Once he told me about the death of his grandmother, who had lived with his family in New Jersey: as a youngster, he’d come home one afternoon and gone into her room to find her sitting in her chair. “And though she looked just as if she were asleep, as soon as I walked in, I knew she was dead.” It had been quite an uncanny experience for him. And, seventeen years later, when my mother called to tell that my own grandmother had died, shortly after I’d gone to see her at St. Luke’s Hospital, it was Ron’s story that came back to me.
We talked about sex a few times: Ron saw himself as straight; I saw myself, then, as bisexual (with lots of silent questioning about the “bi-”). Ron seemed mildly curious, but generally accepting. And there was nothing sexual between us, nor did I want there to be. Once, on the platform of the West Fourth Street subway station, when the conversation had, I thought, moved away from one or another of these somewhat sensational topics, Ron suddenly said, “You know, I was at beauty school.”
I looked at him, not sure of the transition.
“Yeah. Just after high school. That’s what I wanted to do. Set women’s hair and do makeup and stuff. So I enrolled in beauty school. Well, maybe I didn’t want to do it. I just wanted to make my parents mad. It did, too. I never told anybody about it—I mean, especially if you’re down in Texas, working on a fucking shrimp boat. But I did.”
But by now the subway had come, and we got on to roar off to wherever we were going.
I was never quite sure what Ron meant by this “confession.” A long-faced, hazel-eyed, Swedish American, burned darker than myself by his months on the Gulf and more good-looking than not, Ron would strike most as a boat worker before a beautician. He wasn’t trying to tell me that, really, he was queer. (“Gay” was not a word I used or thought with at the time: though I knew it, it then seemed to me, and to most others I suspect, insufferably campy.) I’m sure of that because he was too honest about the fleeting and, to him, uninteresting homosexual experiences he’d had. Perhaps it was a way of saying that he’d known other homosexuals before. But I never was too clear on it.
I knew only that it had been offered as something personal; and that’s how I took it.
Our initial plans were, after getting to Europe, to buy a cheap car and drive about the continent. Like so many other born New Yorkers, however, I’d never learned to drive. So on one of my visits to New Jersey, Ron attempted to teach me, using his father’s Packard. The lesson went well enough for the first forty minutes, as I cruised easily up and down the suburban streets with Ron beside me offering instruction and encouragement—then, somehow, I scraped the fender of a parked car. We stopped. A very blond woman in a very blue dress burst from a nearby doorway (where her bridge club was meeting), looked at the eight-inch scratch on her fender, and became hysterical. She’d had a car accident only the week before and was apparently on some sort of probation from her husband, to the effect that if she had another, he would never let her drive again. In the midst of tears, a bored policeman’s questions, curious neighbors who’d drifted out to see what was going on, and general guilt and recriminations, we exchanged necessary information. The scratch cost me ninety-two dollars of the money (only about fourteen hundred, by that time) on which I had planned to live for a year in Europe. Driving lessons were abandoned, and Ron and I decided that if we managed to get a car abroad, the driving instruction would be done there.
59.3. Back on East Sixth Street, Ana read over an early typescript of “The Star Pit” and said that it needed something more; and the next day I wrote what is now the opening movement of the tale, telling of Vyme and his commune on the beach beneath the double sun, as well as the transition into the story of Ratlit, Alegra, and Sandy as I had first written it. At that point, however, I felt it needed something still further—and stuck the ms. in the back of my guitar case to take with me to Europe, where I thought I might work on it more.
59.4. Bobs Pinkerton had recommended a young agent to me through one Hans Stefan Santesson: Henry Morrison, who was just starting his own literary agency at the time. Henry and I met in the small, cluttered office I believe he then shared with Hans, and we talked a bit on matters ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to the Ace Books contract on Babel-17 to the possibility of writing some restaurant reviews while I was abroad: I found him amiable, well-informed, and sharply intelligent; and we both agreed it was a good idea to have somebody in the States to handle my writing business while I was abroad. A day or two later I delivered to him a number of my adolescent novels—Voyage, Orestes! (1963), Those Spared by Fire (1958), Cycle for Toby (1958), Afterlon (1959), The Flames of the Warthog (1960), The Lovers (1960), and The Assassination (1961).
59.5. In the course of my last weeks in the city I’d managed, almost inadvertently, to acquire a lover, named Allan, who worked at a typing pool near Columbia. He was a thin, neurotic nail-biter (which first attracted me to him), though after our initial night (did we meet at the Christopher Street docks …?), he took to showing up at my Sixth Street apartment in large, colorful silk scarves, which just weren’t my style. I realized rather quickly that he was more attracted to me than I was to him. And I was thankful that the specter of Europe in a week or two’s time hung over our relation from the beginning, an immovable severance. As a going-away present, two days before I left, Allan took me to an opening day screening of the new Beatles’ movie, Help!
Allan was probably the first to suggest—tentatively and with much guilt, pain, and trepidation—that there was something sexual between myself and the light-eyed, dark-skinned, lanky Ron. There wasn’t. (Nor, to repeat, was I interested in there being anything.) Ron was simply an easy and quiet friend—though I think a couple of times I considered telling Allan that there was, if only in hope of more quickly terminating what had become an annoying relationship.
59.6. A memory seeks a margin in which to write itself.
To which column, it wants to know, do I belong?
The littered Lower East Side street was sunny and cool. From the corner of Seventh and Avenue C a young Ukrainian ran, then stopped—perhaps eighteen or nineteen (fourteen or fifteen the year Marilyn and I’d first moved into the neighborhood and I’d initially noticed him). His hair had always been crew cut, but other than one week in autumn and another in summer, it stayed too long, clutching his ears or clawing his neck, a pale brush all over of yellow-brown. His skin was the same sallow hue. Cantaloupe-round, his face still had large ears to the side and a feral chin under a full mouth.
A big-hipped boy, actually pearshaped, still he was not pudgy. His hands had always struck me as those of a laborer’s two or three heads taller than he was: nails long, wide, and dirty. Unzipped, his beige jacket blew back from a yellowing T-shirt ridden up over his navel’s crater. Torn at one knee, soiled khakis sagged below his belly and bunched above immense black-and-white basketball shoes. He looked over his shoulder to call something obscene and gruff to a friend, then laughed, full out in the street’s autumnal gold. Then he loped on by the vegetable stall sloping out from under the corner grocery’s awning.
Though every phrase I describe him with associates with the clumsy, the plain, the heavy, almost anyone who actually saw him could, I suspect, call him a good-looking youngster and find his otherwise ungainly body’s movements masculine and graceful.
Suppose, I pondered as I continued down the sidewalk, he were black instead of white. (Suppose he bit his nails instead of neglecting them wholly.) Suppose his wide-bottomed body hid some astonishing talent, a wisdom, a power beyond its obvious physical strength.
Suppose he were simply other than he was: different. …
I’d spoken a word or two to him three or four times in as many years, when we’d passed in the morning through Tompkins Square, when we’d met at the bodega’s counter, him to get a late Snickers, me to buy a quart of milk for tomorrow’s coffee. He was a slow, unexceptional kid, as likely to become angry as to guffaw—at things I found neither offensive nor funny.
Suppose (
and I laughed, now, as I walked home) the world about him (and me) were so changed from the one we actually shared that the myths reducing the whole of our culture, from the Greek tales of Orpheus and Theseus to stories contemporary radio and old movie magazines told of the Beatles and Jean Harlow, had to be written … differently?
In that world, what voice would he command?
With its center of gravity eight inches below mine (we were the same height), how would his heavy, graceful body leap and dance?
Later that afternoon, while a breeze came through the window by the houseplants, I opened my notebook at the round table, tan cover folded back under, to imagine what, under speculation’s pressure, he’d become—and began to consider his tale (arriving in language blocks) as though I reread it through that marvelous, amorphous shadow at once as apt a metaphor for death as for all the unconsciously creative.
And I wrote ten pages of it down.
59.7. Ron’s and my plans were to meet at Kennedy Airport for our seven P.M. Icelandic flight to Reykjavik, then Luxembourg (twenty-three hours total, on a prop-jet plane). Some incidents from the seventy-two hours before I actually took off have stayed with me, however, and I recount them here.
59.8. Then working at the State Personnel Agency on Fourteenth Street, Marilyn was not at our fourth-floor Sixth Street apartment two days before I actually left; though neither she nor I remembers where she stayed from time to time after Bob left. (My assumption was that she went to stay with her mother; she says today she doesn’t think so.) It was Indian summer, and I believe I’d worn a flannel shirt as a jacket, unbuttoned over a lighter workshirt—though even that was too warm for the shirtsleeve weather that drifted with an occasional breeze that October over the city; I usually wore heavy orange construction shoes and jeans in those days, pretty standard bohemian attire at a time when the term “hippie” had not yet become commonplace.
There’d been a period of a few months—through most of the Bob affair—when I hadn’t seen Sonny at all. But that afternoon, I ran into him on Second Avenue, just down from St. Marks Place. He was living on the street. He hadn’t eaten that day. I bought him a hamburger and a milkshake, probably up at the Veselka Coffee Shop. “How’s Marilyn?” he asked, wolfing at meat and bun in a manner not too far from his (recently deceased) father’s. “She still writin’ them poems?”
I shrugged. “We’re not getting along too well right through here.”
“Yeah, that happens. You still singin’ that old folks’ music?” And the hamburger was gone.
“Sometimes.”
We parted, Sonny still with a white mustache from the milkshake, and both of us making vague noises about seeing you around.
I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in Central Park and, after a subway ride up from the Lower East Side, went walking through the paths around the Eighties. I was of course aware that Central Park was a heavy cruising area, and had from time to time spent late-night hours in the Rambles. The area along Central Park West had been the regular cruising strip for me before my marriage—indeed, my second, third, and fourth pickups had occurred there. But since I’d moved to the Lower East Side, I hadn’t visited it that frequently. How much I was, or wasn’t, thinking of sexual prospects is, at this point, hard to say. But soon I was sitting on a park bench beside a medium-height blond man in his middle thirties, in jeans, black engineer’s boots, and a blue wool shirt, with a bomber jacket slung over the bench back for which the weather was too warm.
Within the first few minutes, I told him I was going to Europe in a couple of days.
“Oh, you’ll love it,” he said. It seemed he had just returned from a monastery in Japan, where he’d been studying Zen—had I ever heard of a D. T. Suzuki? (I had indeed read at least one and a half of Suzuki’s books.) He had been his teacher. Before that, there had been Europe and San Francisco. He’d been in the monastery with a poet, Gary Snyder, and Snyder’s wife, poet Joanne Kyger—she was just wonderful! They’d just been divorced. Did I know Snyder’s work?
I didn’t.
Well, I should. He was very good friends, he told me, with lots of poets, like Robert Duncan, Helen Adam, and Jack Spicer—who had just died. And Charles Olson …? I knew Duncan’s name—had, indeed, named a section in one of my early novels I’d so recently delivered to Henry, Those Spared by Fire, after a Duncan poem: “This Place Rumourd to Have Been Sodom.” Olson’s and Spicer’s names were familiar from the early “San Francisco Renaissance” issue of the Evergreen Review I had read years before.
Helen Adam had written a wonderful play, he explained, in verse: it was called San Francisco’s Burning. They might do it in New York. “Believe me—” he frowned and shook his hand dismissively—“if they do it here, it’ll blow New York away!” The man was a painter, Bill McNeill: and the number of names he managed to drop in twenty minutes of conversation—some known, but most not, though he talked of them as if everyone in the world must know the poems of George Stanley and John Ryan and James Broughton and Richard Brautigan and the paintings of Paul Alexander and Russell FitzGerald—was both amusing, somewhat off-putting, and interesting. To talk to him for half an hour was to see, I suspect, that he was a bit of a charlatan, a bit of a showman. But at the same time you recognized that he had boundless enthusiasm for his artistic circle, some of whose members (thanks largely to the Evergreen Review and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets series) were beginning to garner some attention. He himself was sure he was just on the verge of making some breakthrough into larger recognition—though, of course, who cared what other people thought? But he obviously did.
I asked Bill if he’d ever heard of Marilyn’s and my friend, Marie Ponsot, whose first book of poems, True Minds, had been published in the Pocket Poets series, right after Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems.
No. Apparently his reading did not go too far outside his largely San Francisco-based friends.
When I meet someone new, especially in a sexual situation (which this was), I almost never mention that I am a writer—with, at that time, five books in print (and two more just sold). That has been true for years. But I was also curious what Bill’s reaction might be, so rather tentatively I told him that, well, I was writing a novel.
“Isn’t everyone!” was Bill’s response. But I believe he got as far as asking what it was about.
“It’s about myths,” I said. “Christ, Orpheus, Jean Harlow, Billy the Kid, and the Beatles—it’s about ancient myths and modern myths and how they both work together.”
“Oh!” declared Bill. “You should see a wonderful play by a friend of mine, Michael McClure. He’s trying to get it done in San Francisco. A wonderful play! It’ll change everything, and drive anyone who sees it crazy! It’s called The Beard, and it’s all about Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid!”
I was surprised—and, at the time, somewhat disbelieving. It seemed too much of a coincidence. The Irving Shulman biography of Harlow that was to cling to the bestseller list so long had not yet been published. And Billy the Kid was mostly a joke, thanks to reruns of old westerns on TV And for a few minutes I really thought Bill was simply taking anything I said and just going it one better with any chance fabrication. But three or four years later, I was to realize it was not all that great a coincidence. In 1960 or so, I had purchased that thin literary magazine, Trembling Lamb, whose black-and-white matte cover had featured the close-up of Harlow; “I have three years left to worship youth. …” Already fascinated by prodigies in general and Rimbaud in particular, I ran into an article on Jean Harlow’s bizarre death at age twenty-six only a month or two later. Certainly that quote and cover had been the initial confluence of my interest in Harlow and Billy the Kid. Some years later, when I’d returned from Europe and had become friends with Russell FitzGerald, one afternoon as we were sitting around talking, Russell recalled a poetry workshop that had taken place in 1957 or ’59 in San Francisco, at which the then eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Michael McClure had astonished everyone
by saying, “I have three years left to worship youth, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow, Billy the Kid. …” The line had been much quoted in precisely the circles Bill was detailing to me now, and had eventually been printed on the cover of some literary magazine. … For now, however, I was still curious—but neither he nor I made any other mention of my own writing.
I did tell Bill that my wife was a poet: that clearly intrigued him. He immediately began to tell me of all the people he could introduce her to who would help her with her career—“That is, if she’s any good.” I also told him that she would not be coming home that evening and if he wanted to come back to my place and spend the night, he was welcome. In the course of it, he told me that he too had been married once—also true, but which still contributed to the air of “I’m going to top anything you say,” a game I wondered why he was so interested in playing. As the conversation wore on, it began to lose Mr. McNeill points. Yet his enthusiasm and energy, not to mention his intelligence, was real enough. Also, with his occasional southern accent breaking through his acquired northwestern speech, he was sexy.
Finally we took the subway down to the Lower East Side. That, indeed, was the neighborhood where he was staying. By this time it was early evening, and we stopped off at the Odessa Restaurant on Avenue A, facing Tompkins Square, for pirogies. Bill by this time had told me that he had a lover (“I guess he’s about your age”) named George, a young painter who also lived in the East Village—not more than a block away from me, actually. Bill came back to the Sixth Street apartment, and we went to bed.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 57
