Hot Water Music

  We followed her. She pointed again. “Those flowerbeds. We put them in ourselves. We’re really good with flowers.”

  “Beautiful,” said Tony.

  She opened the door to her study and we went in. It was large and cool with fine Indian blankets and artifacts on the walls. There was a fireplace, the bookcase, a large desk with an electric typewriter, an unabridged dictionary, typing paper, notebooks. She was small with a very short haircut. Her eyebrows were thick. She smiled often. At the corner of one eye was a deep scar that looked as if it had been etched with a penknife.

  “Let’s see,” I said, “you’re five-feet-one and you weigh…?”

  “One hundred fifteen.”

  “Age?”

  Janice laughed as Tony took her photo. “It’s a woman’s prerogative not to answer that question.” She laughed again. “Just say that I’m ageless.”

  She was a grand-looking woman. I could see her behind the podium at some college, reading her poems, answering questions, preparing a new generation of poets, pointing them toward life. She probably had good legs, too. I tried to imagine her in bed but I couldn’t.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked me.

  “Are you intuitive?”

  “Of course. I’ll put on some coffee. You both need something to drink.”

  “You’re right.”

  Janice prepared the coffee and we stepped outside. We went out a side door. There was a miniature playground, swings and trapezes, sandpiles, things of that sort. A young lad of about ten came running down the slope. “That’s Jason, my youngest, my baby,” said Janice from the doorway.

  Jason was a tousled-haired young god, blonde, in short pants and a loose purple blouse. His shoes were gold and blue. He appeared to be healthy and lively.

  “Mama, Mama! Push me in the swing! Push, push!” Jason ran to the swing, got in and waited.

  “Not now, Jason, we’re busy.”

  “Pushy, pushy, Mama!”

  “Not now, Jason…”

  “MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA,” screamed Jason.

  Janice walked over and began to push Jason. Back and forth he went, up and down. We waited. After quite a while they finished and Jason slid off. A thick green stream of snot ran from one nostril. He walked up to me. “I like to play with myself,” he said, then he ran off.

  “We don’t inhibit him,” said Janice. She stared out over the hills, dreamily. “We used to ride horses here. We fought the land developers. Now the outside world is creeping closer and closer. It’s still lovely, though. It was after I fell off a horse and broke my leg that I wrote my book, The Upward Bird, A Chorus of Magic.”

  “Yes, I remember,” said Tony.

  “I planted that redwood 25 years ago,” she pointed. “We were the only house here in those days, but things change, don’t they? Especially poetry. There’s much that’s new and exciting. And then there’s so much awful stuff.”

  We walked back inside and she poured the coffee. We sat and drank the coffee. I asked her who her favorite poets were. Janice quickly mentioned some of the younger ones: Sandra Merrill, Cynthia Westfall, Roberta Lowell, Sister Sarah Norbert and Adrian Poor.

  “I wrote my first poem in grammar school, a Mother’s Day poem. The teacher liked it so much that she asked me to read it in front of the class.”

  “Your first poetry reading, eh?”

  Janice laughed, “Yes, you might say so. I miss both of my parents very much. They’ve been dead over 20 years.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “There’s nothing unusual about love,” she said.

  She had been born in Huntington Beach and had lived all her life on the west coast. Her father had been a policeman. Janice began writing sonnets in high school where she was fortunate enough to be in a class taught by Inez Claire Dickey. “She introduced me to the discipline of poetic form.”

  Janice poured more coffee. “I was always serious about being a poet. I studied under Ivor Summers at Stanford. My first publication was in An Anthology of Western Poets edited by Summers.” Summers was a profound influence on her—at first. The Summers group was a good one: Ashberry Charleton, Webdon Wilbur, and Mary Cather Henderson.

  But then Janice broke away and joined the poets of “the long line.”

  Janice was in law school and also studying poetry. After graduating she became a legal secretary. She married her high school sweetheart during the early forties, “those dark and tragic war years.” Her husband was a fireman. “I evolved into a housewife-poetess.”

  “Is there a bathroom?” I asked.

  “The door to your left.”

  I walked into the bathroom as Tony circled her taking photos. I urinated and took a good belt of the vodka. I zipped up and stepped out of the bathroom and sat down again.

  In the late forties Janice Altrice’s poems began to flower in a number of periodicals. Her first book, I Command Everything To Be Green, was published by Alan Swillout. It was followed by Bird, Bird, Bird, Never Die also brought out by Swillout.

  “I went back to school,” she said. “UCLA. I took an M.A. in journalism and an M.A. in English. I received my Ph.D. in English the following year, and since the early sixties I’ve taught English and Creative Writing at the State University here.”

  Many awards adorned Janice’s walls: a silver medal from The Los Angeles Aphids Club for her poem “Tintella”; a first place certificate from the Lodestone Mountain Poetry Group for her poem “The Wise Drummer.” There were many other prizes and awards. Janice went to her desk and took out some of her work in progress. She read us several long poems. They showed impressive growth. I asked her what she thought of the contemporary poetry scene.

  “There are so many,” she said, “who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There’s no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted. And these new poets all seem to admire one another. It worries me and I’ve talked about it to a lot of my poet friends. All a young poet seems to think he needs is a typewriter and a few pieces of paper. They aren’t prepared, they have had no preparation at all.”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “Tony, do you have enough photos?”

  “Yeah,” said Tony.

  “Another thing which disturbs me,” said Janice, “is that the eastern Establishment poets receive too many of the awards and fellowships. Western poets are ignored.”

  “Is it possible that the eastern poets are better?” I asked.

  “I certainly don’t think so.”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose it’s time for us to go. One last question. How do you approach the writing of a poem?”

  She paused. Her long fingers delicately stroked the heavy fabric that covered her chair. The setting sun slanted through the window and cast shadows in the room. She spoke slowly, as if in a dream. “I begin to feel a poem a long way off. It approaches me, like a cat, across the rug. Softly but not with contempt. It takes seven or eight days. I become delightfully agitated, excited, it’s such a special feeling. I know it’s there, and then it comes with a rush, and it’s easy, so easy. The glory of creating a poem, it’s so regal, so sublime!”

  I switched off the tape recorder. “Thank you, Janice, I’ll send you copies of the interview when it’s published.”

  “I hope it went all right.”

  “It went quite well, I’m sure.”

  She walked us to the door. Tony and I walked down the slope to our car. I turned once. She was standing there. I waved. Janice smiled and waved back. We got in, drove around the bend, then I stopped the car and unscrewed the cap off the vodka bottle. “Save me a hit,” said Tony. I took a hit and saved him a hit.

  Tony threw the bottle out the window. We drove away, coming quickly down out of the hills. Well, it beat working in a car wash. All I had to do was type it up off the tape and select two or three photos. We came out of the hills just in time to hit the rush hour traffic.
It was strictly the shits. We could have timed it much better than that.

  COLD NIGHT

  Leslie walked along under the palm trees. He stepped over a dog turd. It was 10:15 p.m. in east Hollywood. The market had gone up 22 points that day and the experts couldn’t explain why. The experts were much better at explaining when the market went down. Doom made them happy. It was cold in east Hollywood. Leslie buttoned the top button on his coat and shivered. He hunched his shoulders against the chill.

  A little man in a grey felt hat approached him. The man had a face like the front of a watermelon, no expression. Leslie pulled out a cigarette and stepped into the little man’s path. The man was about 45, five-feet-six, maybe 140 pounds.

  “Got a match, sir?” he asked the man.

  “Oh, yes…” The man reached into his pocket and as he did Leslie kneed him in the groin. The man grunted and bent forward and Leslie clubbed him behind one ear. When the man fell Leslie kneeled and rolled him over, pulled out his knife and slit the man’s throat in the cold east Hollywood moonlight.

  It was all very strange. It was like a half-remembered dream. Leslie couldn’t be sure if it was all actually happening or not. At first the blood seemed to hesitate, there was just the deep wound, then the blood gushed forth. Leslie pulled back in disgust. He got up, walked away. Then he returned, reached into the man’s pocket, found the book of matches, stood up, lit his cigarette and walked away down the street to his apartment. Leslie never had enough matches, a man was always short of matches, it seemed. Matches and ballpoint pens…

  Leslie sat down with a scotch and water. The radio played some Copeland. Well, Copeland wasn’t much but it beat Sinatra. You took what you got and you tried to make do. That’s what his old man had told him. Fuck his old man. Fuck all the Jesus freaks. Fuck Billy Graham right up the old rugged tailpipe.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Sonny, the young blonde kid who lived across from him on the opposite side of the court. Sonny was half man and half dick and he was confused. Most guys with big dicks had trouble when the fucking was over. But Sonny was nicer than most; he was mild, he was gentle and he had some intelligence. Sometimes he was even funny.

  “Listen, Leslie, I want to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “O.K. But shit, I’m tired. I was at the track all day.”

  “Bad, huh?”

  “When I got back to the parking lot after it was over I found some son of a bitch had ripped off my fender getting out of there. That’s such dumb stale shit, you know.”

  “How’d you make out with the horses?”

  “I won $280. But I’m tired.”

  “O.K. I won’t stay long.”

  “All right. What is it? Your old lady? Why don’t you beat the shit out of your old lady? You’ll both feel better.”

  “No, my old lady’s all right. It’s just…shit, I don’t know. Things, you know. I can’t seem to get into anything. I can’t seem to get started. Everything’s locked up. All the cards are taken.”

  “Fuck, that’s standard. Life’s a one-sided game. But you’re only 27, maybe you’ll luck into something, somehow.”

  “What were you doing when you were my age?”

  “Worse off than you. I used to lay out in the dark at night, drunk, on the street, hoping somebody would run me over. No luck.”

  “You couldn’t think of another way?”

  “That’s one of the hardest things, figuring out what your first move should be.”

  “Yeah. Things seem so useless.”

  “We murdered God’s son. Do you think that Bastard is going to forgive us? I may be crazy but I know He’s not!”

  “You sit there in your torn bathrobe and you’re drunk half the time but you’re saner than anybody I know.”

  “Hey, I like that. Do you know a lot of people?”

  Sonny just shrugged. “What I need to know: is there a way out? Is there any kind of way out?”

  “Kid, there’s no way out. The shrinks advise us to take up chess or stamp collecting or billiards. Anything rather than think about the larger issues.”

  “Chess is boring.”

  “Everything is boring. There’s no escape. You know what some old time bums used to tattoo on their arms: ‘BORN TO DIE.’ As corny as that sounds it’s basic wisdom.”

  “What do you think the bums have tattooed on their arms now?”

  “I don’t know. Probably something like ‘JESUS SHAVES.’”

  “We can’t get away from God, can we?”

  “Maybe He can’t get away from us.”

  “Well, listen, it’s always good to talk to you. I always feel better after I talk to you.”

  “Anytime, kid.”

  Sonny got up, opened the door, closed it and was gone. Leslie poured another scotch. Well, the L.A. Rams had drafted for their defensive line. A good move. Everything in life was evolving toward DEFENSE. The iron curtain, the iron mind, the iron life. Some real tough coach would finally punt on first down every time his team got the ball and he’d never lose a game.

  Leslie finished the scotch, pulled his pants down and scratched his ass, digging the fingers in. People who cured their hemorrhoids were fools. When there wasn’t anybody else around it beat being alone. Leslie poured himself another scotch. The phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  It was Francine. Francine liked to impress him. Francine liked to think she impressed him. But she was an elephantine bore. Leslie often thought about how kind he was to let her bore him the way she did. The average guy would drop the receiver on her like a guillotine.

  Who was it who had written that excellent essay about the guillotine? Camus? Camus, yes. Camus had been a bore, too. But the guillotine essay and The Stranger were exceptional.

  “I had lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel today,” she said. “I had a table to myself. I had a salad and drinks. Dustin Hoffman was there and some other movie stars, too. I talked to the people sitting near me and they smiled and nodded, all the tables of smiles and nods, little yellow faces like daffodils. I kept talking and they kept smiling. They thought I was some kind of nut and the way to get rid of me was to smile. They became more and more nervous. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought you might like to hear about that.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Are you alone? Do you want company?”

  “I’m really tired tonight, Francine.”

  After a while Francine hung up. Leslie undressed, scratched his ass again and walked into the bathroom. He ran the dental floss between his few remaining teeth. What an ugliness, this hanging on. He ought to smash out the remaining teeth with a hammer. All the alley fights he had been in and nobody had gotten the front teeth. Well, everything would be gone eventually. Over. Leslie put some Crest on the electric toothbrush and tried to buy some time.

  After that he sat up in bed for a long while with a last scotch and a cigarette. They were, at least, something to do while you waited to see how things would turn out. He looked at the matchbook in his hand and suddenly realized it was the one he’d taken from the man with the watermelon face. The thought startled him. Had that really happened or not? He stared at the matchbook, wondering. He looked at the cover:

  1,000 PERSONALIZED LABELS

  WITH YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS

  JUST $1.00

  Now, he thought, that doesn’t seem to be such a bad deal.

  A FAVOR FOR DON

  I rolled over in bed and picked up the phone. It was Lucy Sanders. I’d known her two or three years, sexually for three months. We had just split up. She was telling the story that she had dumped me because I was a drunk but the truth was that I had left her for my previous girlfriend.

  She hadn’t taken it well. I decided I should go over to explain to her why it was necessary for me to leave her. In the book it’s called “letting them down easy.” I wanted to be a nice guy. When I got there her girlfriend let me in.

  “What the hell do
you want?”

  “I want to let Lucy down easy.”

  “She’s in the bedroom.”

  I walked in. She was on her bed, drunk, dressed only in panties. She had almost emptied a pint of scotch. There was a pot on the floor into which she had vomited.

  “Lucy,” I said.

  She turned her head. “It’s you, you’ve come back! I knew you wouldn’t stay with that bitch.”

  “Now wait a minute, baby, I just came to explain why I left you. I’m a nice guy. I thought I’d explain.”

  “You’re a bastard. You’re a horrible man!”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, took the bottle off the head-board and had a good swallow.

  “Thanks. Now you knew I loved Lilly. You knew that when I lived with you. Her and me—we have an understanding.”

  “But you said she was killing you!”

  “Just dramatics. People split up and go back together all the time. It’s part of the process.”

  “I took you in. I saved you.”

  “I know. You saved me for Lilly.”

  “You bastard, you don’t know a good woman when you have one!”

  Lucy leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited.

  I finished off the pint. “You shouldn’t drink this stuff. It’s poison.”

  She pulled herself up. “Stay with me, Larry, don’t go back to her. Stay with me!”

  “Can’t do it, baby.”

  “Look at my legs! I have nice legs! Look at my breasts! I have nice breasts!”

  I threw the pint in the wastebasket. “Sorry, I gotta go, baby.”

  Lucy leaped off the bed at me with her fists doubled. The punches hit me in the mouth, the nose. I let her work away for a couple of seconds, then grabbed her wrists and threw her back on the bed. I turned and walked out of the bedroom. Her girlfriend was in the front room.