Introducing Ina Boyd (a screenplaypoem)
February 7, 2009
1.
-Ina says a dreamboat’s any man refrains demanding anal on like the third date.
-Dreamboat’s mother’s word.
-Mother’d pronounce it in-uh.
-Daddy said Eee-nah.
-Couldn’t even agree on that.
-Ina burns her fingers on the water glass.
-They served me coffee in a water glass.
-My first sensation in Berlin.
-A burn.
-A Flashback:
-Mother pretending drunk on balcony overlooking Mississippi.
-A balcony as architectural trophy of amicable divorce.
-Mother pretending drunk to make the saying…
-Ina needing no such excuse.
-…of certain things…
-Hard as some things are to say.
-…easy…
-Excuses are for those who can be bothered, says Ina.
-The darling child.
-Talks to herself openly in public.
-Sings oldies.
-Mother’s hiccup.
-Ma, it is only cranberry juice.
-Oh so you’re a drink inspector now too. My daughter the mind-reading drink-inspector who quits colleges to chase ratsafarians.
-The sunset a rich dessert.
-The mighty Mississippi.
-Dandan’s mercurial grave.
-Ina thinking it is a Negro river.
-Thinking but never saying this word Negro…
-Okay she remembers calling Joanie Joplin my Negro once.
-Mother saying now Ina…
-Mother saying now do not look at me when I say this but.
-Sunset spectacular flambeéd entrails.
-Staring she said remember dear, gentlemen…
-Ina remembers and laughs out loud at table alone in café where they burned her fingers.
-I must look crazy.
-Suitcase beside me.
-Crazy but hot.
-Nazi folksinger looks up when she laughs.
-Again.
-He sure looks like a folksinging nazi.
-Looking pure but not benign.
-Probably Jewish just to teach me to….
-Half-Jew.
-Half-Jews…
-Mother through ruby depths of faux Chablis peering says remember dear, gentlemen.
-Cheeks both red as cranberry.
-Is this how she turns herself on now?
-Talking dirty to college-age daughter?
-Remember dear, gentlemen do not expect a lady…
-Ina hoots.
-To swallow.
-Ina hoots.
-Ina thinks how preciously naïve.
-Is that the scariest…?
-Ina thinks if only.
-I’d swallow a quart if that’s where it stopped.
-I’d be like, is that all you’ve got?
-Mother pronounced it ratsafarian.
-Please never tell me you’re pregnant with ratsafarian…
-And do not give me that look like it never happens.
-She’d say for all intensive purposes.
-Nucular.
-Flashback finished.
-Inscribing Department of Human Race Horses in her immaculate hand like preserve a secret for the ages in notebook and smile.
-Catch that nazi folksinger look again.
-I am wet as an eight-second egg.
-I am wet as a Mississippi.
-Looks again I’m saying something.
-Looks again it’s on.
-Let’s do this.
-I don’t give a chunky fuck.
-LED eyes Thou hast.
-Kiss these blistered…
-Sorry means never having to say I love you.
-Ina stands and goes hey um would you watch my stuff for a minute I need to go to the bathroom.
-Uncomprehending look in return.
-Look of the daze-ruptured put-upon.
-It is 15:40.
-Do you speak English?
-Do you?
-She laughs and squeezes between the tables wishing she hadn’t said need. Sounds so well I don’t know so irrefutably graphic to say like I need to go to the bathroom. Want would have been better.
-And what’s up with the word bathroom.
-It’s like I need to take a humungous dump.
-For medical reasons.
-Perforated duodenum and such.
-Can you hold my colostomy bag for a sec thanks.
-Batting her eyelashes. Do you find me alluring?
-Feels two eyes on her ass as she passes.
-The tables are just a thigh apart yet she squeezes through without even touching edges.
-Passed the buttock test with flying colors.
-Buttock the farm word.
-Fantasize he is infallible cool cyborg assassin scan rapid digit display scroll phosphor-green screen while geometric simulation of ass rotate 180 degrees on pulsating graph when target-circle zeroes-in on her anus.
-Assassin.
-Get it?
-Loo door swings.
-Thankgod no Americans in this bathroom.
-Clears throat.
-Would it offend anyone if I called this shitroom Mecca?
-I could stay here all day.
-Having grown to abhor the sound of Trustifarian English.
-This haven.
-If I’m in here longer than five minutes nazi folksinger will picture the taking of a humungous dump.
-Can’t have that.
-Though: would it not be funny to birthgroan loud as a whale?
-We are not comedian.
-We are hot like Joan of Arc.
-’Tis only tinkle.
-Mother crying Jesus wept on the toilet.
-Door’s all wide open and I’m like Mother.
-Rotten jello smell: the pain of stench.
-Hemorrhoids mother hindparts acquired evacuating hero of our story.
-The mighty Mississippi.
-My little brother’s widow.
-This foreign toilet paper sucks.
-In-uh.
-Get it?
-Flashback finished.
-Srsly.
2.
-So he claims his name is Spinoza.
-He claims his name is Spinoza. Yes he does. I do. He do.
-That is a fuckedness.
-But seriously.
-Seriously?
-You are a name bigot?
-Your parents are hippies?
-So now she is hippie-intolerant?
-On top of everything else.
-What else?
-I am an honor student.
-What if I was black?
-Were.
-Was.
-Were.
-Whatever. What if I were black?
-You’d have an excuse. But your name would not be Spinoza.
-No, my name would be LaFoyer Grady.
-That is a pretty convincing job of black name random generating on short notice.
-You try.
-DeMario Smalls.
-I see we have our racism in common.
-Something to fall back on during lulls.
-Lulls aren’t the things we fall back on?
-So his name is seriously Spinoza.
-Yes.
-Just Spinoza?
-Simply Spinoza. Yes. I am a gifted young DJ. What is yours?
-LeKwanza Pinckney.
-My first black girlfriend.
-Whoa.
-Whoa?
-Things are moving quickly.
3.
-Ina thinking I recall now reading that a sweetish semen means it is diabetes.
-Which feels like far too intimate to know or to tell him.
-To wake and tell him.
-Rather text it.
-In a week I’ll text it.
-Spinoza in his fetal postcoital coma in the gloaming.
-Semen from her lips to his to close a circle.
-And also the Lego smell and Daniel.
-Daniel melted Legos on their bedroom lightbulb twice.
-Later died on a dare with the Mississippi.
-The varsity swimmer slash little brother in that mighty Negro river.
-Spinoza does not snore he fartles.
-Gnashing his teeth he fartles.
-Spinoza farts the smells of melting Legos to channel brother Daniel.
-Supine Ina sneers at posters of now-old or long-dead frog and wop actresses who wouldn’t even’ve as iffed him.
-Spiderwebs darkly drug-addled thoughts above his mattress.
-Said spiders watch his Jewy dreams.
-Said Ina too.
-Her mouth still sized to the proximate dick.
-The look called pursed.
-The boy she thought a nazi folksinger.
-The boy she thought pure not benign.
-He is fartling he is gnashing his teeth.
-Lo, a tugboat crosseth pudding lake.
-The anal flap and sputter.
-You just can’t imagine loving him less.
-In the spirit of which she note-writes about goodbyes and goodlucks and hinted-at manageable medical conditions.
-The dazzling legend of Nordic healthcare.
-Signed LeKwanza.
-Signed the first blowjob is free the next in dreams bereft ie fool me once.
-Signed I hate being an American on this Americans-choked sidewalk oh so looking the part of congenital Mallness.
-Like folks I just fell off the intercontinental turnip truck.
-But I will learn.
-She had a forty dollar haircut and birthcontrol bazooms and she was ready to use them.
-This rolling suitcase louder than the liberation of Paris.
-The airport handle.
-I am creditcard-dressed and distressed.
-Sweet-semen fed and obvious.
-Turning sees Spinoza in his briefs in window like mother on balcony overlooking mighty Negro brother-stealing river with a waving shyness mouthing call me.
-Call you what?
-Almost Daniel?
puppet in a tunnel
March 24, 2007
Desultory Notes on Shit and Beauty
January 2, 2007
A text message from Rafael Miller. He’s in Berlin; time for a little walk? I don’t see him often. Don’t take that as a tragic lament. Rafael only likes to see me in order to brag or complain and he starts in on the bragging before my hand can fall out of the first handshake we’ve shared in six months. In media res, as they say. Things are going so well in his new job that he’s thinking about opening a business of his own, soon. He’s living in a modest flat in Bristol, England, selling men’s suits for his generous German boss. The boss, says Rafael, promises to finance a second shop that Rafael, himself, will be running. The big money will finally be his. Which way should we walk? I nod in the direction of the Ku’damm and we’re off.
It’s a not-too-chilly, intermittently sunny day in March. Rafael is very tall. I’m tall but he’s a head taller. An athletic-looking, very handsome black American I first worked with years ago, when I was new to Berlin and looking for a male singer to front a commercial project. Rafael can sing a little, models here and there and can claim to do several other unremarkable things, besides selling men’s suits, to earn his money. He’s an astonishingly-preserved fifty years old, appearing to be in his mid-thirties. The problem with Rafael, if it can be said to be a problem, is his profound stupidity.
Rafael sometimes shows unexpected flashes of wit, as though fleetingly, mockingly, possessed by intelligent demons, between the bragging and complaining and the clumsy efforts to impress. He has an off-putting trait of habitually working out his angles and options via whoever he’s facing at the time, without the necessary ability to mask these calculations, which are always displayed quite plainly on his face. He’s usually torn between the need to brag about having plenty of money and the urge to borrow some.
As a former American soldier, he is allowed to own a gun in Berlin.
One grasps that American Society has invested time and money into creating and maintaining Rafael’s stupidity. Why?
Rafael is a likeable fellow. But it can be excruciatingly embarrassing, strolling down a busy street with him while he’s holding forth on some topic he’s ignorant about in the confident voice of the ignorant. I remember him holding forth on “the Jews” a few years back, on a summer’s day, in a crowded Berlin shopping district, with the bell-clear tones of a hiker discussing bad weather. He gestured at the German banks, boutiques, cafes and cinemas and announced that greedy Jews owned all of it. Surely, relatively recent German history contradicted this claim? I tried, with a smile, to get him to lower the voice, if not to change the subject, but why should he? As he put it, he was telling the Lord’s truth and therefore had nothing to be ashamed of.
Just as American celebrities of a previous era had a tendency to speak in the third person (I’m thinking here of Jerry Lewis referring to Jerry Lewis as “a Jerry Lewis”), Rafael Miller favors the second-person narration. This can be more distressing, for his walking companion, on a crowded street, than when he’s pontificating about the Jews. He was complaining to me about his girlfriend; a tall, beautiful, status-obsessed Muslim of Eastern European descent, no Erasmus herself. Rafael and I walked on a day that was warm enough to fill the sidewalks, and he entered into the spirit of his complaint.
He shouted at me, “I show you all my damn love and give you a damn place to stay and put damn food on your plate and the best damn clothes on your body and shoes on your damn feet, you gonna pull this selfish shit on me?”
*****
Anyone who takes writing seriously, who wasn’t clever enough to have been born rich, must put some thought into finding the kind of job that will pay the bills without sapping one’s writerly will to go on. Early I discovered that I had two talents ( “talent” defined as the ability to produce steadily) , one musical, one literary. It took years to come to the conclusion that if I prostituted the former, I could pay for the luxury of the latter, destroying the former completely. It’s possible you’ve heard some of this shit on the radio.
*****
There was a quaint era when young men without steady jobs spent most of every day being unreachable by phone. Answering machines soon mitigated this freedom, before cell phones eradicated it entirely. The young men I see on the streets and in the U-Bahn, now, look hunted. The young women look like section heads for a vast, data-gathering-and-disseminating network; like bureaucrats sitting on a mountain of information. The old people look out-of-it; the old people look like corrupted data; none of these incessant phone calls are about them.
*****
The nicest guys tell the smallest lies. Constantly.
*****
I once spent a weekend in the supposedly ritzy city of Munich, attempting to collaborate with a sinewy, weathered expat American songwriter named Bradley Rankin, with material to his credit on Tom Petty and Celine Dion albums. Rankin claimed, on the second day of my visit, that his clairvoyant German wife had detected thirteen spirits, among them the shades of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, hovering around the recording studio. He asked me if I was afraid of ghosts. He didn’t ask me if I was afraid of strangers who make ridiculous claims they dare you to laugh at. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to punch him, destroy the studio with a fire axe and take the cost of my roundtrip ticket out of the deco cigar box he kept his cash and his baggied pot in.
*****
If you can’t be a star in the heavens, be a lamp in a chamber
-Arab proverb
*****
The Germans call their celebrities Prominente. These Prominente are engorged as ticks on their fatty super-suppers of self. And why should anyone care? It’s clear to me, as I flip through the pages of various magazines, that America’s idols are proportionally even more absurd; an even bigger prank on a planet which foolishly thinks of these human logos as old friends or moral compasses or arbiters of style. As an expatriate, I see the con with fresh eyes.
Look into a stranger’s shopping cart if you want to see how terrible your own diet really is.
*****
I was fronting a four-piece avant garde rock group called Tin Tin Tin Tin at a party I’d helped to organize for a Czech Theater group, singing my spectacularly strange composition, “The Ancient Fireman Song.” As I walked offstage to confused applause a permed booking agent named Frank Gagne handed me his card and posed a rhetorical question about whether I wanted to make real money playing music. He told me, in his rented car, in an effort to bond with me, that he’d married his wife for her tits and further because he could fuck her in the ass and come in her mouth immediately afterwards. It was as he was telling me all this with glittering eyes that I realized that I would never make real money playing music. So I became a composer.
*****
I slept with a fetching Duchess (with a dilapidated family castle to brag of) who, before performing the oral sex, sniffed my penis like a hound, her nostrils flaring, forcing me to laugh too hard to maintain an erection.
*****
My father, a neo-Fauvist painter, had his Korean War rifle confiscated by the Liberian government, because it was more powerful than any weapon in the army.
*****
A Literary Critic who introduces us to otherwise neglected work is performing a valuable service. Everything else is a matter of taste and generally suspect as back-scratching, score-settling, band-wagoning, hackwork or envy.
*****
A British pop-act-manager (with an advanced degree in History) once presented me with the schnapps-fueled theory that Bobby McFerrin had written and performed the most trenchantly satirical, socially-conscious number-one pop record in history, but that the American inability to grasp sophisticated irony had doomed McFerrin to be forever associated with the ethos of the Reagan era he had set out to excoriate, rendering him a great martyr, second only to John Lennon, in the minds of the cognoscenti.
*****
There’s no real reason a lottery contestant isn’t every bit as likely to win once as win ten times in a row. What argues against it happening is the Narrative Field. Statistics are a narrative. Statistics pre-suppose some kind of connection from one moment to the next. Without consciousness, which supplies the narrative, what connects the first coin toss to the fiftieth? As far as the inanimate coin goes, each toss might as well be its first: there’s no physical reason why there shouldn’t be a string of 5,000 heads (or tails) in a row. It’s only the Narrative Field that prevents it.
*****
I walked into a MacDonalds in Stockholm, off Kungsgatan, with a sheepish grin on my face, as though I expected the fourteen year old Swedish girl in the paper hat who took my order to sneer, Oh, suddenly you’re not too good for us.
*****
The commonest greeting in Vienna is “Grüß Gott” (Greet God!) , a tendency which the Viennese are without a doubt averse to being told is remarkably Muslim in character. Walking up and down that small city and having its straight-spined citizens greet one relentlessly in that fashion is very much like being at sea on an immense Christian warship. The waiters in Vienna are square-jawed, crewcut and tall, like elite soldiers. There’s a table-waiting academy they are obliged to attend and a very long apprenticeship they must complete before being allowed to serve. When a waiter in Vienna hands you your menu and orders you to “Grüß Gott” you forget your hunger and do it.
Sipping a Kleinen Braunen (espresso), in a mellow block of spring sunshine at a restaurant which lies just beyond the chilling jurisdiction of Saint Stephen’s midday shadow, it occured to me that my body’s blasphemous transubstantiation of a heavenly Sachertorte into reeking lumps is a reminder that human cultural evolution is the chronicle of a protracted battle between Shit and Beauty.
The middle-European word for ‘novel’ is Roman, as in romance, and what better non-chemical form of escapism could exist for the literate, aristocratic dreamers of the 18th century than the virtual immersion in a book’s compression of time and omissions of odor and its structural beatifications of Death and Sex?
*****
This is the thing about Bush: people who voted for him knew it was wrong…they were pre-teens smoking cigarettes behind the garden shed…the transgression that feels so giddily and foolishly like empowerment. Europe of course was the stricken parent.
*****
No: Bush is that lying, thieving, physically abusive son-of-a-bitch that a woman (America) just couldn’t bring herself to break up with. Everyone warned her, until the inevitable finally happened. Was it low self-esteem, in the end, which killed her?
*****
I started writing my own songs before I had learned anyone else’s and formed a band, DaVinci’s Lips, before I could properly play. Astonishingly, the best drummer I ever had left me in order to join Prince. He was an extremely fat drummer known to wear attention-getting hats. He was well-read and very bright and seemed somehow able to package his fatness as being a direct consequence of such unwieldy intelligence. What I remember, fondly, is how he fell through a heating grate one afternoon and got jammed in the circular hole in the floor of the rehearsal space.
*****
I performed oral sex on my girlfriend on one of the principal sets of the film Purple Rain. I was guarding the set overnight, alert, to the point of distraction, to every sound in the cavernous night club. The club was/is called First Avenue, a remodeled bus station. I was licking my girlfriend like a not-entirely-famished cat guarding a bowl of rather too much clotted cream. Being very young and naïve I was disappointed at the cheapness of the materials on the set: the tinfoil and plastic, the Styrofoam and cardboard; the terrible script, a copy of which we had found and read through, taking the parts of various characters as if it were Ibsen.
*****
Germans sometimes chide me for my imperfect German, unaware of the fact that my original inability to speak the Fatherland’s language was what made Berlin so attractive to me in the first place. A day’s worth of any language is nothing but data, with no intrinsic style, meaning or value. Imposing elegance on the bulk medium requires the strenuous premeditation and/or good habits of verbal hygiene that most citizens can’t bother with. Overheard small talk is nearly as pleasant as second-hand smoke. The only thing worse than overhearing it is being forced to participate.
*****
For some reason, the sectarian warriors in Belfast got bored with their hatred. Someone should analyze this. Making hatred boring may be the only hope for the planet. Or, examine the demographic shift. The hatred hurricane probably requires a critical mass of young men to feed it. Or maybe the girls of Belfast have gotten a little easier to sleep with?
*****
One of the loveliest public spaces I’ve ever spent an afternoon in was an abortion clinic in London, out on the Richmond line. Sitting on the end of my girlfriend’s bed in a room full of beds of chatty Irish girls, passing around their chocolates.
*****
I auditioned a singer who turned out to be a high-end prostitute who begged me for three months of free singing lessons, which I consented to give her. At the end of the three months she begged me to be the father of the unborn child she’d been carrying since the week before she’d auditioned, to which I said no.
*****
Austrian super-misanthropist (and great writer; do the two go hand in hand?), Thomas Bernhard, was the scourge of his country. He often referred to Austria as a land of six and a half million idiots full of unrepentant Nazis and murderers. The Austrians, in turn, considered Bernhard somewhat of a Nestbeschmutzer (a bird who shits in his own nest) while he lived, though the country now celebrates the very dead Bernhard as one of its greatest products. Bernhard did his best to preempt this hypocritical plaque-making by stipulating, in his will:
My material – whether published during my life or made public after my death – shall, for the duration of its copyright not be performed, printed or recited within the borders of the Austrian state, wherever the borders of this state may lie. (I wish to underline that I don’t want anything to do with the Austrian state and I reject not only any interference but also any approach by this Austrian state towards me and my work in the future.)
Bernhard’s last wishes are being jocularly disregarded by his survivors. The dead, as we know, are always at the mercy of the living, and not just the worms and the weevils. It can be said that Bernhard the living writer fucked with the corpse of the dead novel with as much rude glee as the Austrian state (or any state) fucks with the dead writer, as he is famous for his grandiose deformities of style. His book Correction, for example, is two paragraphs long: the first paragraph is 140 pages long; the second is 131.
*****
From human personality to insensate animal to object to substance: it seems impossible in anything less than a thousand years. How can it be that the same system that requires millions of years to transform a chunk of carbon into a diamond only needs a decade or so to turn Duke Ellington into a few kilos of mud?
*****
The difference between an Artist and a Hack is that an Artist knows the difference between an Artist and a Hack.
*****
I was thirty minutes into the walk with Rafael Miller when a slightly heavy, middle-aged woman with a sensible haircut and the ghost of blonde beauty haunting her cried out his name from a distance of ten meters. We all then stood on the corner chatting. They were old acquaintances who hadn’t met in fifteen years, I gathered. I also gathered that Rafael couldn’t remember who she was and therefore failed to introduce us. I studied her solid, ruddy face; her blue eyes and straight nose; the thick blond hair and even white teeth. I saw her as she saw herself: clinging to the shreds of once-formidable powers of seduction. I was glad, all over again, that it wasn’t necessary for me to seduce anyone anymore, unless initiating intercourse with my beautiful wife by touching her shoulder can be called a seduction.
*****
Suzanne Verdal, a French-Canadian dancer of great gypsy beauty, casually mentioned that she was looking for a Flamenco guitarist. I felt inspired to claim I could play: a very young man’s endearingly foolish bravado. She asked to borrow thirty dollars and made a hesitant, contingencies-probing attempt to seduce me the next day when I delivered the money in fresh bills to her borrowed flat, where she was lying in bed, rumpled and moistly warm. Leonard Cohen had written a famous song about her, though she had never once offered to seduce him and they are no longer friends.
*****
Why is Black music so far ahead of Black Literature (as far ahead of Black Literature as it is of White music) ?
*****
I recently re-read an interview with Vendela Vita in which the interviewer remarks that Flannery O’Connor once said there are “too many writers.”
Ms. Vida responded: “I completely disagree with that. There can’t be too many. At our writing lab, 826 Valencia, we’re trying to raise all these kids to believe that they are writers–and indeed they are–and convince them that they can go around and say, ‘I am a writer,’ or, ‘I am a poet,’ at age twelve, and hopefully they will take that conviction with them the rest of their lives. So I don’t think there can ever be too many writers.”
Awful and foolish. Makes me think of a five-storey smiley face logo on some future Ministry of Culture in which even the buttons in the elevators will correspond not to numbers but pictographs of dullards performing simple tasks.
By tricking these kids into proclaiming themselves as writers at the age of twelve she robs them of the pleasure of the infinitely more magnificent declaration, I want to be a writer when I grow up.
*****
The word bed looks like one.
*****
I was enlisted by a man named Owen Husney (unflatteringly nicknamed, by, who knows, perhaps the worst sort of disgruntled and mendacious nobodies with unfathomable motives, “Owe Me, Hustle Me”) to write songs for his next big discovery: a lanky blonde guitarist who looked and sang like David Bowie. Owen’s first big project had been Prince; Prince owes his start in show business to Owen Husney. Owen therefore hyped Zane Travers as the “white Prince”. The problem with Zane being that while he looked like Bowie and he sang like Bowie, his material savoured overpoweringly of Jethro Tull. Even hippies, who preferred, sensibly, to dance, eschewed his performances.
There was a brief period in History during which young men believed that guitar virtuosity, hierophantic sects of antiquity, and cutting-edge particle physics… in some way overlapped. This period deserves careful study.
Zane Travers was the best guitarist I have ever known: a useless distinction, as it turns out. What he had going for him, in even greater abundance than the similar sine qua non that makes Prince not only famous but also unmarriageable, was the aura of sometimes-helpless, sometimes-threatening and always presumptuous nuttiness we commonly associate with great artistic gifts. He called the unadorned mattress he slept on rent-free in the corner of the living room of a hippie-infested household his sanctuary and turned white the time he caught me sitting on it.
I was drafted by Owen Husney to help Zane come up with commercial material, though I considered myself a strange choice for the job. In the manner of all Artistes who disdain the mainstream while believing they can milk it, the tunes I composed for the Zane Travers Project were even sappier than the most hideous Top 40 junk then stinking up the charts. I had fallen into the worst artistic trap: condescension.
*****
I once spotted Zane Travers at another band’s record-release party, squatting upon a stovetop, his long blond hair like Lauren Bacall’s, hiking his kaftan in order to shit a glistening turd in a souvenir ashtray.
*****
Rafael Miller and Zane Travers taught me everything I know about music.
.
Salter’s Luck
December 7, 2006
Salter woke up with Lola shouting at him that there was oil fucking paint on her Jil fucking Sander. He couldn’t at first tell if he was having a heart attack or being caught in an earthquake or both, but Lola was so up in his face that she appeared to him to have one long ice-blue eye in the middle of her forehead, a monstrous organ of inhuman beauty, a lens through which he could not see the future but through which the future could plainly see him, despising the information it gathered.
On the street ten minutes later he said “Shit!” catching his reflection in a shop window: his t-shirt was inside out. Never dress in terror. No wonder those Jap girls had giggled at him. He’d dressed in a rush and run out of the house without checking. The ribbing of the seams visible on the inverted black tee shirt wasn’t so bad…it looked like a fashion statement… but the “wash in cold water” tag hanging off the back of his neck was embarrassing. In that case he headed for the park, rather than a café, and wouldn’t bother looking for a new girlfriend until he had a chance to get home and change. Never approach a woman with anything less than utter confidence. Which is how he’d ended up with Lola.
He sat alone under a two hundred year old tree for two hours, enjoying the indirect pleasures of the Southern California sunshine…the tepid clear-milk breeze, the leaf-cut kaleidoscope spangling the yellow grass at his feet under the tree. Fucking squirrels, too. Funny about squirrels: no one seemed to appreciate what a nightmare life would easily be if squirrels decided to go militant. Make mosquitoes look like a blessing. Make mosquitoes look like gifts from God. If rats had half the talent and energy of squirrels…
Later, when Lola was at work, placed like a white queen at her post at Chez Guevara, luminous under the track lighting, he crept home and started work on something new rather than bothering to change his clothes and bike over to Pacific Beach in hopes of finding a true and lasting Romantic Love. The name of this new painting was “Oil Fucking Paint on Her Jil Fucking Sander” and he got bored with it after about four hours of pointless messy work on it, slopping the cadmium red around the canvas with a palette knife like it was lead-based tomato paste…why not just eat it all and kill himself? But would it kill him, or simply fuck him up? Like he needed more of same. Eyes bulging, mouth drooling and mute. Brain-damaged. Incontinent? But here’s the thing: a similarly afflicted woman could always find a fella willing to hump her at least once.
It was too late to make it to the beach, too early to sleep and too soon to call Lola at work to see if she was still in hate with him. He grabbed the phone, nevertheless, with red paint glamourizing his hands and punched the number with a relatively paintless thumb.
“Chez Guevara, can you please hold?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Brief pause of recognition and then the “hold” click. He’d half-hoped to get Jem, who could always be counted on to flirt with him a bit before handing it over to Lola, thus proving his worth to Lola. Jem…he remembered that it was short for “Jemima”…what kind of parents named a girl that? He could never have a girlfriend named Jemima. Names were important to him…a bad name was worse than bad breath. He’d backed out of something once with a model named Santana…you couldn’t even abbreviate that hiply…what would he have called her around the house? Santa.
He caught himself nodding to the black black jazz they treated him to while he waited for Lola to release him from the tasteful limbo of “hold”. A CD burned from an authentic and scratchy old 78. He couldn’t help visualizing a synchronized chorus line of Al Jolsons in shoe polish, dwindling towards infinity, strumming banjos and grinning like skulls while being buggered by an equal infinity of Satchmos. Black black jazz for a white white restaurant. Friendly racism. Does any Ethnic Group valued chiefly for the quality of its suffering stand a chance?
When Lola got back on the line, Salter was relieved to find that she was half-whispering conspiratorially in the phone to him, so he knew he probably wasn’t in danger of Fargo in bed that night. Fargo; Siberia; name your frigid wasteland. Relations were normalized and he so badly needed the existence-confirming sensation to be had between Lola’s legs, the cool oyster of her involuntary grip.
“Get this,” she hissed, “rich fucker just dropped $42,000.00 on a dinner for five.” She pronounced “fucker” fokker. Otherwise her speech was thoroughly Americanized, which is to say ornamented with luridly nasal banalities. ”I don’t know why but the servers thought he’s going to stiff them so each one goes spits in his butternut squash soup.” She waited for Salter’s gasp, clucking her tongue. Then the punch line. “Eight thousand dollar tip.”
She got home at one looking eight feet tall in her heels and goldish dress and her hair a platinum blade. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom, waving hello but not speaking, as though speaking was a form of touching and she wasn’t in the mood, but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her.
She unsheathed herself standing, her breasts and then hair lifting and falling as the dress went up and off and she clomped into the bathroom in her heels and nothing but and she brushed and flossed and dabbed her makeup off and proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking in the front door, all with nary a word, nor nary a gesture to Salter to come and partake and partake and come. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual: missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum.
He was sitting there knees-up beside her, treated to a view of her tawny back and pale damp wing of hair, clutching the remote, gritting his teeth like a Russian serf on a block of ice, cursing his humiliating neediness. O wretched man that craveth a fuck! Tears began laminating his eyes.
Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in it. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, and Ann Francis) with the sound off and strained to make sense of the movie through the seawater filter of his grief…the lion-like monster, visible only as raw energy, was howling like a banshee and trying to claw through the protective force field around the ship. A crew member…a hero with a lone blaster…was seized and ripped apart. Ann Francis with her buttery hair and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability. He needed a 50’s-type nubile tomboy lacquered siren in his life. He really needed this. It was no joke. He was crying.
So Salter had thought that the day had fixed itself but he’d been wrong. Lola was obviously still mad at him, or simply tired of it all and had retracted into her morally unassailable cocoon of sleep, the hard shell of I need my rest that a girlfriend who pays for everything by having the only job in the household claims as her terrible Right. He snuffed the television and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up out of bed.
He suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two, but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret…to cut himself in two.
He staggered miserably into the living room with his unrequited hardon. He milked himself, kneeling, across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He squirted three long draughts of solder-colored semen into her two hundred dollar heels, gasping, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of a coat (that anomalous coat) which stood there like a priest with his back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked her shoes. Afterwards, as he crouched there, postmodern shoe rapist, still burning with a richly satisfying orgasm, he thought of this exchange:
Lola: “Honey, I hate to break it to you, but as a painter you have no talent whatsoever. Not that’s visible, I mean.”
Salter (with a shrug): “So?”
That had been six months ago…she’d dropped that A-bomb on him six months ago…what was left? What was next? What horrors to come? Everything (one thing he’d learned)…everything escalates. Hunger, porno, Vietnam. She’d be punching and kicking him next. Stabbing him in bed while he slept. Putting her weight on a pillow mashed over his face. Scissoring off his…
In the kitchen, in a drawer, looking for those very scissors with which to cut open a bag of chips so as not to waken Queen Lola opening it, he happened across an old name tag of hers from innocent days extinct, from just three years ago, at the “Yacht Club”. That four-dollar-an-hour job she’d had when they first got there.
He looked at the name on the name tag. Where had she evaporated to? That sweet girl with a heavy accent who had been grateful just to be there, in America, and work a shitty job with chubby Mexican teenagers for colleagues in order to support him. Where had she gone to? Salter held the tag up to the light. He wanted to kiss it. He wanted to die.
L. Beedo.
He ate the chips. Quietly. Fifteen minutes later he was dressed and out on Fifth Avenue, pushed along by a sultry breeze that the heads of the palm trees were applauding. The avenue was tawdry and worn in daylight…as sunfucked and urinous as any street in Tijuana (a four hour walk from his door)…but at night the same stretch was mild and crisp and luminous, burnished by the smart scuff of Yuppie footwear, ablaze with Tiki torches of dirty gold or neon glyphs of organ-pink and money-green, and scented by Gay cologne and charcoal braziers. He felt lightfooted and better-looking in the dark and he walked at an optimistic clip, looking for something to buy, or for something to happen to him, or a convenient combination of the two.
He walked by the Tea Leaf and Rockit Records and the boarded-up and tramp-infested deco-era Bijou; then the Starbucks on the corner, the Rite Aid parking lot across the street. Along which he did a left towards Sixth Avenue up Robinson. Then a right towards the park.
What really hit him as he sailed along was the sheer number of people…couples…who seemed to be happy. Was the world, or was it not, a place of either terror or boredom that changed only briefly, at the very end, for the very old, into a place of terrified boredom? But there they were, the dozens, the hundreds, holding hands and swinging their arms in that triumphalist goose-step of love, babbling giddy goo-goo to each other. Salter had to wonder how abnormal he was. Had it been him all of these years? Him and not them; her; It? His problem and not The World’s?
Standing at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas, Salter near-swooned as his mind came that close to accepting the notion that the Misery he once considered merely typical of Life (or systemic) was in fact just his own and his own fucking fault, not even necessary, just the result of faulty thinking and consequently bad choices that could be blamed on nobody else. But he was saved from this devastating epiphany by a pink convertible that was honking like a drunken straggler from an Italian wedding caravan at the traffic light across from him.
Salter was wary. Me? he pantomimed and the car honked a delirious yes.
The pink convertible was some kind of vintage car…Salter didn’t know from vintage cars… with white tires and a lot of chrome and what sounded like the salvaged motor from a B-52 roaring under the hood. The car looked like a birthday cake. Piloted by a white-haired gent in a Commodore’s cap (Salter didn’t know from Commodore’s Caps but that’s how he would have described it to the police) and beside the gent in the convertible was a white-gloved woman in matching white shoulder-length hair, presumably the gent’s better half or lady-friend or however the old put it these days.
“I said,” said the duffer when Salter had scurried out into the street to lean over the convertible to hear him, “Would you like a ride young man?”
The duffer gunned the motor for emphasis. Or to pressure him. Salter was 30, and the old gent was 66, so, arithmetically speaking, the offer of a ride in the gent’s car was no different than if their respective ages had been 5 and 41.
An ancient alarm in Salter’s skull (finally activated; ringing in a thick skin of dust) went off and just as quickly sputtered quiet and Salter got in the car, jumping (and banging his elbow in the process) in back as the light changed. It was the naïve belief that a man with a woman is never as dangerous as a man alone that contributed to Salter’s decision.
The old guy twisted sideways to face Salter as he drove, saying, “This is the only city in the world that it makes sense to own a convertible in. Others are too damned dangerous or rainy. Are you from the area?”
He was talking like a man in a gale. He was a white-haired ringer for the actor Don Ameche. Salter was, in fact, tempted to ask the old guy if he was related (or even Ameche himself) but instead merely limited himself to responding directly to Don’s query.
They drove as far as Robinson and did a swaggering u-turn so wide that they nearly took the door handle off a parked car on the other side of the four lane road and headed back the way Salter had been walking when they picked him up. With his eyes on the road again, Don Ameche smiled in the rearview mirror.
“We’re practically neighbors then. We do this every Friday night…” he inserted a pause to indicate his companion, whose hair bestirred itself indolently like a tattered white flag on a berthed yacht…whose teeth were aimed at him in the simplest smile… “We see something new every time.”
He added, “For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that there’s a banana tree in the yard of that bungalow on the corner of Robinson and Third Avenue.”
“No,” said Salter, surprised, “I didn’t.”
“Delicious. Stolen fruit tastes better in an open convertible at night, you know. And you probably weren’t aware of the fact that there’s a full-sized statue of the comedian Jonathan Winters in the backyard of a place up there on Point Loma. On a six foot plinth. A prop from the movie ‘The Loved One.’ We saw that when it first came out, at the old Bijou.” He thought a moment, searching his brain. “Evelyn Waugh.”
“Really?” Salter had never heard of either the movie or the comedian or Evelyn Waugh. He wasn’t even sure about the word ‘plinth.’
“Awful lot of movie people down here,” concluded Salter’s genial host. They were idling at a red light at the corner ofLaurel and Sixth. To the left was Balboa Park and its orderly arrangement of sky-scraping palms attended by a vassalage of shorter pines lurking in low darkness. The old woman was touching up her lipstick and her drawstringed mouth was alternately pouting and grinning at Salter in the rearview and Salter was thinking: what have we here? A crucial detail was all wrong, of course: the combined age of the two was a good deal more than one hundred; but otherwise things seemed to be shaping up into one of Salter’s hoariest fantasies come true.
Rich couple picks up a young stud. They all drive to a deserted stretch of the beach. A towel is laid out on the sand. The millionaire with his arm around the young stud’s shoulder: I love my wife but I’m impotent…please…I don’t know how to ask this, but could you…would you? She hasn’t had one in years. ..
“Vincent Price had a house over there, back a-ways, in Mission hills, overlooking the Airport. Lindberg Field. I always had a problem calling it ‘Lindberg Field,’ you know. I guess I’m showing my age, but I can never hear the name ‘Lindberg’ without remembering one of those awful ‘Lindberg Baby’ jokes.”
He assumed a perfect deadpan and turned with his right arm along the top of the seat and looked at Salter and cleared his throat theatrically and said, “Say, what do you call a…a, uh…oh, wait a minute. That’s not how it goes! Dammit! I’m useless! I just thought of one the other day…”
A classic specimen of one of those old-time couples, thought Salter: the man doing all the talking; the woman just smiling…beaming, really…mostly at the man himself, oblivious to outsiders, while the man, her ‘hero,’ talks. Salter tried to remember. There was another example. It rang a bell. But he couldn’t…who? Who. It would drive him crazy if he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. That look on her face.
And then: yes : those Reagans. Salter tried his hand at small talk.
“So, you two are married, then?”
Don was still idling at the intersection of Sixth and Laurel, despite the long-ago fact of the light going green. Was he still trying to remember a Lindberg Baby joke? The traffic light blinked and its eye turned red. The old guy was staring at something to the left, away from his wife, in the park maybe, so intently just then that Salter guessed that he hadn’t even heard the question, but as Salter cleared his throat and undertook to repeat himself verbatim, the old guy replied, overlapping him, with a distant voice, “For a very long time.”
For a very long time.
Which sounded so nice. It sounded so nice that it made Salter regret every single fact of his life as it was, and made him hunger for a change, it made him long for a second chance, and the first thing he resolved to throw out before relocating into the shiny new home of the Duplex of his re-organized Soul was ‘Art,’ that dusty thing. That furry brown dust-caked 19th century attic heirloom called ‘Art.’ Fuck it! Toss it! Filthy old bristly bearded hoary repulsive thing! Musty thing! What had it done but ruin his life? ‘Art!’ May it nevermore be freed from the restraining cage of inverted commas!
Where was Salter’s convertible? Where was Salter’s love-dumb, worshipful wife? Where was all his stuff, his security, his piece-of-fucking-mind? Somewhere back there, at some juncture so remote that he couldn’t even remember what sickly-sweet pop song was a hit on the radio the day that he did it, he had turned Left when so many others…so many others!…had kept on going. Kept on going on that long straight road. The long straight road of happiness. So easily achieved! You just remain on that long straight road. That’s all! No turning right; no turning left…just: straight. From now on. Tomorrow, in fact, as a first step…Salter nodded to himself as he blessed the back of the head of the Happy Duffer in his Commodore’s Cap. Tomorrow. First thing. He was going to buy a tie.
The light changed green again and the car moved forward, as effortlessly as a breath, or a liquid downhill, advertising wealth, and a jet bellied directly overhead on its way to Lindberg Field and Salter hollered, “It must be great to grow old with someone you love!” and he was nearly choked with emotion as he hollered it, touched as he was by the serene beauty of human completion seemingly radiated by the white-haired couple, the living opposites of Salter’s world and Salter’s monotonously unspectacular luck, but Salter vowed to change all that, inspired by this couple. First thing tomorrow. A tie; a blazer…a navy-blue blazer…he repeated himself at a lower volume. “It must be great…”
“Rubbish,” laughed the old coot, over his shoulder. “We can barely stand the sight of each other.”
Salter laughed back at him. Weren’t old guys always funny in the same way? Never quite slap-your-knee funny (to anyone under fifty), but just as reliably never unfunny, either. Wry. Are young people ever ‘wry’? That’s one thing age could give you: a sense of…
“I suppose you think I’m joking,” he said and then grunted, like a man on the phone on the toilet, doing something complicated with the gear shift and clutch or whatever as the car took on the hill that rose up like a striped black whale before them, “But I’m not, I promise. ‘Hate’ is too strong a word, of course. But…”
“But, no. Love? No. I can see how you’d get that impression. Nice old couple, cruising around in a convertible on a Friday night, right? Not a care in the world! All smiles…” He winked in the mirror. Then: “But that’s just nerve damage. See? Look: that’s a permanent grin on her face, like a Jack-O-Lantern. Pure luck it didn’t freeze into a scowl, really…I’ll give The Good Lord credit for that much.” His eyes touched lightly on Salter’s in the rearview again. How far can I go? they seemed to be saying. How far…
“She’s ten years older than I am, but you’d never know it. Got a collection of face lifts older than our grown children. I even started naming them! The last one I called Griselda. That’s the nerve damage right there, if you ask me. You can only lift a human face so many times …something’s gotta give.” Then he released a sigh so long that Salter could smell his breath: bananas. “I could have had two convertibles for the money I’ve spent on making a seventy-five year old woman look seventy!”
Salter had never realized, before now, how genteel…how delicate…he really was. He was unbearably embarrassed. His face was as red as a blood-blister; as numb as heel-rubber; he didn’t know what to say; it wasn’t as simple as being trapped with a bore, or in a conversation gone shamefully wrong, at a cocktail party; he was in a moving car. Not that the car was moving so fast… a gifted jogger could have caught up with it. Should Salter politely inquire about getting out at the next light? Perhaps old Don was deranged; without a doubt rude; but was he dangerous. Did he pose a threat.
They were headed for the Highway. Salter could see it clearly with his Tales From The Crypt imagination: a Luger in the glove compartment. Which was stuffed in beside a bloody roadmap which was folded around a sandy, black-edged, ear-ringed ear. Or: thirty two wallets. Or: Mexican scalps on a belt. A fetus in a jar? Don Ameche was shaking his head. Then he exploded with a guffaw that sounded like an Apache War Whoop that made Salter jump in his bones.
“You must think I’m awful! But don’t worry, I forgot to mention, the poor thing can’t hear a word. Deaf as an old boot!” He leaned on the horn and raised his voice over it and shouted, “AREN’T YOU, NAT? AREN’T YOU?” Then shrugged. “Can’t read lips, either. Couldn’t be bothered. I keep this happy look on my face,” he nodded, grinning, “And Old Yeller just thinks I’m saying nice things about her. Haven’t done the Hokey-Pokey in a Coon’s age. Mostly I abhor the smell of talcum powder. Turns me off.”
After a long pause he added, with extra significance, “I’m dying for a little company,” and he waited a calculated interval before slipping a shy glance into the rearview mirror. But Salter was already gone, tumbling on the blacktop, over and over. Laughing like a loon.
He limped back home.
