The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  I caught your Santa act, he mentions further, twinkling. On an earlier visit. That was some exit you made.

  Ormus shrugs, is unamused by the happenstance of it: the Cosmic Dancer Hotel again. As if Nataraja, the old Lord of the Dance, were out there somewhere, choreographing the steps of his petty human destiny. I was going through a bad time, he snaps. I’m better now. He doesn’t add that the excitement of England, as it approaches, is flooding through him, as if he were a drain-blocked Bombay street in the monsoon. Standish, a big man, sees it, anyway: Ormus’s aroused condition, his readiness for whatever may come. His so to speak protagony. You’re the vigorous type, he notes. Good. We have that in common, for a start.

  Standish’s own vigour is so great that it seems he might burst out of his suit and shoes at any moment, like Tarzan in the City, like the Hulk. This is a person who has business with the world, who expects events to fall in with his plans. An actor and a maker. His highly manicured nails, his equally well attended hair, speak of a certain amour propre. Near the end of this long plane flight he looks daisy-fresh. That takes some doing. That takes an exercise of will.

  Is there something I can do for you?

  Ormus’s question actually makes Standish applaud. You’re in even more of a hurry than I’d hoped, the older man congratulates the younger. And here I am thinking it’s the East that’s timeless, and us transatlantic rats who can’t stop racing to Hell and back again.

  No, Ormus answers. Actually it’s the West that’s exotic, fabulous, unreal. We underworlders … He realizes that Standish isn’t listening. Don’t go chippy on me, Mr. Cama, the American says: distantly, even idly. We may be working together for some time, and we’re going to have to be able to speak our minds, any way we choose. Even a pirate can cleave to his First Amendment rights, as I hope you will allow. (The twinkle is back in his eyes.)

  He’s a Cambridge man—Cambridge, England; two years of graduate school. In his day he was a brilliant Chinese scholar, with dreams of setting up an academic institution of his own once he was through studying. Things have not worked out as he hoped. An early marriage to a woman in the rag trade failed, though not before it produced two sons, who stayed in England with his angry, resentful ex-wife when he went back across the Atlantic. For a time he taught Chinese at Amherst College. Then, frustrated at failing to gain the rapid advancement he expected, he made a curious, flamboyant decision. He would drive long-haul trucks across America for a few years, work his ass off, save money, start his dreamed-of Chinese school. From teacher to Teamster: a metamorphosis that represented the first stage of his true coming to be, his American way. He lit out, without illusions or regrets.

  He quotes Sal Paradise by heart: So began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off For two years, maybe three, time was kind of stretchy then, you never knew how long things were taking, I crisscrossed America, carrying its produce to those who needed it, who were addicted to it as badly as any junkie, or had been told they needed it so often that they became addicted to the telling. A heavily fatigued speedhead, blissed out on distance and music and harsh, hungry freedom. Of course I never saved any money at all, spent it right away on women and substances, and most of all I spent it at Vegas, where the big wheels kept taking me, the spinning roulette wheels of my monster trucks.

  Standish is away with his thoughts. Ormus, sipping Scotch, understands that a full opening of the self is being offered here, an absolute honesty, offered at once and without restraints as the proof of the soliloquist’s bona fides. Listening, Ormus closes his eyes for an instant, and there is his own Vegas, that blaze of light through which his dead brother ducks and dives. So they have Las Vegas in common too.

  Like Byron, like Talleyrand … I do not hesitate, Ormus Cama tells me A.V., to compare Mull Standish to such men; for he often made the comparison himself, and these days, a person’s self-description is quickly adopted by all and sundry—Clown Prince, Comeback Kid, Sister of Mercy, Honest John—so why deny Standish his chosen similes? … like Joyce’s Nausicaä, Gertie MacDowell, the American has a club foot. The Lobb shoes have to be specially built to accommodate and support it. In the matter of sexual attraction, it is well known that neither Talleyrand nor Byron was adversely affected by his damaged limb. However, in the younger days about which he has chosen to tell Ormus, Mull Standish was still more of a Gertie: his foot crippled his self-belief. Then, while he was losing his stash in an early round of the World Championship of Poker, he was approached by a young man, who spoke appreciatively of his physical beauty and offered him a substantial sum of money to accompany him to a suite at the Tropicana. Standish, feeling broke, absurd and flattered, agreed, and the encounter changed his life.

  This was the beginning of my voyage across a frontier I’d thought forever closed to me. (His voice is languorous now, his body stretches out and grows dreamy with remembered joy.) Through that slash in the iron curtain between heterosex and homosex, I saw a vision of sublimity. After that, I gave up the trucks, and for a passage of years I stayed in Vegas, as a working male.

  Prostitution taught him he was beautiful and desired, it allowed him to dream, to construct the Mull Standish who would dare to enter the Zeitgeist and shake it all about. From Las Vegas to New York’s Forty-second Street was a predictable next step, and it was here that he became the beneficiary of a classic only-in-America moment. A limousine pulled up; its window motored open; out leaned that selfsame young man, the trick from the Tropicana, his transforming angel. Jesus. I’ve been looking for you for months. Jesus Christ. It turned out that Mr. Tropicana had come (a) into his inheritance, and (b) to the conclusion that Mull Standish was his one true love. As a token of this love he gave Mull a brownstone apartment building in St. Mark’s. In a trice the midnight cowboy was transformed into a member of the propertied classes, a respectable member of the Greater Gotham Business Guild of gay businessmen, and a pillar of the community. Thereafter Standish rapidly parlayed his early, lucky break into the beginnings of a jaw-dropping real estate portfolio, thanks to his continuing, long-term relationship with the Tropicana Kid—let’s call him Sam—and, therefore, honorary membership of the inner circle of one of New York’s true First Families, the great construction dynasties, the master builders, the high grammarians of the city’s present tense.

  Mayors, bankers, movie stars, basketball stars, representatives, Mull Standish says, and it is the first time Ormus hears a note of boastfulness in his voice, These people have been, let us say, frequently at my disposal.

  America is not so unlike India, after all.

  Why aren’t you there now? Ormus has perspicacity of his own. There is a hidden dimension here, a side to the tale that has not been disclosed. Mull Standish raises a glass, acknowledging the question’s shrewdness. I have certain issues with the IRS, he confesses. Corners were cut. There was a degree of clumsiness. It suits me to be in England for a time. England, where it’s still illegal to be queer. As for India, I go there for my spiritual needs. I see this is a remark of which you do not approve. What shall I say? You have lived in the wood all your life and so you cannot see the trees. To provide the planet with good air to breathe, we have been given the Amazon rain forest. To provide for the planet’s soul, there is India. One goes there as one goes to the bank, to refill the pocketbook of the psyche. Excuse the vulgar money-oriented metaphor. I have a refined act but I am not at bottom the refined type. Leopardskin briefs under the sober suit. Lycanthropic tendencies at the time of the full moon. A certain loucherie. In spite of which I have my spiritual hunger, the needs of my soul.

  The stewardess tells me you’ve been calling this plane the Mayflower, it has pleased you to make that joke. Did you know that Standish is a famous Mayflower name? I guess nobody reads Longfellow any more, especially in Bombay. Still, it’s a poem of more than a thousand lines, a long and vile thing. Miles Standish, a profe
ssional soldier, suffering from soldierly inarticulacy, wishes to marry a certain Puritan maiden, Priscilla Mullens or Molines, and makes what you might call the Cyrano error, sending his friend John Alden to plead his cause because the cat had gotten his tongue and wouldn’t let go. Young Alden, a cooper, a signatory of the Mayflower Compact, the founder of Plymouth Colony, a man of fortunate looks and pleasing manner, is unfortunately much in love with the same damsel, and yet in friendship’s name agrees to do as he is bid. Well! Mistress Molines or Mullens, she hears him out, then looks him squarely, forwardly in the eye and asks, Why don’t you speak for yourself, John? Tedious hundreds of lines later they are married, and the gruff old soldier, my vanquished—and distant—ancestor, is left to make the best of it. I tell you this because, though I’m no Puritan, Mistress Priscilla’s words are now my motto. I ask nothing on others’ behalf, but am shameless and inexorable in my own interest. As now, this minute, in making my approach to you.

  Ormus reddens, and Standish, seeing his embarrassment, laughs. No, not sex, he reassures him. Piracy on the high seas.

  England rushes towards them, then stops. Air traffic congestion, even in 1965. Unable to make their approach, they circle in the sky. Down below them, the pirate navy has assembled, an invasion is in progress. Here is a decommissioned old passenger ferry, flying the Jolly Roger, moored in the North Sea. The Frederica. Here’s another, the Georgia, anchored off the Essex coast, near Frinton. Look down at the Thames Estuary: those three tiny dots, see them?, are also part of this cutthroat fleet. Ormus, tired, exhilarated, is in an airplane state of mind; hollow, unreal, a condition in which it’s hard to keep a grip on things. Mull Standish seems utterly unfazed, and is talking, now, about childhood:

  There was a heavy glass ball that used to sit on the windowsill of my bedroom. My father would turn it to catch and refract light. There were bubbles in it, like galaxies, like dreams. The small things of our earliest days move us, and we don’t know we don’t know why. Now that I’ve started this pirate fleet thing, I keep seeing that ball. Maybe it’s innocence, freedom, I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s about a transparent world: you can see through it to the light. Maybe it’s just a ball of glass, but somehow it’s moving me, it’s making me do this.

  It occurs to Ormus as Standish talks on that he’s giving too many reasons for doing what he is doing: over-explaining what is, after all, a nakedly commercial enterprise, news of which has already reached India. At a brilliant moment in British music, British radio is deadly dull. Restrictions on “needle time” mean that when you want the latest hit records—John Lennon singing “Satisfaction,” the Kinks’ “Pretty Woman,” or “My Generation,” by the new super-group High Numbers, who changed their name from The Who and immediately made the big time—all you get is Joe Loss or Victor Sylvester, music for dead people. But because commercial radio isn’t illegal if it’s not land based, the pirate ships have come to give the kids what they want. Needle time and adverts. Hello pop pickers this is Radio Freddie broadcasting on 199 … this is Radio Gaga … this is the Big M. The pirates aim their sounds at Britain and the country surrenders. And Mull Standish is the Lord High Desperadio: the music brigands’ king.

  Reasons go on pouring out of him. Maybe he’s in England because, to be absolutely frank, things with his lover, Sam Tropicana, are no longer what they were, the bloom is off. Or maybe he just plain got bored with the construction industry, all those hard hats and girders, all those empty rooms for other lives to fill. Or maybe it’s the fault of the CIA, because, yes, they approached him on several occasions, a Chinese-language expert is assumed to be top-grade spy material, so they try and sign you up before the Yellow Peril gets to you and turns you to the dark side, and the second time he refused them—a man called Michael Baxter or Baxter Michaels had made the approach right in the foyer of the Sherry Netherland—he was accused of having an attitude and threatened with the confiscation of his passport. I crossed some line when that happened, it changed America for me, and it became possible to leave. And then, of course, it’s surprising he’s taken so long to get round to mentioning it, there’s the war, America is at war. Ballot boxes have been stuffed full of votes for President Kennedy, war is always good for sitting presidents, his numbers are up from the tight squeeze against Nixon in 1960, he’s got four more years of power and priapism at Pennsylvania Avenue, and now it’s the voters, the young generation of soldier electors out there in jungled, swamped, incomprehensible Indochina, who are being stuffed into boxes in shocking quantities and being sent home to various addresses less exalted than JFK’s. Their numbers, too, are up.

  Mull Standish is against the war, but that’s not exactly what he wants to say. He wants to say—his eyes are gleaming now, and the energy pours from him with redoubled, frightening force—that the war has turned him on to its consequent music, because in this dark time it’s the rock music that represents the country’s most profound artistic engagement with the death of its children, not just the music of peace and psychotropic drugs but the music of rage and horror and despair. Also of youth, youth surviving in spite of everything, in spite of the children’s crusade that’s blowing it apart. (A mine, a sniper, a knife in the night: childhood’s bitter end.)

  That’s when I really fell in love with rock, Standish is off and rolling, because I admired so much what it was doing, the humane democratic spirit-food fullness of its response. It was not just saying fuck you, Uncle Sam, or give peace a chance, or I feel like I’m fixin’ to die, or even making patriotic noises, zap zap zappin’ the Cong. Rather, it was making love in a combat zone, insisting on the remembrance of beauty and innocence in a time of death and guilt; it privileged life over death and asked life to take its chance, let’s dance, honey honey, in the street, on the phone, and we’ll have fun fun fun on the eve of destruction.

  His manner has changed completely, from patrician Bostonian to eager-beaver muso peacenik, and Ormus, watching the transformation, begins to see who he really is. Never mind all his explanations, the truth is he’s just another one of us chameleons, just another looking-glass transformer. Not only an incarnation of Jason the Argonaut but also perhaps of Proteus, the metamorphic Old Man of the Sea. And once we’ve learned how to change our skins, we Proteans, sometimes we can’t stop, we career between selves, lane-hopping wildly, trying not to run off the road and crash. Mull Standish, too, is a slip-slider, Ormus understands: a shape-shifter, a man who knows what it’s like to wake up as a giant bug. That’s why he picked me out, he can see we’re of the same tribe, the same sub-species of the human race. Like aliens on a strange planet we can recognize each other in any crowd. At present we have adopted human form, here on the third rock from the sun.

  Standish, this new, exhilarated, high-as-a-kite Standish, says: I came to England to get away from a country at war. One month after I arrived, the new Labour government decided to join forces with the Americans and ship its own kids out to die. Things here stopped being theoretical. British boys and girls, too, started being mailed home in small packages. I couldn’t believe it, as an American I felt responsible, as if I’d flouted quarantine regulations and imported a deadly epidemic, I felt like a flea carrier. A plague dog. This development was not as per programme. In a spin, I flew out to India, which is what I do when I need to regain equilibrium. That’s when I looked in at your big moment at the Cosmic Dancer, by the way.

  After Bombay, Standish had gone to sit at the feet of a teenage mahaguru in Bangalore, and then up to Dharmsala to spend time at the Buddhist Shugden temple. Again—I find myself thinking when Ormus tells me the story—again the curious possessive fascination of the hedonistic West with the ascetic East. The arch-disciples of linearity, of the myth of progress want, from the Orient, only its fabled unchangingness, its myth of eternity. It was the god-boy who came through. He’s an old soul in a young body, Mull says reverentially, a Tantric Master in his final incarnation. I confessed everything to that wise child, my alienation, my guilt, my despair, and
he smiled his pure smile and said, The music is the glass is the glass ball. Let it shine.

  I understood then that the limit on needle time was the enemy, the censor. The limit was General Waste-More-Land’s broadcasting ally, General Haig’s whore. Enough with big bands and men in white tuxes with bow ties pretending nothing was going on. I mean come on. A nation at war deserves to hear the music that’s going mano a mano with the war machine, that’s sticking flowers down its gun barrels and baring its breasts to the missiles. The soldiers are singing these songs as they die. But this is not the way soldiers used to sing, marching into battle bellowing hymns, kidding themselves they had god on their side; these aren’t patriotic-bullshit, get-yourself-up-for-it songs. These kids are using singing, instead, as an affirmation of what’s natural and true, singing against the unnatural lie of the war. Using song as a banner of their doomed youth. Not morituri te salutant, but morituri say up yours, Jack, those about to die give you the fucking finger. That’s why I got the ships.

  He slumps back in his seat, almost talked out. He has sold up a chunk of his American real estate holdings to purchase, equip and staff up these barely seaworthy little boats. A complete encirclement of England and Scotland is envisaged, seagoing conditions permitting. Now we’re blasting the material at them round the clock, he says, Hendrix and Joplin and Zappa, making war on war. Certainly, the loveable moptops too. Also the Lovin’ Spoonful, Love, Mr. James Brown feelin like a sex machine, Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel feelin groovy et cetera. My one regret is that we can’t moor a boat on the Thames, right outside the Houses of Parliament, mount giant speakers on the deck and blow those complacent bastards right out of their murderous seats. But never say die; this project, too, is in development. So what do you say? Are you with us or withered? There or square?