And now two years later on the ferry drawing closer to the Battery the city looked flat and painted, a decal on the horizon, suppurating in filth and cold evil. No promise or future in her. I would get in and out with dispatch after two short visits. Or I would be happy to see her leveled by a giant tidal wave caused by a comet plunging into the Atlantic a few miles off shore, the harbor clogged with dead squid. The water beneath me was dank and smelly—the engines roared in reverse as the ferry nosed into the berth. I'll catch a train to midtown and walk around until dawn. Oddly I've never felt threatened in New York City. Perhaps my innocence while walking around Harlem and Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, and of course shabby, anonymous clothing makes you appear a poor mark. Even sitting on a park bench in what I later found out was Needle Park. Talking easily with the whores and junkies, curious to see how they live and think. A friend told me that I was never approached because my googly eye made me look hostile and criminal in itself. How many times have I asked strangers questions to startle them and to watch them look over their right shoulders to see if I'm talking to someone else. Anyway I felt safe. And never hesitated to go where I wanted. In the three times I've lived in the city I've only been involved in two incidents that could be thought of as violent. On the way to a party in Far Rockaway some young hoods were tearing up subway seats with their knives and then after we were well into Brooklyn they pried a door open and brought in some snow from the platform. There were five of us, three girls from Barnard and a friend of mine, a sandal maker from the Village. His girl told one of the creeps not to throw any snow at her which he immediately did just as we reached another stop. We chased them out of the car and down the platform where my friend upended one of them by the hair and I chased the other off the end of the platform where I yelled, I hope you hit the third rail, cocksucker. But he ran across the tracks and climbed a fence. When I got back up the platform the conductor was holding the train and the other creep was sitting on the cement blubbering. My friend stood there waiting for me with a handful of hair he had jerked out when he had stopped the chase. He said he slapped him a few times but that was all. When we got back with the girls, mine told me that I should never do that or I might get stabbed. But then I had seen within a few months the most insane brutality on subways without a conductor or any subway employee ever interfering. The other incident was unpleasant inasmuch as it was my own fault. I was sitting with some people at a bar that was popular with painters. I went to the toilet and a well-dressed man standing next to the urinal said, You queers really like this bar don't you. I hit him full blast in the ear while he was combing his hair then a few more times about the head and shoulders and kneed him in the solar plexus on the way down. I then stomped on his glasses which had fallen to the floor. He sat there looking stupidly at me holding his hands out and said again I was a queer so I stuck his head in the toilet bowl which had something in it and walked out and back to my table. But then he emerged and talked to the bartender who came over and said that I shouldn't have beaten up a regular customer. Then one of the painters said that it was the guy's “bit” to get beat up in toilets. I felt very embarrassed but then they went back to talking about de Kooning and let the subject drop. I've always hated any sort of violence to the extent that I feel vaguely jittery and nauseated when watching a fist fight.
After a few hours of walking in a generally westerly direction I realized how hot it was going to become. The Huron Mountains are on approximately the same latitude as the city of Quebec but when the wind off Lake Superior ceases the summer weather can become dense and unbearable. The year before camped on the pine barrens of the Yellow Dog plains I had spent much of my time lolling in the cool river. The heat was so intense and the forest so baked and dry that a single match would have created a firestorm, an animal Dresden with the fire moving at two hundred miles per hour in great orange leaps, the same speed incidentally as an avalanche moves. Some false conclusions should be drawn from this. Never forget that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And vice versa. Gourd in her great widowdom creates worlds daily with mathematical verisimilitude. A plowed furrow resembles an open vagina and so on. A rifle is a false prick and a prick is a false rifle, useless if the Nips invade California. I was told only last week that we live in apocalyptical times. Perhaps the “last days.” Yes of course, I'm making a caul, a necklace with a pendant built out of a chocolate-covered horse turd to ward off evil. The problem is suffocation by chintz not apocalypse—too many rats in the grain bin and many are becoming enfevered and will die from stress, death of the mind first, the body goes more slowly. I climbed a hill with effort, up through a windfall of poplar and aspen, until I reached the summit and sat down on a moss-covered rock. Nothing but green, encircled by forest and no sign of man visible though they were out there somewhere cutting pulp for the paper mills. Or cutting cedar logs to build cabins for auto workers in Detroit a comfortable six hundred miles south of me. When I caught my wind I headed north down the hill toward a small lake I spotted perhaps three miles distant. Take a dip there and turn east. I noticed that I had forgotten to smoke for several hours and looked down at the cordovan tobacco stains on my fingers and the way my shrinking lungs had to suck in air to feed my heart oxygen. A short fit then as I stomped on a half pack of cigarettes and ground them into the dry leaves. Ugly package. I knelt and scooped a small hole with my fingers and buried it knowing that I would regret the action by the time I reached the lake. I began to feel a total enervation again and thrashed through the woods as fast as I could walk. The anger fed by the thought of a girl trying to guess my birth sign. Fuck horoscopes. But I remembered dreaming of running through a swamp as a centaur, then plunging into a river to wash the mud from my flanks. Also taking the bow from my shoulder and unsheathing an arrow which I shot at a tree for no particular reason. But it's the daily gab and trash of the astrology thing. The alchemists had sense enough to conceal themselves just as the true satanists remain anonymous and work their wonders privately. I said I was a spy thus revealing that I wasn't despite my Luger and Burberry trenchcoat. The black arts including astrology require an apprenticeship and great study from their novitiates. Then you discover that there are no secrets or true mysteries but a Secret, no holy books but the unwritten one hidden from us at earth's center. The dark side of the moon is merely dark and cold and Jupiter and Saturn only distant flecks of brain hurled out before time was. I lost control of my feet and slid down a ferny bank and into the trunk of a tamarack knocking myself windless. I lay there wheezing and soaked with sweat, the local mosquitoes and flies finding me effortlessly. Are you a Pisces? she asks. No, I say, slapping her face with a schmaltz herring swung deftly by the tail. Can I eat your Libra pussy, RSVP? Backscuttle your Scorpio bum? Drive Mr. Powerful down your silly Taurus throat? I rolled over reaching automatically for the cigarettes that wouldn't be there. Maybe I could climb back up the hill and find their little grave. Salvage even one. That will teach me. I could see the sunlight barely reaching through the ferns and the straight, slight stalks. Mary Jane and Sniffles the mouse go down the hole in the stump. Miniaturization by magic sand. No one ever sticks his hand in the dark hole of a stump. A witless naturalist maybe who deserves a bite on the fingers. I thought of the mountain lion bounty hunter I met near Duchesne, Utah. Long greasy hair down over his shoulders and a stained buckskin shirt. While we drove along in his ancient Plymouth he complained that none of the Mormon women would fuck him because they stick to their own kind. When the mountain lion business got slow he would catch two or three burlap bags full of rattlesnakes and sell them to a college in Provo for medical research. Five bucks apiece. We failed to make one mountain grade but a county road truck came along and pushed us over. He said that he usually lived with his brother who was a rancher near Roosevelt but he preferred sleeping outdoors. He could ride seventy-five miles north into Wyoming without seeing a soul. Or south farther than that along the Green River and Tavaputs Plateau. He gave me the address of a girl in Ve
rnal who might just possibly be “nice” to me. But my next ride had been a Catholic priest who let me sit in the car in Vernal while he ate. Trusts me in the car with the keys in his pocket but won't buy me lunch. His voice was highly nasal and he preached to me until it sounded like a duck's voice, either Donald's or Daisy's. But then we became friendly after he bought me dinner and I told him about all the lies Baptists used to spread about Catholics—the tunnel between the nunnery and the monastery with the tunnel floor littered with the bones of babies. He took this very seriously and said we must pray for them. Lying in the ferns I was happy that there were no poisonous snakes this far north. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to wallow around in the leaves with safety or impunity. I finally got up when my sweat had begun to dry and I had eaten some raisins with a slug of warm water. Oh God I'd give a healthy tooth for a cigarette. My hair flopped irritatingly across my eyes and I stopped and took out my knife and cut the front shock off, then made a sweat-band out of my red handkerchief. Natty Bumppo wants tobacco. And a porterhouse and a bottle of Chateau Margaux and a horse to ride back to camp where he would pack, back to the car where the horse would be abandoned and the car driven straight through to New York City to the Algonquin or the Plaza where he would send an underling over to Bonwit's Bill Blass shop with his measurements and get out-fitted for outrageous high-class low-down gluttony and fuckery. Tiresome. I mean fine places and coming down to the Edwardian Room for breakfast, forgetting your tie and having the waiter whip one on you before you could fart or whistle. The rich never forget their ties and my dad tied mine for me until I was nineteen because I simply couldn't get the hang of it. I was walking into a lower, swampier area and knew the lake couldn't be far away now. I skirted the swale for a few hundred yards then plunged in, in despair of finding an open path to the water. I reached a knoll and shimmied up a birch tree from which I spotted the water not far ahead. The birch was too thick to swing from—it's a dangerous sport in that if the tree is a bit too thick your downward swing stops too far in the air and there is no retreat. You have to drop. Be smart to break a leg here and crawl for a week to reach the car. My boyhood hero Jim Bridger would never be caught in such an act but neither would he have entered the Plaza without a tie except perhaps to set a fire or hit somebody. Still some of his kind left. A friend had seen a halfbreed near Timmins, Ontario, portage two miles with four hundred pounds of moose meat on his back. I reached the lake and spotted a sand bar to my left down the shore where I could sit and take off my clothes for a swim.
I went into a bar near the Battery and had my pastrami sandwich and five double bourbons. Health creeping back in the blood stream after last night's chill and discomfort. There were only a few nondescript old men in the place mumbling to themselves—New York has the highest concentration of mumblers per square acre in the world. A Bulova after working for the city until sixty-five and then the mumbling begins. Shirts spittle-flecked from it. The bartender was intently watching the Jack Paar show where a celebrity was lashing out at the phoniness of Hollywood. Yum what wit. I want to go out there someday and take a room and wander around and challenge Esther Williams to a swimming race, three miles into the Pacific with the fate of the world as a prize. A thousand movies have poisoned the mind. James Dean, O James Dean, where are you now? Six feet under Indiana's lid. I'm not like Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road. We didn't get a TV until I was on the verge of leaving home at eighteen. Still don't like it because the screen is so small and the people might be that size if you went into the studio. I asked for a glass of water and popped three bennies. Here we go folks. Out onto the street and toward the subway and the hum beginning.
I got off the train at Sheridan Square and walked down Grove to look at the building I had lived in the year before. Tears of stupidity formed. As they do during the national anthem at a football game. I looked at the Barrymore house and then turned around and went back to the Square where I had coffee at Rikers. A queen next to me with false eyelashes asked for the sugar. Flutter flutter. I felt warmly toward him—why should we care who they fuck and why. All the legislatures with their Robert's Rules of Love. I have it on good authority that there are proportionately more transvestites and flaming rim queens in Congress than in Laredo, Texas; Springfield, Mass.; or Malibu Beach. A sub rosa report filed under “China” at the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the collective wisdom of which organization could varnish a Ming vase with bubbles. Of course singly the members are alpha types but at election time the daisy chain sets in and whirl herself nose picks the unworthy first. Finished my coffee. Three bennies were two too many. If I walk at the speed of light it's my business. I was aiming generally at Sullivan Street where she lived in the squalor she loved and deserved. If she wasn't there I would lick my name on the door and she would never know unless she got there before the saliva dried. Down West Fourth with all that apparel to determine the real you. Opera buffs eating manicotti, breaking into song spontaneously with their mouths full of marinara sauce. Music comes from blood-soaked holes. If I were drafted I'd carry catsup and play dead until they let me go. A girl at the mailbox on Sixth Avenue, led there by her elegant Afghan hound. So beautiful with long legs and high butt and hips. Please be mine and would someone introduce us right now. She walks away with her globes rubbing each other where my nose or hose could be. Wish I could ditch the chemistry and come back to earth. I want to go back home and pound nails into two-by-fours and carry my empty lunch bucket to the car and have Mama say how did it go today. Bad very badly. I hit my thumb twice and very hard. Tore off three fingernails the first day on an irrigation job. A scream across the dry field which the water sprinkled and dispersed in my blood. Finally across Washington Square and to her street. People playing chess in the dark and a dozen studs along the meat rack. To be yodeled for a fee. I bought a sack of pistachios and sat on a bench to collect what was left of my thoughts. When I'm rich I'll hire a Pulitzer winner to do nothing but shuck my pistachios. The rest of the time must be spent in the henhouse clucking. He will not be allowed to touch the eggs.
Up the stairs. Zero hour and not a sensible word forming in my throat. Perhaps a Zen “I'm here because I'm here because I'm here.” And then the master will run out of a broom closet and cudgel me to the floor with what is the sound of one flap clapping. Knock. This place smells of the usual cabbage soup. Knock. And fish and Roman Cleanser. A fat girl with puffy eyes opens the door.
—You woke me up.
—Swell. Is Laurie here?
—Who are you?
—Swanson.
—She gets off at three-thirty.
She begins to close the door.
—Wait a minute.
I push past her through a narrow hall and into the arty living room. There is a sofa along the far wall and I sit down then lay back.
The fat girl shrugs her shoulders under her robe and walks into another room. I try to close my eyes but they are gritty. There are books and records and magazines strewn over the floor and theater programs pasted on the wall. And a Moses Soyer painting of a girl whose thighs are askew where they enter her red dress. Larry Rivers print. An imitation Chaim Gross piece on a corner table. Laurie is a counter girl at a big East Side delicatessen catering to the rich Temple Emanu-El crowd. I met her the first time I came east when I intended to go to Washington and had a letter recommending my character from a prominent businessman to a Congressman. But I got sidetracked in Philadelphia and pawned my high school graduation Wittnauer watch and came to New York City. The room grows dimmer, my nerves die a little, my body softening into the couch. Fatty puts a record on in the next room—low and sweet and Latin and I see Mexicans and am back in San Jose covered with palm fronds. Standing then in the hot asphalt parking lot of the bus station. Palm trees with naked trunks like elephant hide and pineapples. Eating tripe stew, menudo, I love to eat menudo with the kernels of hominy and red peppers.