by Jim Harrison
“All around us, sir,” he said and I nodded.
Back in my rooms I turned the television on and noted the many stations lacked any particular contents, and opted for radio classical music that dealt with emotions I’ve never had. Back in college I at least presumed I had similar emotions when I listened to the great Carlos Montoya. I rankled, but only for a moment, at the idea that Cindy was pushing me through a whole college botany course in twenty-four hours. At this time the night before, given the hour difference in the zones, Donna was scenting my pine-pitch salve. I thought of her perineum in the muted shadows thrown by the night-light. Our sexuality, of course, has content but is invariably written about in terms of process. “And then I and then she . . .” I thought this over and remembered Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, then the memory of my mother’s voice prating, “The exception proves the rule.”
With the help of a pep pill and a pot of coffee I read until five A.M. when I finished Humanistic Botany, albeit hastily. I would have flunked the simplest retention test but when I finished I hugged the book and rolled over in the bed as if we had been wrestling. I’ve given up the practice in recent years but back when I took my work more seriously I used to give the occasional lecture to journalism students on the nature of my success. I told them that you had to absolutely disregard your moods to get your work done. If you put all of your moods in a shoebox and placed them on a scale, you’d only get a reading on the shoebox. Moods are only self-indulgent emotional whims and the fuel for sloth. I had to keep these Calvinist inanities in mind in order to finish the book and then I was able to face the dawn with a moderately triumphant smile. What I had tried to teach students was the most egregious lesson possible for happiness.
The singular high point of the night was when Donna returned my call. The conversation was brief because she was studying but she did say she was willing to see me again. That had to be enough, though there was a trace of sexual teasing that made me anxious. I told her I wasn’t very versatile and was incapable of making love to anyone I didn’t care for. Sad but true, I used to think, but no longer. It’s impossible for me to look at my own sexual behavior except in comic terms, no matter how occasionally wonderful. At one time I revered D. H. Lawrence and might still if I re-read him, but then Henry Miller was more accurate.
To be frank I’ve been fibbing a bit for reasons of clarity. Another fib! Is there a chain of fibs that encircles and binds us? You know who you are when you wake up more than when you go to bed when your filigree abilities are at their highest. The autobiographical hoax is not different from the biographical hoax. Donna and Rico and wine and food are true. So is Cindy whom I’ll see in six hours for the first time since the honeysuckle porch, the hashish smoke in the dirty DeSoto. When a man, a subject, tells me that he separated from his first wife and married another it is glossed over, and it would be impolite for me to probe, yet this is the most momentous event in the man’s life. He sees his spawn, his two children, frequently, then less frequently, then frequently not at all, and the grandest love of his life, his first marriage, is gone forever. This is true entropy. The largest share of the emotional content of his life has fatally vanished due to the usual plenitude of mutual inconveniences. People even used to say, “We grew but in different directions.” The fact that the divorce was necessary, destined, plain inevitable, doesn’t make it less consequential.
Here I am avoiding the back wall a dozen feet from the end of the bed. I’ve never really been married so what do I know? Nine days, really eight, doesn’t add up to a hill of frostbitten beans, as Grandmother would say.
Let me begin again. I awoke at eleven A.M. in a sweat with sun pouring in hotly from the southwest window, my brain a whir of flower dreams and large, deep green plants that opened showing green plant intestines, my eyes dry, red-hot balls. I had smoked half the pack of cigarettes I had tucked in my briefcase and had drunk two beers and three half bottles of wine from the mini-bar concealed underneath the television set. I had used the TV clicker to raise three different porn movies at nine bucks apiece but none stirred my loins one little bit. Through all of this I continued my not so studious reading. I hadn’t had a night like this in the seven years or so since I was forty-eight and had put myself in a discreet Arizona clinic for a month’s rest. Before this downshift I couldn’t get my work done without between three and five bottles of wine a day, though well before that I had abandoned my cocaine chasers because a doctor had told me I was going to permanently blow out my gaskets, meaning death. To save myself I had become unfashionably religious, saying my prayers morning and evening as I had done with my grandmother.
Everything is after the fact. That morning I could only croak with a diffident hard-on pointed toward Donna in a different time zone, and domestic jet lag from rising at eleven rather than seven. A snake loses its skin and doesn’t recognize itself. Such is the nature of consciousness that you can lose several skins at once. At such times I try my hand at fiction, a few poems, ten days or so of musing before I head to the dermatologist who would never give me anything as primitive as the black pine-pitch salve which came from a young woman in Coconut Grove who had caught fish poisoning in the tropics, nearly lost a finger, and had been given the salve in St. Bart’s by a French sailor who had been “mean” to her. God knows what that meant. With the continentals we xenophobes have learned to suspect prolonged buggery.
With my fifth cup of coffee I dozed in a chair with my heels on my luggage. The language with which I talk to myself had fled so far into the interior it had disappeared. Buckle up or buckle down. Gird up thy loins. The worst is to walk tall. We are raised on a whole school of “guy talk” that leaves out our own sensibilities. A recent perverse stepfather of the Midwest was Vince Lombardi. It’s at its most absurd when an announcer praises “good ole face-smashing Big Ten football.” We could hear the roar of the stadium for miles in Bloomington. But on a more malignant level there was the implicit cultural language of forbearance, bravery, grit, hard work, thrift, “sticktoitiveness,” of getting to work early and leaving late. This has allowed me to save a couple of million which is not nearly enough according to an article in the Wall Street Journal which said I would need five million to guarantee a “pleasant retirement.” This made me long for the real money I earned as a paper boy pedaling my Schwinn on the icy streets of the city in February, or the quarter an hour I earned hoeing gardens.
Anyway, I sat there trying to figure out the sentence you use to call a bellhop, gave up, and carried my own stuff down to the lobby, my mind still a void with flowers. I recalled something I heard on NPR about the formation of “dark parks,” areas without ambient light so people could see the stars, and that after the L.A. earthquake many people who had never experienced the lack of electricity were confused and alarmed by the Milky Way, the misty sash of stars that I loved in my youth but haven’t much seen since then.
Important businessmen were click, clacking around the lobby with possibly leaky asses. Two of them shook hands with the out-sized vigor that made our nation what it is today. I was pleased to note that my language-numb mind didn’t prevent me from navigating through checkout, getting directions from two quarreling bellhops who had different ideas on my routes. When the parking valet pulled up with my rental car I was thrilled that he left the motor running and I wouldn’t have to repeat my ignition search. The cars in the future will start when you pull your dick and whisper, “Bongo.”
I felt curiously buoyant having run out of negative interior chatter. I headed toward the Point Douglas Parkway, slowing to miss two very drunk Native Americans who were crossing the street against the light. My brain reeled off whole segments of American history, the questionable gift of my mother whose repertoire of injustices was longer than anyone could listen to. Because of her I tend to avoid thinking of history but perhaps I should forget her and do what I wish. Why reject anything offered? Let it slide. My night-long botany churning was doubtless a hesitation over entering my father’s busi
ness. I had to wonder how many times he had seen Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa, an absurd movie but Ava walking pitty-pat barefoot in her gown across the marble floor buzzing the groin.
Moving toward Point Douglas I passed Pig’s Eye Park, a truly enchanting name. I hoped to figure out why the park was called that all by myself, its greenery doing quite well in a world without people with splotched pastels of flowering trees. There was a distinct relationship between the greenery and the book I had read in the night but it would take some time to figure it out.
I took the first of several bridges back and forth between Minnesota and Wisconsin, with the mighty Mississippi looking excessive and disordered. I pulled off into a tourist stop so I could look down into the water, recalling T. S. Eliot’s line to the effect that this river was a “great brown god.” There were the usual vertiginous tremors but the habitual bridge question “Should I throw myself in?” didn’t arise. There was the suggestion of a song in my heart, however muted, as if unconscious but benign decisions were being made in my behalf.
Now that I was in Wisconsin I recalled that in the scant hour’s interview Michael Eisner had allowed me, he had told me that as young marrieds he and his wife had camped in northern Wisconsin and a bear had hassled their tent. This didn’t seem possible in the life story of a man who inhabited such a grand office, from which he directed an immense corporation, but it was doubtless true. Mike faces bear in dark. “At age twelve Henry Kissinger was pushed into a mud puddle by a chum and resolved never to go outside again, and if that wasn’t possible, he would at least avoid the vicinities of mud puddles. Once while drinking Cristal champagne high above the city of Gotham, he had told this story to Bob MacNamara, who had chortled. However, isn’t it true, Kissinger had added, that cities with proper drainage don’t have mud puddles.”
Fact can be enough to gag a maggot, I thought, driving south on Wisconsin Route 35, a smallish but delightfully scenic river road. “They knelt at twilight before a naked Oriental pussy and begged pardon for Vietnam.” Possible but unlikely. Perhaps I could vomit up enough inanities to raise the river, now on my right, on which barges headed south.
Near the bridge between Nelson and Wabasha I stopped at a wildlife area to take a stroll down toward the river, or at least one of its channels. There were hordes of mosquitoes but enough of a mid-day breeze to keep them at bay. The path was muddy from a recent rain and it quickly became apparent that my Bally loafers weren’t proper footwear. There was a fat black snake wriggling in the grass which drew up an image of Cindy’s poor snake from so many years ago that had become cat food. Cindy’s cheeks had been tear soaked and her hands trembled holding the small whiskey old Ida had poured to calm her. Sometimes she cried when we made love because it was so much “pure fun.”
At the end of the bush-enshrouded path was a mudflat and the river. Two boys about twelve were fishing and turned in alarm seeing me, as if I might be a truant officer if such creatures still existed. I waved, smiled, and asked the usual question, “Catching any?” They had two smallmouth bass of decent size and I immediately imagined the fish in a frying pan. In a knapsack up the bank I saw a copy of the Victoria’s Secret catalog peeking out but pretended not to notice, definitely a better-quality erotica than when I was their age. I moved off upriver on the mudflat and one of the boys yelled, “Don’t,” but it was too late. My foremost foot plunged up to its knee in mud. My other foot was still fairly solid but the awkward position collapsed me to my butt. I held out an arm and the boys tugged me out with some effort but my left shoe was gone. They were willing to try to retrieve the shoe but I said, “Fuck it,” and we all laughed.
On the clumsy way back to the car it occurred to me that the lost shoe left me with only fuzzy bedroom slippers, but in Winona I found an Army and Navy “war surplus” store where I bought socks and a pair of Marine combat boots and was directed to a nearby restaurant where I could get fried fish. It is difficult to find simple country-style fried fish in Manhattan or Chicago. You simply douse it pink with Tabasco and wash it down with a beer or two.
I stood with legs spread wide athwart a sidewalk crack in the manner of a Marine since I was wearing brand-new Marine combat boots. I was recalling my interview with Colin Powell prior to my Bioprobe on him several years back, and wondering again as I had at the time about the evolution of military mannerisms: the hypererect terseness so crisp that even shuffled papers were expected to respond. The rasping of crisp khakis in the halls of the Pentagon, the interior of the building so profoundly ugly you wondered if we were entitled to win a single game of international Scrabble. At the time it seemed apparent that a phalanx of officers striding toward lunch was not unlike a phalanx of pissed-off chimps in remote Gombe. These noble thoughts did not diminish my concern over the sign in the restaurant that simply said, “Fried Fish.” There had been a past, silly experience in Kansas when I never did find out what kind of fish was available. The waitress said, “You know, fish fish.” When I said that the ocean contained many types of fish she said, “This is Kansas,” closing off further discussion.
The catfish was fair to middling but then Dad used to say that “a saltine is a feast to a hungry man.” There was the specific regret that I had faxed my sister in Bloomington to say that I would be at Cindy’s near La Crosse for the weekend and giving the number. Though it was unlikely, that meant Don could track me down. To be frank it was Don who sent me to the rest clinic years ago with company money. He told me I was his golden goose and he wanted me to keep laying golden eggs, not really very flattering. He had been to this clinic several times and likes to tell me that the Mexican staff called him EL don Don. Don has the irritating habit of repeating stories, knowing that he is rich and powerful and can get away with it in the same manner that he accepts incoming calls when you are having an important meeting, important being his term.
I slept in the car in the restaurant parking lot, baking like a Sunday chicken, until a kind old man rapped at the window to see if I was alive. During my sleep I had actually made a decision to ask for a month’s extension on the Eisner manuscript. I wondered how it was possible to receive instructions in your sleep when no dream was involved. Don is a real killer on the subject of deadlines and once when I had a bit of nervous collapse during the writing of my Donald Trump Don had had the bulk of the manuscript ghostwritten.
Frankly, I’ve never been one for vacations but sensed I was ready for one now. Quite early in my career on the ample monies supplied by my first three Bioprobes I took up tennis and skiing but soon gave them up as simply too banal against my early literary backdrop, though my literary sensitivities were certainly evaporating in the heat of my Bioprobe labors. I skied at Stowe, Vail, and Aspen, and went to expensive tennis schools in California, Texas, and Florida. I almost forgot but I also had a few days of deep-sea fishing off Key West. There is something nearly offensive about the company of other people on vacations. The many long evenings with others who are exhausting mind and body trying to buy high-paced fun: dancing with a woman who was sweltering in a hand-knit Norwegian sweater, eating elaborate and expensive and mediocre resort-town meals that suffered horribly from the latest food fads, and all of the stupidly expensive equipment, the seven-hundred-dollar skis and the four-hundred-dollar tennis rackets, when the level of my abilities would have made Wal-Mart junk more appropriate. In Aspen you could always hear braying Texans a block away. Once on Little Nell a big-deal socialite shit her pants after a bad fall and her friends scattered. I loaned her my parka to tie around her waist but that evening she ignored me in a bar and I never got my parka back. This was more comic than grim I had reflected over scallopini with a cup of vinegarish capers and some tainted frozen raspberries. I shouldn’t neglect to say that Don has played the fifty “greatest golf courses of the world.”
Life is work, or so I have thought, or “done,” since there were no really appealing alternatives. Claire was appalled when we had a tiff in Paris and I spent three days riding the trai
n back and forth to Marseilles to get some work done. The trip was four and a half hours each way and I was too angry and restless to work in a hotel room when I was paying for a high-rent apartment. A lovely train stewardess would bring me coffee, wine, hard-boiled eggs and I’d fill victorious notebooks with workable prose about Warren Buffett.
Sitting there in the hot restaurant parking lot near an exhaust fan pumping out redolent but unpleasant fried-fish smells I thought, “Fuck Don, I’m taking a break.” I squealed the tires leaving the parking lot, my heart not exactly soaring but far lighter than usual.
Cindy was far too sun-chafed, wiry, muscular, her speech much more rapid than in the old days. We stood in the jungle-like yard behind her farmhouse that needed its half-done paint job completed. I had been met at the door by a blocky young woman whose voice I recognized from the phone, and in the backyard this young woman had brought us each a two-ounce glass of mediocre sherry. I already had begun to suspect the woman might be Cindy’s “companion” in addition to assistant, but then I’m frequently wrong on such matters. I was pleased when Cindy poured out her sherry on the grass and decided my arrival might merit a martini, though when I poured mine out I was chided about directing it on a plant that the sherry might injure. At least I had not yet asked any stupid botany questions though I had verged on one. The fields behind the house were disappointing unlike the photos of blooming flowers in the airline magazine. Easy. It wasn’t time for the flowers to bloom yet (though Humanistic Botany hadn’t dwelled on the matter) but this wasn’t quite enough to make me smug. When I followed her up the back steps and into the house I couldn’t help but note her ass lacked something in the way of contents, the polar alternative to the middle-age spread.
