The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

1.

Why are people so awful? After all this time I still don’t know. There must be evolutionary advantages in being an utter shit. There must be. Do I look like a stalker? Was I born to pee into coffee pots?

Everyone in the world, at some time or other, lived in that flat on St. Alban’s. When I say everyone, I mean the dozen or so that I was hanging out with from Moorebury. They weren’t all students but they were all connected to the college.

St. Alban’s is a sidestreet in the Summit Avenue neighborhood of Saint Paul where, if the mind’s spark survives the body’s extinction, F. Scott Fitzgerald feels most at home. There are a dozen addresses along Summit where Fitzgerald lived, as a boy or as an adult, but the only one the clique ever paid any attention to was a Romanesque brownstone in front of which we’d linger invariably in the misty dead of night in an attempt to give the girls the fantods on the way home from some little concert or movie or party on campus. We continued to haunt Moorebury long after we’d quit or graduated. “Fantods” was Tucker van Tassel’s word…being poor I filched it from him.

I was the only scholarship in the circle and the only one who had a ‘work -study’ job during my year and a half at school and most definitely the only one who had to wake up at the crack of dawn every Thursday, slip into painter whites and meet a grey-eyed half-Ojibwe alcoholic named Chuck in front of the student union, where he’d already be setting up the dropcloths and the extension ladders, reeking of drinkable paint thinner. I was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to attend this gilded bunker of privelege. Watching my weightlessly rich acquaintances sail through every chatty day towards every night’s bacchanalia filled me with resentment.

I suppose it was my subconscious revenge maneuver to aspire to make love with one of ‘their’ women; to defile her with my dirty paws, my working class seed. The moment I first saw Mary Duncan Ford, though, looming in silhouette against a laughing thirty-foot Jeanne Moreau on a bicycle, I interpreted my panic as a simple case of love at first sight.

She was pushing her way down the row of cinema seats and she squeezed right in front of me, hunched under the grayscale of beams from the projector, giggling with her friends and saying pardon moi to bursts of hilarity. She put a hand on my knee and stepped on my foot and ended up sitting to my left. The smell of her shampoo made it impossible to follow the movie and when all five of us got ushered out for making clever little jokes at the screen and disturbing the rest of the moviegoers I followed my new friends to an off-campus pizzeria. You didn’t have to be poor to want to fuck Mary: she was hurtfully beautiful.

The four I met that night were part of a much larger clique. Mary, Sophia, Eric and Katie referred so often, in the course of the conversation, to those not present…to the three Johns and Tucker and Andrew and Lorelei and Annette and Victoria…that it was like sitting at a long table in a banquet hall instead of at a booth near the jukebox in a place called The Leaning Tower. Sophia, Katie and I sat on one side of the table and Eric and Mary on the other. I wrote Eric off as a potential rival early on after he demonstrated his ability to talk and belch simultaneously.

The Clique, as I came to know it, divided into two churches: the Self-Pitying Cynics and the Sweetly Doomed Romantics. The two groups were divided by taste…not high versus low but a Kubrick vs Truffaut kind of thing. The conversations in general could be superficially worldly and clever in a show-offy way but they hinted at travels and experiences beyond me. They were my first exposure to people who enjoyed mass-pleasures like pizza and pop music without guilt or disdain but under the contractual loophole of irony. I grasped immediately that curling my lip at disco music, for example, wouldn’t put me any higher on the carefully-calibrated ladder than being caught with a poster of John Travolta in his white suit on the wall of my dorm room.

I wisely kept my provincially boyish enthusiasms for F. Scott Fitzgerald to myself that first night in the pizza parlour. The main thing was they were all from cultured, well-off East Coast families and I knew if I gave them anything to pick on in those first few formative days and weeks the flaw or error would become my description. I would become the crippled mascot, rubbed on its head for good luck. So I was very quiet; I listened more than I talked; I mastered the off-hand quip and improvised a working persona.

It’s obvious to me in retrospect that Mary was intrigued by my blue-collar good looks from the very beginning. I wasn’t the only dark-haired boy in the bunch (Tucker’s hair was blue-black as any comic book hero’s) or the only one with a calloused handshake (sailing will do that for you) but there was something solid, or self-willed, about me that the over-bred males of her species lacked. I know now that if I’d looked her in the eye and casually said something about fucking she would have. At the time, of course, I was privvy to no such useful knowledge.

2.

Hyacinth is on her death trip again. Shuffling from room to room and staring at stuff with that spooky I am a camera blankness. Like she’s memorizing it, filing it away. Storing it for the day, soon coming, when none of this…the ashtrays, the doorstops, the all-in-one entertainment center with a busted cassette player and a scratched-at unremovable Take That sticker over the radio dial… will exist. Only Hyacinth will exist, only Hyacinth will survive as a witness. Hyacinth the Chosen One. The rest of us are doomed. When the landlord of landlords comes tromping up the back stairs of the universe jingling his zillion keys, the rest of His tenants are toast.

What I like is how Hyacinth strips down naked before trancing out. Wants to meet her maker in her innocence is how she puts it. In her birthday suit. Hyacinth has a very nice birthday suit. You’re having a dinner party and virginal Hyacinth comes shuffling into the dining room with The Gypsy Kings on at low volume, and she makes her entrance in the middle of some toff’s anecdote about Heidigger, in her birthday suit, polaroiding everyone with those big brown memorializing eyes: that makes an impression. I usually say she’s sleepwalking, poor thing. No sudden moves. Remain seated. She’ll nip off to bed on her own in a minute or two. People call and ask me when’s the next dinner party?

Well, problem is, I can’t guarantee that Hyacinth will make an appearance and nothing kills conversation like half a dozen people glancing expectantly at the dining room door for two hours. Thing is, she has to be on a death trip to do it, and she only goes on a death trip when the signs and omens augur the imminence of joyful dominion. Hyacinth is our American. You’ve probably gathered as much.

It isn’t given to many English to be raised on a compound, is it? It’s practically a rite of passage for Americans. Most of them over there could probably write a pretty good tell-all exposé about some Spiritual Leader or other. Most of them have been dandled on some Messiah’s knee as a matter of course, and staged deprogramming interventions have become, in the 21st century, what bat mizvah’s and coming-out parties once were in a bygone era. I used to think they were preposterous for forming these little cults of a few thousand and proclaiming themselves The Chosen, as distinguished from the other 6.8 billion on earth. That’s a pretty strict door policy. Studio 54 at its peak was all-embracing in comparison. But Americans, and always very rapidly, take things to the illogical extreme.

It’s a nation of escalation, the spiritual home of escalators, and as if to prove that an apocalyptic sex cult of six heavily-armed Puerto Ricans speaking in tongues in a one-room flat in Brooklyn (for example) isn’t as far as one can go in the direction of exclusivity in the matter of holiness, now you’ve got these cults of one popping up…these all-American solo-cults or uni-cliques like Hyacinth. In fact, Hyacinth tells me she had a falling out with her best friend Phoenix, back in Nebraska, for that very reason. Phoenix was under the impression that she was the Chosen One (hereafter to be referred to as the C.O.). Reasoning that Nebraska isn’t big enough for two C.O.s, Hyacinth headed back East. Her father, a relatively down-to-earth Baptist, was from New Jersey.

On the long bus trip east she noticed, strategically placed in seats on the right and left of the aisle, three or four waifs of approximately the same age, body mass index (in a country of the fat, the thin stick out) and facial expression. More C. O.s, of course. Hyacinth’s only hope (if she planned to set up shop as a C.O. in unclaimed territory) was to get out of the country.

“It’s because you’re secure in yourself that you can admit that I am The Chosen One,” says Hyacinth, during one of her more talkative moments. But really it’s because I desperately want to nail her.

More about that compound. That photo album she brings everywhere with her is a wealth of coded information. Ignoring the sunsets and geese-on-the-lake pictures, and all those blurry snapshots she took of her own left hand, starting when she was nine, the other photos comprise a vivid document of a place where clean-air America and Millennial dogma met. One snapshot that stays with me is of a man in a dark cloak, kneeling in the snow in a semi-circle of dark-cloaked onlookers. The man’s gloved hands cover his face. Yet the onlookers (with unisex, too-long, center-parted hair) don’t seem particularly galvanized. They seem bored; unimpressed. I always wanted to ask about that.

3.

My maternal grandfather shot his adopted son over a property deal. The deal would have made my grandfather a millionaire, finally, after so many years. My uncle, half-Ojibwe by birth, rescued by my grandfather from a Red Lake orphanage in Northern Minnesota, grew into a hippie. A hippie named Graham who refused to agree to the deal. He answered the door in nakedness one brilliant green morning and was found right there in the vestibule of the hand-built house he loved by a groggy member of his harem with holes in his chest and face, scribbling on the baseboard with a bloody finger. 1968.

I start calling myself Graham and dressing a certain way, twenty years too late and quite awhile before it’s fashionable again. Reagan is giving a speech on a thriftshop television on which the speaker doesn’t work and he sounds like a fly. I have a band called The Law of Averages and would you like to know what the law of averages means? It means that the average person is just average in the eyes of the law. A fat girl is paying my rent and licking my washboard stomach. Her head is in the way.

4.

There have been times in human history when ugly was fashionable, when being ugly was a kind of good luck so powerful it conferred itself also on those who clamored to be near it…when ugliness had the power to bless. But this isn’t such an era. It’s said that the Emperor Hadrian refused to attend state banquets unless accompanied by his favorite page, known to be the ugliest man in Rome, valued for his ability to weaken the concentration of uninitiated foreign dignitaries. And Spencer Tracy, no Adonis, was not only a movie star, but the man who shared Katherine Hepburn’s bed. The Golden Age.

I was born somewhere between 2,000 and 30 years too late. In these times, my times, the era I inhabit, this Pyrite Age, this awful epoch, it’s considered better to be born stupid than ugly; the beautifully stupid flourish like flames in a mattress factory. Page through the magazines and blink through thousands of television channels and bend your head back on your neck as far as you dare to in the dark and goggle at the barn-sized images of blank perfection.

Ugly these days is seen at best as an embarrassment, and at worst as a kind of disease, and it resists the social leveling that has done so much since The Civil Rights Act to eradicate the barriers that once kept blacks, Asians, Catholics, gays, women, etc., filtered out of the Good Life. If you are a myopic black ex-con of a Buddhist lesbian overweight Democrat confined to a wheel chair and fond of spouting Marx, you have a better chance of getting a job as a traffic cop in Texas than an ugly man like me has at being the romantic lead in a Hollywood movie.

So you can imagine my surprise when the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen made an effort to speak to me at the wrap party that SmikSmak Films was throwing for the cast and crew of Model Citizen. Model Citizen was our postmodern slasher flick. Plot: a super-model becomes a serial killer. Running time: 98 minutes.

The tag line on the poster (If Looks Can Kill…We’re All In A Lot of Trouble!) was not as good as the one for the original Alien (In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream), or as kitschy fun as the one for Jaws (Don’t Go Near the Water!), but it was turning out to be a good topic for a wrap party conversation. With the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. The poster was taped to Terry’s screen door; the image in the poster was a pouty-lipped model-type headshot of the lead actress…with skulls for irises…and the tag-line was printed over her head, appearing to drip blood.

The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen read the tag line out loud to herself. ‘If Looks Can Kill…’

‘That one sentence,’ I interrupted, tapping the poster, ‘took nearly as long to come up with as the whole screenplay. And five times as many writers!’ Which was true. I’d written the screenplay alone in six weeks, while the tag-line was finally the effort of everyone in the SmikSmak office: Jay and Terry (creative), Tomiiko (financing), Guin (the secretary), and Guin’s boyfriend (something like Joe…or Jack. Or Jason. Jeff?). It wasn’t finally agreed upon until the night before the morning we faxed the PR layouts to the printer, a week after the Model Citizen work print had shipped out from the developing lab.

‘I’ve got one,’ said the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She stared at me, expressionless for a moment to create a dramatic pause, and then she announced, with her hands framing the sentence, ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder…and it’s the last thing he’ll ever see!’

We both laughed. ‘That’s good! That’s pretty damn good!’ I nodded.

We were standing together outside, near the screen door at one corner of Terry Hilliard’s enormous redwood deck, under the grape-black night of the San Jacinto mountains, balancing pale gold coins of reflected moon in our champagne glasses. L.A. was two hours away, north by northwest, and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen pointed at the moon and said, softly, with the confidence of a first language, ‘Qamar.’

Before she could explain that Qamar is the Arabic word for moon, I added, “And the Czech word is Komar. They both sound like…like sickles; they sound like sickle-shaped words, don’t they? The quarter moon of Islam. Isn’t that interesting? But the Greek version sounds all wrong: Fengari. The Swahili, too…it sounds too tiny, like a speck of something, or a cat’s name.’ I made my lips small. ‘Mwezi.’

She mimicked me, squinting. ‘Mwezi.’

“You’ve been terribly betrayed by a handsome man recently, haven’t you?” I asked.

She smiled.

5.

It is Chicago, Illinois, and the year is 1972. There are three of us together, good friends, old friends, in Jimmy’s, near the corner of Jackson and State Street, under the ‘EL.’ Jimmy’s is half-way between what we’d call greasy spoon and down home and Jimmy does all the cooking. One has a choice of three tables near the window or the counter itself to eat on and the tables are always occupied. The tables are green Formica and chrome and they were new when Jimmy opened the place with a VA loan after surviving the Korean War with two good arms and a leg.

Jimmy is good at producing a certain kind of very heavy meal with sweet iced tea or very strong coffee for a beverage and pie for dessert and he charges a fair price. The one thing you do not do in Jimmy’s is tip.Jimmy’s is lit like a pool hall: coolie hats of light hung from a dirty ceiling. There is no juke box. Jimmy thinks it’s impolite to listen to popular music while one is eating his food. The sooty windows gazing on State Street are a triptych of iron-webbed sky (the structure of the ‘EL’) and one little Xmas tree of a traffic light. The upper right corner of the triptych blinks red, yellow, green all night, even when there’s no one in Jimmy’s to see it.

Here we are: Gorman, Perez and I. We are lucky and have a window table near the door. It’s summer and being seated near the door is a relief, even with the stain of blue exhaust fluttering in on the breeze. Gorman, with his big head and too-small haircut like a child’s cap barely reaching his neckline or red ears, and his feminine eyelashes, has, in preparation to eating, cut his meat into a grid of what looks like thirty two small squares and is now leisurely forking one after another into his mouth while Perez and I hack away like slobs at our porkchops.

‘The Germans are metaphysicians,’ says Gorman, between forkfulls, putting the meat away. ‘Nietzsche. Jung. Kant.’ He glares at the ceiling. ‘Horbigger.’ He forks a square of meat and writes an ‘eight’ with it through a tablet of gravy and puts it away. ‘They might as well have been witch doctors.’

The squares of meat he removes from the plate follow a pattern: one bottom left, one top right. Next bottom left, next top right. Perez winks at me and tips his chin at Gorman’s plate: the puddle of gravy with a vertical ‘infinity’ inscribed in it. The tesselated Salisbury steak and cuneiformed mashed potatoes.

‘Gorman,’ says Perez, ‘We’re curious. Really. Do you take a crap as methodically as you eat?’

Perez is pretty: he has flared nostrils and a precise black haircut and an Elvis-like permanent sneer. But one eye is always bloodshot and a little dead because a big kid clubbed him on the playground for being too pretty. I heard a rumor more than once that Perez and Gorman did a little something as Vaselined choir boys in one or the other’s bunk one night when we were all three of us attending a week-long ‘retreat’ at a seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin. The retreat was sponsored by the Catholic School (Our Lady of The Loop) in which we were incarcerated the year we all three became friends.

Gorman was there at Our Lady of the Loop because his parents didn’t want him attending the run-down educational institution of the neighborhood: Joseph J.Pulaski Junior High School. Perez was there because his whiskery grandmother, the sole gaurdian of Perez and his six sisters, supported a Catholic universe so fervently that she experienced ecstatic visions of the Virgin Mary on demand, the holy mother illuminated in swirling clouds of Lucky Strike. You could smell Perez’s house from a block away. I was there at Our Lady of the Loop because it was the farthest my mother could get me from the house every day: we didn’t even live, technically, in Chicago.

The rumor about Perez and Gorman never bothered me, and I treated it with the same open-minded neutrality I applied to the miracles that the Sisters used so much of every school day advertizing: I neither believed nor doubted. But that rumor went a long way towards explaining the teasing. Gorman and Perez would bicker and tease like a couple embarrassed by the memory of an unrecoverable closeness.

‘Sure’n if you tink oi eats metodically,’ retorts Gorman, with a fakey brogue, after a swig of tea with a sandstorm of sugar in it, ‘you ought t’ see how oi barney yer muther.’

Then he catches my eye and drops his gaze and he apologizes profusely in a deep soft voice: he’d forgotten, and now he feels like a shit, a real shit, and I feel sorry for him. Being a good guy, and famously easy to get along with, I change the subject immediately, of course. Or, that is, I change it back, faking a casual sing-song.

‘Henry Miller.’

‘Henry Miller,’ echoes Perez, tapping the table. But Gorman is still pouting over his faux-pas, his mouth in the palm of his hands; all work has ceased on the construction site of his dinner plate and his words have escaped him. We have to prod.

I repeat, ‘Henry Miller…’ but Gorman won’t bite. Christ, Jerry, I want to say: she was my mother. What are you so upset about?

I say, ‘Come on, Jerry. You’re the writer. It’s your job to educate us Phillistines. If you don’t finish, Perez and I are going to go out into that heartless night without the gift of knowledge to light our paths. You were saying… ‘ But Gorman just sits there, slumped, so Perez stars talking about popular film.

Poor Gorman. If only I could admit that I’m glad she’s gone! But that would put me under suspicion.

6.

LD: A particular guy wants a particular woman: this is not a story, it’s a situation. Make it two particular guys and make the two guys friends (and the woman beautiful) and at least you have a story. Make one of the two friends in competition for the affections of the beautiful woman not a guy but another woman and make the two not friends but married and you have a modern story on your hands, possibly. The jury is still out on the relative modernity of sad or happy or unresolved endings. Is there a fourth alternative? Maybe the fourth alternative is there is no ending. It just goes on and on that way. Everyone in the story just gets older and older until you can’t even stand to look at them any more. Does that sound like a bestseller to you? Anyway, you asked so I told you. How’s the Mrs?

MD: You’re so bitter, Larry. So sarcastic.