by Jim Harrison
I stood on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Third rehearsing what happened during those twenty-four hours which, while not a horrifying trauma, was at least tinged with navy blue shame. Thirty years is not quite enough to comfortably gloss it over. I have searched mightily for some viable excuses. The best is that it was spring, the sap was rising, and I have often noted that I’m light-activated, like migrating birds. For instance, standing on this busy corner I have seen five women who have added at least a teaspoon of blood to that circulating in my loins. That’s spring for you. It wouldn’t have happened in November.
Anyway, after the Stephen Spender exposure we were off to a series of Irish bars which abound in Chicago. My friend claimed to be part I rish but like many of the faux Irish in the Midwest he proved this by adding a Scots burr in the tavern. Of course he was a horrid fool but then he had published poetry in the Paris Review, Sumac, Tri-Quarterly, and a half dozen other magazines that were thought to be important at the time. To me he was heroic and could do no wrong.
We listened raptly and drunkenly to Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, went to an after-hours place where we unsuccessfully threw dice, and were kicked out when we ran out of money. At dawn we were cooking breakfast for two decidedly non-extraordinary women my friend had called up at about three in the morning. They lived close by and were fans in his Chicago literary circle. Anyone less than totally anonymous tends to attract followers and my friend as a major literary light in Chicago at the time had many, though these two women were beckoned mostly because we had run out of beer, wine, booze, anything. In the spirit of the evening, about four A.M. by now, my friend took off all of his clothing hoping the women would do the same. They didn’t, and one made a comment about the peculiar, radical crook in his otherwise normal penis which made him morose, and led him into a long disquisition on his lifelong suffering of various sorts, ending, as always with writers, with his severe mistreatment at the hands of his publishers. The prick mocker was impressed enough to take off her blouse and shoes, but then seemed to forget what she was doing when he launched into a virulent attack on Robert Lowell and the “eastern establishment,” including, of course, the Englishman Stephen Spender.
The other woman, Rachel by name, was smoking an enormous joint she had pulled from her purse with a flourish. We crawled out on the fire escape and did a little necking, but luckily I was too drunk to commit adultery on the eighth day of my marriage, or at least that’s how I remember it. Years later when I ran into Rachel in a Chicago bookstore she recalled our “fabulous” night on the fire escape and I fled. She was still cracking her Dentyne.
Anyway, I awoke on the sofa at one in the afternoon with two pieces of bacon clutched in my right hand, and when I went to the bathroom I saw through his bedroom door that my hero had managed to liberally piss his bed. You could say that he was in the tradition of Dylan Thomas and a thousand other writer-drunks. It was some time before I could eat bacon again. Naturally my hangover was shattering and the taste of Rachel’s Dentyne on my lips burned them with guilt. It was a good thing I quit my heavy drinking by the time I was thirty because hangovers tended to flood me with rather self-righteous anger, not exactly the emotional nexus you want to carry around on your first meeting with your in-laws. There was so much to be angry about: the roach wallowing in the congealed egg yolk on a plate in the kitchen, the “fuck you guys” written in the pan’s congealed brown grease, my friend’s typed “Rodentia Suite” which he had read to us at six A.M. that could not match the song of the sparrow on the fire escape. The shower water was tepid. The only coffee was instant. My shoes looked old. My friend had fallen asleep when I had tried to read one of my own poems. I had felt pleased when he tripped on his way to bed. I had a mild case of diarrhea and somehow had burned my tongue. I envied my friend who got up and rather merrily had two warm beers and popped both a Dexedrine and a Darvon, announcing sententiously that he didn’t believe in pain.
I was nearly to Hinsdale in my miserable DeSoto, trembling a bit when it occurred to me I shouldn’t have worn my blue velvet bell-bottoms and my orange flowery shirt. I pulled off in a mall parking lot about a mile from my in-laws’ home and stuffed a nubbin of hash a student had given me into the end of a cigarette. I brushed my very long hair while feeling the drug calm my trembling. I rehearsed a number of answers to the obvious questions, prime among them, how was I going to support their daughter? This was easy as there was a fair amount of money left from the deaths of my father and mother. The fact that Cindy was only eighteen was a bit of a sore point as I had already been teased about it by my buddies in the M.F.A. program. “Many girls of eighteen in Indiana marry” seemed a bit weak.
I was walking faster and faster as I told this grim story to myself. High ideals were missing so the comic nature leapt to the front. I was mindful of cab traffic as I crossed Fifth into Central Park, still moving rather quickly but passed by a man in his seventies, a racewalker who flapped his arms seagull style, grinning at me with the tolerance of an expert, his bony ass wobbling on its hip pinions.
Again, how can my language match walking up the steps of that capacious porch in Hinsdale, the yard bee-loud with lilacs from the warmish spring? My skull was sore, my mouth dry as the soles of my shoes. My heart a snare drum. The door opened before I reached it, her knobby brother on spring break staring at me as if I were a new species of rodent.
The four sat there at an overlong dining room table, old oak and Victorian kitsch. Cindy and her mother looked as if they had just fled from a smoky, burning house, eyes red and rheumy, faces swollen from rubbing, the father’s face a pink storm cloud, the brother a patina of Ivy League bored disgust.
The upshot was the cagey dad had two dozen photos of my night on the town, starting with departures from Spender’s reading, Irish pubs, the after-hours place, arm in arm with two ladies. And somehow through the fire escape window my host with his pants down and unimpressive crooked dick, and somehow an upward shot of me on the fire escape with the woman’s plump, bare butt pressed against iron rungs.
Now I was aware our government had spied on the Chicago Seven but such personally based spying was purely fictive. Naturally I had read Chandler and Hammett, but these photos that were tossed at me, with a few falling in my lap, were beyond my ken. To this lumpen bourgeois family they apparently proved I wasn’t marriage material, an illusion indeed in that I had been raising my brother and sister for the past five years.
Sobs began. Cindy wouldn’t look at me. Her father actually said, “You goddamned cad,” though even at that time, in 1969, “cad” was archaic. He was hyperventilating when he added, “You goddamned filthy hippie.” The brother chimed in, “You raped my little sister!” then walked around behind me which added to my discomfort.
“One of your buddies screwed her when she was twelve,” I bravely taunted, though Cindy had told me she had cooperated out of “scientific curiosity,” even then a nascent biologist.
That was that. I was jerked by my neck from the chair, the brother grappling me in a choke hold, the father coming swiftly around the table and falling on his ass when he tried to kick me, Cindy and Mom with unearthly, piercing screams. Dragged out the door and tossed from the porch and landing partially on a honeysuckle bush which partially broke my fall. Stung by a bee for good measure. To her credit Cindy tried to run to my prone body as I tried to regain my wind but her father grabbed her arm. Or was it her mother?
I drove home to Bloomington, Indiana, forgetting my suitcase was still at my writer friend’s apartment. It took him a full month to U.P.S. the suitcase though I sent him money three times to do so. One of my poems was missing and three lines of it eventually ended up in one of his efforts published in the Partisan Review. In the meantime I spent two days in the hospital suffering from my most virulent eczema attack yet. In a way this total experience was an apt preparation for writing about the great and near great for reasons I’ll reveal later.
At the children’d zoo in Central Park I was drawn
, as always, to the seal pond and also the penguins frittering their time away against a hokum Antarctic backdrop. Wobbling to and fro waiting for meals. At zoos I always think of Thoreau’s notion of quiet desperation. On this day I quite literally ached with empathy for the penguins. The seals at least seemed able to amuse themselves, while I avoided the polar bear whose behavior was decidedly repetitive and autistic with hours spent as if pulled by an invisible wire.
I continued on across the Park to the West Side which, though occasionally full of fungoid self-congratulation, is less provincial than the East Side and its silly self-promoted aura of the world center of art and money. The hot dogs weren’t holding up so I had a brief lunch at a Chinese-Cuban place I favor. While I ate my delicious stewed oxtails with garlic it occurred to me that I had fibbed a bit in this little auto-Bioprobe. I do fly first class but usually on an upgrade from accumulated mileage. Business class is good enough for Europe. Claire my French lover (sic) cost me three grand last month due to unspecified medical difficulties, which I doubted. I did fuck the woman on the fire escape so many years ago, partly because I was so amazed by my hard-on what with being that drunk. One of the photos indicated the act. How could I do such a thing on the eighth day of my marriage to my true love? I’m not sure why. I was dislocated in the rapture of the Chicago night. I was a “hundred-proof fool” as a country song I heard on the radio said. My eczema doesn’t just strike if I dwell on art and literature but also when I finish a Bioprobe. There. The truth will set you free, but free for what? Laughter arose when I thought of my erstwhile editor cooling his heels at the Four Seasons. There was a real cad. He was an unworthy thought as I regarded the mighty Hudson, then turned toward home. And the chore of cleaning up the shattered wine bottle.
On the way back to the apartment I decided to stop at the wine store and see if Rico had plans for dinner. I was a scant thirty-six hours from leaving to see Cindy and I didn’t want to sit around alone and change my mind. Rico had helped me a great deal back in 1994, my “best” year when I had made over nine hundred thousand dollars and had switched my wine buying from the more expensive Bordeaux and Burgundies to Cotes du Rhônes. Thrift is a pleasant sedative. Spending exacerbates. My sister is a puzzle who loves to create puzzles and come up with inane oddities. She has figured out that Bill Gates’ fortune would fill seventy-seven thousand caskets with tightly packed hundred-dollar bills, newly minted at that. She has done so much research for me on bio subjects, including fifty or so discarded by agreement between myself and my publisher, that she has become outrageously cynical which is not a Hoosier virtue. Occasionally this cynicism can be a corrective. If I’m perhaps identifying too closely with a subject she’ll send a fax with “Donaldson” in the center of an otherwise empty page, referring to the newscaster who presumes to be the equal of any poor head of state. Probably her main defect is that she considers all human activity to be mischief. Several years ago she convinced me and my editor-publisher, whom I’ll call “Don,” to write my first Bioprobe on a literary figure, Gabriel García Márquez, admittedly a great novelist. I have a phobia against using the word “great” but Don is kind enough to spread the word liberally in my manuscripts before publication. Anyway, I flew to Mexico City and booked into the Camino Real where the first evening I watched two striking women playing tennis on a rooftop clay court. In the morning my ten minutes at the author’s apartment was comprised of a delicious cup of hot chocolate his impressive wife brought me, and watching the great man leaf through a couple dozen of my Bioprobes Don had sent ahead. He finally looked up from my work and said with a smile, “Would you mind if I donated these to the poor?” I bowed and fled.
At the wine store I’m allowed to use the service and shipping entrance, a matter of some pride to me. Rico and a salesman were simmering on a hot plate both boudin blanc and boudin noir the salesman had smuggled into the country from France. I tried one of each with blistering mustard and a glass of simple Crozes-Hermitage. Rico had dinner plans with his newest conquest but called her to see if she had a friend and a double date was arranged.
Back at my studio after my sturdy three-hour walk I surveyed my shattered-wine bottle damage with pleasure though I did recall my sister saying, “If you ever start leaking you’ll sink in a day.” This was a little squirmy but was allayed by the three messages from Don on the service. “Where the fuck are you?” he barked on the last message. That’s one of the drawbacks of first class. Self-important men talking in muffled barks. It is the cryptic language of success, these barks. It used to include braying until magnum success included less drinking.
Certain splotches of wine on the wall seemed to border on the artistic. This was lucky as the spray cleaner and paper towels didn’t quite do the job. There were still violet Rorschachs here and there: river deltas, pussies, clouds, sharp fingers, stalagmites. Sweeping the glass raised a musical tinkle in the air. I sent a fax to Don’s office saying I had had a malaria attack and turned off the phone. I rejected the idea of a second cigarette. The package sat on the kitchen counter like a lonely sentinel, as young writers say, which can be followed by a prayerful squirrel.
In the shower I barked to myself in the language of my class, a small class but nevertheless an identifiable class. My laughter walking home the night before came from the purposeful strides in and out of the restaurants, the nonchalant self-importance, the gauche expensive tailoring, the hundred-dollar neckties and custom shirts, the diffident assurance of potency. I suppose in antique Marxist terms we are lavishly paid because we are perfect tools for the class even higher up, those who own the ballpark. You can occasionally have some sympathy for those frequently unhappy souls with big inheritances from birth. This was fate in which the sense of victimization is always possible. But my own class is undeserving of a mote, a mite, a filament, an iota of sympathy. We are self-made barkers, toy dogs, prime weenies. I snarled at the steamy mirror. How dare it make me look exactly as old as I am. The mirror rudely watched me apply the pine pitch, the tarry salve that is best for the first itching signs of eczema, invariably around the genitalia, the crotch to be exact. I heard the magical whir of the fax machine. “You too can be replaced. Yrs., Don.” Barkers are usually bullies.
I had a long and unbelievably sweet nap that ended late in the afternoon with a brief dream of the time I visited my grandmother, my father’s mother and the last alive of my grandparents. Cindy was with me just before we were married and I wanted her to meet old Ida whom I revered. Cindy was far more interested in the local flora than the old lady and had wandered down to a tiny creek on the small farm in far southern Indiana. I sat in the kitchen with Ida watching Cindy out the window. “She doesn’t look old enough. What are her people like?” Ida asked. I couldn’t admit I hadn’t met them so I only said, “They’re fine.” All through my youth this woman had been far more motherly than my own mother who was bent on finishing her Ph.D. in her late thirties. In the summer I was often excommunicated to the farm from Bloomington for being a “trouble maker” which meant anything that distracted my mother from her dissertation on the Gilded Age. Oddly I was a fistfighter and fistfighting causes more of the same because if you keep winning then everyone wants to knock your chip off. This was during my years from ten to fourteen. My sister was even more contrary, refusing to have schoolmate friends unless they were black. And little Thad settled for never taking his thumb out of his mouth so mother whined about expensive orthodontia. Ida’s husband, my grandfather, was a remote fellow, far older than she, a retired high school science teacher who had inherited his own parents’ small farm. The only pleasurable activity we had together was fishing on a small lake a few miles away. He was normally taciturn but fishing made him talkative. He’d drink cheap A&P beer and we’d stay out on the lake until we caught enough panfish to fry up for supper.
“Well, don’t fall down a hole you can’t climb out of,” Ida had said as I watched out the window where Cindy was climbing up the hill from the creek with something in h
er hands. As she drew closer I could see it was a large black snake she had lovingly patted into submission. I turned away before she could catch my eyes through the window. Ida was also watching Cindy with a smile. She decided it was prayer time and we went to the parlor and knelt with our arms on the sofa where she asked God’s blessing on my intended marriage. Her prayers and Bible reading were part of my youth and, curiously, I never regarded them with irony. I was startled by the refusal of James Joyce to pray with his mother. Why not? While Ida prayed we heard Cindy call out from the porch, “Come see what I got.” Unfortunately by the time we reached the porch Ida’s old burly tomcat Ralph was in full threat display. For a cat he was pretty close to a watchdog and was prancing around the porch with guttural yowls. Cindy was backing up fearfully and the thickish snake had become active in her hands. Ralph acted as if he were going to leap and I tried to kick him away but missed. Cindy jumped down the steps and tossed the writhing snake into a grove of lilacs where Ralph quickly nailed it with great drama as if he were fighting a python. Ralph dragged the snake away for lunch and Cindy wept piteously. Ida who was Lutheran rather than a teetotaling Bible Belter insisted that Cindy have a whiskey to calm her nerves.
