by Purdy, James
“We have all been here before!” the USA cries as it turns over another page on its TV roller. “Ouch, my bleeding piles.”
“We can’t tell the difference,” the child, the dowager, the millionaire kid from the Chicago department store all say, “we can’t tell the difference between General Roosevelt and Captain Truman or Professor Eisenhower from Grover Kennedy Johnson. They all look like boys in charge of a scouting party who don’t hear the cry, ‘timber!’ as the big investors screw away in the jungles, in the sugar islands, the pampas and waters of Lake Titicaca, the dynamite beds under the Prado, Habana, Bolivian tin-mines and Katanga. The boys all look alike to me, the viewers cry, except each succeeding President does promise a little more to the arthritic old and the darker niggers.…Hark! Now I hear it! Dong, dong, dong.”
“You shall have dong, niggers and outfielders, as long as there is health in my General’s body! I will give you dong. I am the President.”
“We’ve all been here before!” the USA is crying in front of the little screen.
But they’re so tired.
AFTER LEAVING MRS. BICKLE, Cabot Wright, still partially without his memory, was in a semi-dazed condition which plausibly might have grown out of his having been emotionally anaesthetic since emerging from the tut-tut of his mother’s surprised birth pains. He went on of course to become a supposititious child. “PA-RAD-E RRRRESST. AT EASE, M E N.”
In the absence of Mrs. Bickle, Cabot paused on 42nd and Sixth Avenue when he heard Sister Sadie X: “If I could only make one of you feel anything.” The evangelist always opened her meeting, feebly but repeatedly waving her Bible and flag.
“If only one man or woman stopped here and showed his eye was not glassy with meaninglessness, I would stoop down here on this dirty curb and say, ‘Blessed Jesus, I do thank thee.’ But I don’t see anything but glassy eyes, and I don’t refer to your expensive optical equipment. No, dear lost sheep, I refer to something no optician can correct. You are living in the wickedest city which ever existed, making storied Babylon child’s play, for at least the Babylonians felt and relished their sins. You sin not even knowing the stab of your wickedness, not even, oh flock, gaining pleasure from your transgressing as did that ancient city on the Euphrates. You sin not through appetite for it, but through sheer spiritual emptiness and bodily numbness.
“If I could only make you feel anything, citizens of the greatest country in the history of the cosmos, but you’ve had too much from every point of the compass: they’ve made of every orifice in your body a cornucopia, and you’ve been stuffed and stuffed and stuffed till you can’t budge. You cry More! More! but you can’t feel a thing.”
As Cabot walked away further West, losing himself in street after same-looking street, he saw the whole of the Continent, as turned into a highway known as Piker. Trees are rubber tires and condoms. Dirt is cigarette butts propped on spark-plugs. The birds, gophers, rats, field mice, wood pussies and summer rattlers are old-fashioned jacks, air pumps, fan-belt, 1928 inner tubes. Everywhere ads tell you what you are about to do & did. The sentiment of moneycups is catching, and all America loves a moneycup. Not a man, woman or child alive today in this beautiful country who does not love a flower called moneycup, whose eyes grow a little moist at the very mention of the modest bloom, whose hands shake ever so little at the thought that somewhere in this great land a field of pure untouched moneycups is blowing in the soft spring zephyrs. Oh for the afternoons of childhood, youth, and of course full maturity. The aged not excepted either. The aged can look out from their mortgaged shingles and see moneycups. America is moneycups, as a great Yankee poet once said while working in the White House for General Woodrow Roosevelt. He had just received an $18,000,000 dividend check from a mail-order house which sells faulty teddy-bears, and leaky bathroom conduits. “America,” he wrote, “you are moneycups,” and all Americans waved their hankies at him.
This great mid-continental poet felt that General Woodrow Roosevelt should have waged war earlier as he and his wife (now confirmed Easterners) were quite put out that they had not been able to visit England and France (second land of citizenship for them) to spend their mail-order dividends there on Anglo-French culture. (Enumerate, if you would be so kind: antiques ormolu clocks cheese wine wine wine French perfume not-to-be-duplicated spirits Chambertin champagne British preserves—can’t be beat, the English never learned to cook, but they’re queens and kings with gooseberry preserve and/or damson spread—British china British Chippendale wax-work dummies selected butlers and don’t forget tweeds & stout.) When the laureated great mid-west poet’s poem, America Is Moneycups, hit the newsstands in the big picture magazine called beautiful usa, the crush all over the continent was tremendous. To procure copies taxi drivers were seized and carried to the parapets of bridges and tossed over, mothers with baby-carriages were stopped and slapped for getting in the road of the newsstands, pregnant women were warned not to attempt the streets but go back to their kitchen units and make pudding in event of an emergency, truck-drivers with unusually developed deltoid-bicep-trapezius muscles were warned not to attempt approaching the newsstands to get copies of America Is Moneycups and finally the President of this country the President of the Grand Old USA had to speak from his sickbed and say, “Both my wife and I promise you that if you will all go home and quit creating a disturbance, which it is your constitutional right nonetheless so to create, we personally, she and I, will send each Democrat under 70 a copy of America Is Moneycups with a portrait of us coming down the chimney on the Fourth of July. Amen and God guide you to the polls. This is your personal Jehovah going off the air.”
SUDDENLY CABOT WRIGHT could laugh. It was the first real laugh he had ever been able to bring off. The early part of his life, real and supposititious, had been devoted to giggles, and though he knew he would never be at attention fully anywhere again in his body, now suddenly he could laugh. First Ha then Ho, then Ha Ha HAR, HAAAAAA!
Laughter!
And Reverend Cross had come to see him. He had held his young ward’s hand as the laughter trickled, flowed, cascaded, came in torrents.
Cabot had told Mrs. Bickle nearly everything or had hinted at what he had left out. He had told his whole story, and she would never use it. Maybe she believed it and maybe she did not, which was better. Now he could forget his own story and himself.
Every day Reverend Cross from the Church of His Choice had visited him, though only for a few minutes, but today holding the culprit’s hand against his paroxysm of laughter, the preacher said:
“Cabot, my boy, you’re better.”
A young man in appearance, Reverend Cross suffered from several spiritual diseases of his own, as witness circles under his eyes, rapid pulse, dry mouth, looking at boys’ crotches, talking to himself. But he had renounced life for Christ and this was getting him through the world without being beaten and reduced to a pulp.
“Confession, Cabot, is good for the soul,” he patted Cabot’s knee.
“Told you everything, already, Reverend.”
“But you’re not sorry, Cab. You’re not.”
“I’m not tired any more, either, Reverend. Not tired at all. And I told Mrs. Bickle just about everything—after I heard it in that book.”
“Pray with me, Cabot,” Reverend Cross said. “It won’t hurt you even if you don’t believe in it. Pray some with me.”
“I was a supposititious child,” Cabot said dreamily. “God, does that reach your guts when you think about it. But I don’t.”
“Come pray.”
“My scrotum is blue with varicocele, Rev.”
“Pray anyhow.”
“Hold my pulse then while you mutter, Rev.”
He heard in sleep-like underwater thunderings the young preacher’s prayer.
“All suffer the deadwood, my boy, having rejected our divine inheritance. Remember those flowers which you so adored as a boy, Cabot? The hunts in the woods for snow-apples, jack-in-the-pulpit, heartsease…”
>
“When I left prison,” Cabot confided, “my warden said, ‘Cab, maybe this time you better stick to the company of your own sex.’”
“We must all do what is right,” Reverend Cross said, and his long black lashes were smashed to his cheek by tears.
“What’s right?” Cabot inquired, and when he said that the Reverend Cross looked like his name.
“My mother said that,” Cabot reminded the Reverend. “Did she know what was right? All she knew was life-insurance would save her when her mainstay kicked the goosepot. But was she bugged. Both mothers were bugged. They both died. The hand of no-return carried them off without their collecting on their forty years of fleshpot bleeding. Where was my real parents, Rev.? we should all do what is right. Excuse me while I use my new laugh. Let me tell you something, Reverend Cross. You bug me.”
Pacing up and down, the preacher said, “You have set yourself up against God and man, and especially against yourself. My boy, you are in a state…”
“The ugly truth is,” Cabot shook his head, looking out the window at the incoming steamer from Cartagena, near Fort Jay, “religion hasn’t got anything on the ball. It’s all Daddy-rattling and pious alarm.”
“I will continue to pray for you, my son.”
NOW CABOT WAS alone again with his non-self. Loneliness feels so good after the mythic contact with the social. Dreams become clear, and nightmares are no longer attention-getting. One sucks eight or nine aspirins and allows his calloused thumb to rest on a quilt. The trauma of birth, life and death pass as shadows on the moon. Mother Nature goes right on keeping house even though nobody is to home.
“Hello, Central Information Bureau?” Cabot spoke into a phone. “Weather woman? Are you now or have you ever been in the pay of a Cosmic Bugaboo? I’m not human now and never was, is my fuckworthy answer. Thank you for allowing us to enter your home in the legal frock of spies. We are screwing you, as you know, to protect the innocent. Thank you and good morning. Remove the bandage tomorrow. The stitches are absorbed by the blood stream. You will feel no pain. We repeat. You will feel no pain. Sold, American.”
Lying down on his side, Cabot relieved himself in laughter. His laughter was like a paroxysm, neither willing nor unwilling. His regions from the breast-bone down shook in helpless hapless hopeless waves of self-relief, which happily for him was one prolonged orgasm. After all, laughter is the greatest boon Nature has bestowed on miserable unjoyous man. The release, the only relief from the pain of being human, mortal, ugly, limited, in agony, watching Death cornhole you beginning with the first emergence from the winking slit above the mother’s fundament, pulled into existence from between piss and shit, sorrow and meaninglessness, drudgery and illusion, passion, pain, early loss of youth and vigor, of all that had made it worth while, with the eternity of the tomb, the final word over the hunger for God, the repletion of earth and slime, the shout of the ocean in the ears of death. Meaning is there is no meaning but the laughter of the moment made it almost worth while. That’s all it’s about. We was here, finally laughed.
“The roof of my mouth fell in. I laughed!” said Cabot.
He lay in the Brooklyn mud, guffawed weakly. He had laughed until he was in erection again for the first time since the policemen’s nightsticks, laughed some more until he was limp as an old man, laughed until he mewed and purled like a new-born babe. Then he lay back on his back silent, weeping a little from the pain of his laughter, a thread of drivel coming down from his mouth onto his pointed dimpled chin.
“I thought I’d die but I lived.”
That deadly monotony of the human continuity,
The fog is a sea on earth!
19
MAMA’S WELL IS DRY
The runaway is back!” Carrie Moore cried, in her TV nookery on Dorchester Avenue, when she saw Bernie Gladhart come in the door.
Entering Carrie’s basement again, Bernie Gladhart sniffed carefully and did not take on that “at home” expression around the mouth and eyes. He had the slouch of a transient.
Putting down his bags temporarily, Bernie tried to avoid studying the changes in the face of his former wife. Carrie had aged and when a woman ages, she goes faster than a man ever can, Bernie reflected. Seeing his look of shock, she blamed her face’s condition on TV principally. “It’s what they call television glint,” she explained, a nervous ailment common in the Greater Chicago area. Dressed as usual, only in her foundation, with her wired bra raising her nipples to the angle of a woman young enough to be her granddaughter, she had a special bit of crape to hang, as she explained, on Bernie’s lapel. “Might as well tell you the worst while you’re still fresh from your train ride.”
“Is a new fellow living with you?” Bernie inquired jerking his head in the direction of upstairs. He knew, of course, that Joel Ullay had departed long since.
“I’m kind of beyond new or old fellows,” she said. “I’ve got real trouble. I’ve got bad news, real bad news.”
He stared at her and saw that what she said was true.
“If you don’t want me, Carrie,” he began, “I’ll leave of course. Your calls didn’t indicate whether you really wanted me or not. But I just didn’t have any other place to go, sweet-heart, not right away today, I didn’t. I’m sorry your book idea for me didn’t pan out, though I’ve got some money for it, of course. Princeton Keith, well, he was really queer for the Cabot Wright story. Dreamed it would crown his career and all…”
“He’s dead, you know,” Carrie remarked.
“What?” Bernie gasped. “Who?”
“The name you mentioned, Princeton Keith. Heard it on the early morning show. Shot himself in his rocking chair, with a big old .45. Think of using one of them!”
She yawned convulsively.
“Is that your bad news?” he inquired.
“Bernie, you bug me,” she said. “Of course not.”
He noticed how out-of-date Carrie’s slang sounded. Her slang, which he used to think was current, he now saw as belonging to the earliest lingo of the Flat Foot School of writers, the old bop men who had all retired from the scene, but he knew of course the passion Carrie had always to speak the latest language, in order for her to feel she was here at all. But her speech was hoary; she was an old jazz-record in an age when jazz is more classical than fun.
“My bad news,” Carrie cried a little, “is bad news on a paramount scale, and it’s baddest of all on account of it’s largely all just for me and nobody else is going to feel it.”
She cried hard now.
Bernie, who had risen now, and with his head resting on his elbow, against the wall, was sobbing quite hard himself, so that Carrie left off her own weeping to bark:
“What are you bawling for, can I ask?”
“Guess it’s the shock of his death,” he replied.
“Whose?” she wondered. “Oh, that editor guy, Keith…”
Bernie wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.
“Well, I’m sorry the Keith man died since it strikes you home this way,” she scolded.
“He gave me quite a lot nobody ever had before. But I guess in the end he didn’t think I was a writer either,” Bernie mumbled.
“Well, then it’s unanimous at last,” she said.
“You thought I was a writer once, Carrie,” he came back to this.
“Ahem,” she said. “But that’s so long ago, baby heart. So long ago. Mama was well in those days.”
“Ain’t you well, Carrie?”
“Well, let’s say like this, honey. If for example you decide to go on living under my roof, you won’t be living in the jet age.”
“I won’t stop here if you don’t want me to,” he appealed now to her. She stared at him, her eyes slightly out of focus. “I’ll leave whenever you give the word,” he bowed his head.
“That’s cute to hear,” Carrie helped herself to the bourbon bottle. “Matter of fact, I hadn’t given your leaving or staying a bit of thought. I did think about your appetite, your b
elly that is, on account of you eat a lot. When I found out your train was arriving I called up the Chinese Chop Suey Parlor on Fifty-fifth street, Wong Duck Fu or whatever the mothy place calls itself now—changes hands once a month at least—and they’re sending us over our supper. I hope they’ve heated it this time. We have some skillets out back though if they goofed. And they’re sending a gallon of tea.”
“What’s your bad news, Carrie?” Bernie returned to this.
“Let me raise the bucket myself, dolly,” she admonished him. “Say you don’t look so good either, speaking of bad news.”
Bernie pointed out to Carrie that he thought he heard the doorbell through the sound of the television set. He walked to the door just in time to catch the delivery boy before he returned to Wong Duck Chop Suey Parlor with their order.
A few minutes later, having dished out from paper cartons the cold rice and chop suey, he poured her tea from paper containers.
“You don’t have to eat that grub if it don’t suit you, by the bye,” she pointed with her paper fork.
“Why don’t you tell me your bad news, Carrie?”
“Won’t spoil your appetite?” she wondered. She had hardly touched her food. She drank dispiritedly from her paper carton of tea.
Bernie began speaking: “I don’t believe anything could happen to me now that would really throw me. I’m throwed, and good. Maybe,” he spoke too low to be heard even by her perhaps, “maybe there’s always something that can get a guy further down yet, but how?”
“What guy?” she said.
“Where’s Joel Ullay?” Bernie inquired.
