, and I’ll get back to you whether or not you make it up here for that afternoon visit, be assured. Readers of outgoing mail say now and then they read these letters but when they get past first few lines like mine so little smut or legally inflammatory—and you ask does that teacher Ruth M. Heard ever write?

  Well, she could run, I’ll say that; small, not too thin, thick around the shoulders, lithe arms, prominent head of curls and when she faced you, her azure eyes came at you and at you, which there’s more of to come, though you understand that my account of the Norseman economist’s view of woman and my fascination with the Scot financier of kings, projector of Mississippi schemes, demand-and-supply monetarist who was first a man and far beyond the moneys he dreamed in, all this, Jim, is no mere opening screen played upon those outgoing-mail scanners who when they’re at the end of their rope have been seen actually holding a page upside down like they’re looking for something. Perhaps, like us, to do.

  And so let us say they never got to the mythical messenger. No more than they the spendthrifts of this state’s at last account fourteen grand per inmate-annum (who can’t imagine the lights of that messenger’s car seen intermittently round curves, through trees, like a series of signals, signal fires, smoke signals) will find each the key to his own nature, that "invisible government," Jim, but not to be confused with your liberal nightmare, that CIA they call the "invisible government" right down to the "evenings" they sponsor. Which isn’t—if you can stand one prison inmate’s non-violent reality—the invisible government I mean (though you as a stranger even to yourself whose motion’s a way of waiting, know what I mean?) the skeleton key to what Jim Mayn can do: and this home wherever you go or are, the two the same. You would not go to a siege zone and expect immunity from snipers (or Cubans!) because you’re Press. Alcatraz is where it was, but now nobody home, not the Spaniards or the British, and the Indians who "landed" there were not the first ones there, and during their protest wrote their high slogans on its walls so to the passing ferry the walls might speak. The Feds, in essence they gave it back to the Indians, but the Indians didn’t want it, I said to you; you laughed at me seeing me anew and deja vu and I would be willing to be your reincarnation, if you let me. If I was to plan—thanks for sending back the correspondence form—to be elsewhere, like Outside, I would get my wish one day but arriving there victorious I might find nothing to occupy, it’s like that communication system world round we discussed, Jim, when maybe you got nothing to communicate, that’s what Ruth Heard once said.

  And so I am here. Consumer of unseen leisure. A pat on the back for you that you don’t save letters much (you said—and I report—I the maker of carbons near-sighted reader of fine print practically on the end of my nose, in a book-lined study with grid-exposure on the west whence comes the mountain of my inspiration rumored in the stacks of force that one correspondent thinks is widely if slowly approaching, an old man sciencing radioactive weather, yes wrote me—and you boil all letters down in your mind, saving on head space since you doubted there could be as much unused brain capacity as the authorities are trying to make us believe. You saw me grin, man, I knew what you were saying. I who have diversified and know letters need to get lost if thrown away, just as I know what is small is better, idle need not be unused. But you don’t have to be so honest all the time with your new pen pals—Efrain, who’s writing a lot to his Iroquois girl sending her dreams; Smitty, who I wonder if he can smile with his eyes closed—please fill out the correspondence form—and if you write them you will find them very idealistic, Jim, souls, so with an exception here and there I wouldn’t expect these men to tell you their lives, if that is what you came for. Do we want your life?—there’s Shin, a Cambodian social worker (not assigned to prison), who seldom comes and come to think of it seldom writes except to apologize for not writing and to hint at problems in his personal life; so his marriage is on the rocks, maybe he’s got something going.

  Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract!, in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together—soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all—which is their secret from themselves.

  My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said—I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find
surcease from the metaphysics of normality . . . ? What are we going to do about it?"—yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!

  So that sometimes in this quest for things-to-get-in-the-way, I have felt the rock-bottom unit was Woman, so here, so there, so ever hard to pin down.

  You evinced experience of this unit, this constant; I did not ask your marital history; thought Efrain followed up on you saying you had something in common with us but all you said was "Crisis."

  And in the middle of the midnight of my pursuit which the South American economist about your age but bald traveling I feel sure you know under an alias seemed to understand in the brief time we spoke across the Visiting Room table so many months ago it’s years by calendar and even not by calendar (though the warp of this communication yields sometimes Efrain and sometimes only his absence, paroled)—followed by a second (but only by my count) stranger visit in the Visiting Room after our economist got back from a space launch—that visit the last time I heard from him till recently—I sometimes have felt that after all I have not found that unit and it’s as close as air and wherever I go it is with me, so I will not get shook when some former missionary in a sweater murmurs What a waste, as I’m standing by mop and pail, and I say that in my father’s house there are many mansions, but then see this missionary isn’t the same as the other, his brother, his twin, ever have a brother, Jim?, but then am reminded that, no, I indeed did find the fundamental unit microscopic as beings we’re made of, grand as thought, abstract as the age.

  And where is this letter by the way? In your hand? someone else younger? Here? Gone? Boiled down? To what?

  To be made like my earlier letter and our subsequent afternoon visit? You said you would check out colloids (like to see if there’s any left!). You didn’t read much "to speak of." Thank you for bringing the correspondence form with you. To answer your question, No, Ruth Heard doesn’t write. Of Cubans and our Chilean I cannot say, though one of former was visited by a tall, scarred man sent by a fortuneteller’s friend and it’s general knowledge he’s on the way out of here sooner than legal.

  I hear the black chant, the Muslim feet jogging down the concrete tunnel, study session’s over; I hear, I see, the men, two by two, the knitted caps, among them Willie Calhoun Jackson soon to be out on work release. And seeing this limited yet group consciousness bind these men, I think we are all . . . but you know what is coming, I felt it a century ago in the frequency emanating from natural sources, cloud, hail, mountain, human plasm making me, as I then was, a hole in somebody else’s head no doubt (smile)—but what is coming you know.

  The Colloidal Unconscious passed like a watchword so brief as to be unspoken from the South American through you was it by chance but really by itself. And so I know that he needs my help, though you might not know this, though you may know the gravity of his plight which I have not helped.

  All this goes too far too fast, and whatever is true in your racket, Jim, brevity’s wit may turn out gravity’s vacant nutshell (read "-house," as in "nut-" or read "multiple dwelling")

  Yet I slow down to be complete—holding no brief for speed, what do you really like doing fast?, in and of itself you get plenty of time to fix all that—then if you follow not for the purpose of honoring a super’s garbage cans which he would speak of and as often keep watch over in case a neighbor, a kid, even own daughter’s boyfriend at school should leave a lid unsecured having stashed an old out-of-state plate where any animal or other might get into the building’s garbage, which is neither here nor there I’ve learned later in three places which are all prison which in turn I may not have said, but it’s a very good experience being transferred, as I have been twice, no middle-of-the-night police-state nonsense, right after breakfast, and you can get well-known for being well-known.

  And when you get there you are as ageless as before though for once time done is space crossed, but might as well be the river in Australia longer than our Mississippi, endless as the abundant dairy products Miriam and I are farming in New Zealand calling to mind dairy-product cancer but also life as it was at first, where land is for the having.

  To own land, Jim: not theft, as Juan thinks, practicing on my typewriter till the last minute—eleven o’clock when the juice surges elsewhere leaving us in technical darkness. For even if such property comes down to your claim through heirs upon the future, it is a transient holding minor as an accident, kernel of corn falling from a bird, a wind; one corn falling like theory, evenly from heaven, not to mention the paper manufacturer’s daughter who in her race for the State Senate and in preparation for that long-winded body added to her pilot skills learned at our airfield just outside these walls with a course in bailing out, but overshot the acreage her father owns, and someday, always in skirts, she will own for miles all around airport and prison, and on the Sunday of a Puerto Rican festival she drifted down too low, and, clearing one rampart but not two, she found her fantasy skewed, she yanked her lines expecting an answer that wouldn’t come, accepted with total-body wit the double-chute bare bloom, nearly twisted her leg descending onto the volleyball net with its angry holes stretched in lost memory—practically landed in the caldron of beans and sausage which would not have ruined underwear she was anyhow bare of but dispersed a long line of PR inmates and families and could have corned the ice cream but missed the rice, the coffee urn, the bandstand wired for poetry at that point, and missed a man and a small boy playing catch in the sun—catching up on lost life with a third, a known visitor in a western fringe outfit and hit a picnic table by the far wall where Efrain was getting it on with his full-blood Iroquois girlfriend fingerprint masseuse though while kissing turning both their heads so he could watch the Unidentified Woman’s flight approach out of the corner of his eye.

  To touch down and be besieged by admiring strangers who, all but the Chilean’s associate the journalist Spence who had been talking to the Cuban’s little boy, could not be blamed for not knowing the industrialist’s daughter was the new owner of this land, if you see; for, sometime during my fourth or fifth year inside, the truth came to me (which I could never discuss with Shin the Cambodian would-be correspondent who when he used to come wanted to discuss the extra lift a guard gives you on your way up to the Box or how many assault problems per new inmate, plus profile which guys lose their wives in here within six months, ‘stead of basic problems like what I’m telling you came to me): that property is theft only of yourself: where are you if you have land? Why, you are there. It’s got you like the tax man leans on next year, which you have let’s say borrowed from him, but where is he if you want to blow him away or drive him nuts? You learn there’s a new man.

  They go away, and approaching what I hoped would not go away, I’ve known the great obstacle, which is to be not remembered, to be almost on the tip of someone’s tongue, no more, though that’s a beginning for you.

  The evening’s visitors, the program people, came up the long corridor, and there’s my Mayn in the rear chatting with the Austrian wife of the car dealer who turns and waits a beat as if to say to her, You O.K., dear?, and in the forefront comes a former missionary in a sweater, he knows me and I say, "Putting in your time?" and he, "Aren’t we all?," eyes rolling upward, but when I say, "But mine’s being paid for by taxpayers," he steps on, as if he’s thinking for the first time today, turns back toward me and I don’t know which of the sweatered former missionaries he is and so don’t know what of me he remembers, and say before he can say anything which is doubtful anyway, "In my father’s retirement compound no rooms are rent-free," and he turns to greet you, and you stop to shake a hand, grip an arm, say a name.

  And that obstacle, that being forgotten, I got to go down after it till you pass through the last nothing betw
een you and the ground and find a footing. Everything you find here, Jim, I have seen with both eyes for myself. So I remember the Y camp that let me in for two weeks one summer because I knew a lifeguard at a beach in the Bronx I’d never swum at; they let me into the Y camp even after I had trouble in school thanks to Ruth Heard, I mean really thanks, and it was the first time she was fired; and when I left camp to go home I wondered where she was and remembered the pine needles on the ground beyond the screen of the cabin where dew and early sun whispered to me, Jim—yet, more, I had in my head a watery place way under a float out in the lake supported on all sides by fuel drums so you had to dive down through the anchorage lines and come up into the cool tomb of air, empty drums smelling of mineral echo and containing inside them someone’s private motor faraway outboard, bike, chainsaw; and while the drums and slimy ropes were good obstacles to your being discovered, you heard the guys shouting far away. One day a black kid with reddish hair came up in there gasping like whispering his mistake, and we just breathed at each other and I didn’t tell him the air pocket was getting smaller and smaller and the drums was timed to go off at seventeen hundred hours, but then I did, and he said, "Shee-it, man." But then he got to believing the way I believed it, and we would swim in there from different directions under water like as much as twenty-five yards thinking seriously for the first time of saving energy even creating your own, and two kids who went to parochial school and I would dive off the float and get up on it again, one of them must have had an idea because one afternoon just before seventeen hundred hours he came back up under there in the center in our air space and couldn’t believe it when he saw us and looked from one to the other, back and forth, but I whispered that the air pocket was getting less and less and we had to get out of there, and he got scared of us, I saw his teeth, his white eyelashes, the water and shadow gave us speckled skin —I never thought of that—he was treading water like he had a cop running after him and he was grinning at me and over his shoulder at the red-headed black kid and I said there was only air for two minutes for two guys and what would that be for three guys and the kid said so quick it was like breathing in, Forty seconds for three, thirty for four, and the red-headed black kid and I reached for him and he started screaming and we pushed him down, down under and toward the ropes—why did we?—but we didn’t hear anything after that and on the train home when the two weeks were up I kept thinking the place would forget me. Just some crazy place? Because I knew I wasn’t coming back and anyway the float would be gone.