Desolation Angels: A Novel

  “Raphael I want you to know that I love you.” (This information was imparted eagerly to Irwin the next day by Simon, who saw its importance.) “But dont bug me about money. You’re always talkin about how you dont need money but it’s the only thing you want. You’re trapped in ignorance. I at least admit it. But I love you.”

  “You can keep your money, I’m going to Greece and have visions—People will give me money and I’ll throw it away—I’ll sleep on money—I’ll turn over in my dreams on money.”

  It was snowing. Raphael accompanied me to Ruth Heaper’s where we were supposed to eat supper and tell her all about our meeting with William Carlos Williams. I saw a funny look in her eye, in Ruth Erickson’s too. “What’s the matter?”

  In the bedroom my love Ruth tells me her psychoanalyst has advised her to tell me to move out of her room and go get a room of my own because it isnt good for her psyche or mine.

  “This asshole wants to screw you himself!”

  “Screw is just the right word. He said you were taking advantage of me, that you’re irresponsible, do me no good, get drunk, bring drunk friends—all hours of the night—I cant rest.”

  I pack up all my gear and walk out with Raphael into the increasing snowstorm. We go down Bleecker Street, or Bleaker Street, one. Raphael is now sad for me. He kisses me on the cheek as he leaves (to go have supper with a girl uptown), and says, “Poor Jack, forgive me Jackie. I love you too.”

  I’m all alone in the snow so I go to Julien’s and we get drunk again in front of the TV, Julien finally getting mad and ripping my shirt and even my T-shirt off my back and I sleep drunk on the livingroom floor till noon.

  The next day I get a room in the Marlton Hotel on 8th Street and start typing what I wrote in Mexico, double space neatly for the publishers, thousands of dollars hidden in that pack of mine.

  45

  With only ten dollars left I go down to the corner drugstore on 5th Avenue to buy a pack of butts, figuring I can buy a roast chicken that night and eat it over my typewriter (borrowed from Ruth Heaper). But in the drugstore the character says “How are things in Glacamora? You living around the corner or in Indiana? You know what the old bastard said when he kicked the bucket …” But later when I get back to my room I find he’s only given me change for a five. He has pulled the shortchange hype on me. I go back to the store but he’s off duty, gone, and the management is suspicious of me. “You’ve got a shortchange artist working in your store—I dont wanta put the finger on anybody but I want my money back—I’m hungry!” But I never got the money back and I shoulda stuck the finger up my ass. I went on typing on just coffee. Later I called Irwin and he told me to call Raphael’s uptown girl because maybe I could live with her as she was already sick of Raphael.

  “Why’s she sick of Raphael?”

  “Because he keeps laying around on the couch saying ‘Feed Raphael’! Really! I think she’d like you. Just be cool nice Jack and call her.” I called her, Alyce Newman by name, and told her I was starving and would she meet me in Howard Johnson’s on 6th Avenue and buy me two frankfurts? She told me okay, she was a short blonde in a red coat. At 8 P.M. I saw her walk in.

  She bought me the hotdogs and I gobbled them up. I’d already looked at her and said “Why dont you let me stay at your apartment, I’ve got a lot of typing to do and they cheated me out of my money in a drugstore today.”

  “If you wish.”

  46

  But it was the beginning of perhaps the best love affair I ever had because Alyce was an interesting young person, a Jewess, elegant middleclass sad and looking for something—She looked Polish as hell, with the peasant’s legs, the bare low bottom, the torque of hair (blond) and the sad understanding eyes. In fact she sorta fell in love with me. But that was only because I really didnt impose on her. When I asked her for bacon and eggs and applesauce at two in the morning she did it gladly, because I asked it sincerely. Sincerely? What’s insincere about “Feed Raphael”? Old Alyce (22) however said:

  “I s’pose you’re going to be a big literary god and everybody’s going to eat you up, so you should let me protect you.”

  “How do they go about eating lit’ry gods?”

  “By bothering them. They gnaw and gnaw till there’s nothing left of you.”

  “How do you know about all this?”

  “I’ve read books—I’ve met authors—I’m writing a novel myself—I think I’ll call it Fly Now, Pay Later but the publishers think they’d get trouble from the airlines.”

  “Call it Pay Me The Penny After.”

  “That’s nice—Shall I read you a chapter?” All of a sudden I was in a quiet home by lamplight with a quiet girl who would turn out to be passionate in bed, as I saw, but my God—I dont like blondes.

  “I dont like blondes,” I said.

  “Maybe you’ll like me. Would you like me to dye my hair?”

  “Blondes have soft personalities—I’ve got whole future lifetimes left to deal with that softness—”

  “Now you want hardness? Ruth Heaper actually isnt so great as you think, she’s only after all a big awkward girl who doesnt know what to do.”

  I had me a companion there, and more so I saw it the night I got drunk in the White Horse (Norman Mailer sitting in the back talking anarchy with a beer mug in his hand, my God will they give us beer in the Revolution? or Gall?)—Drunk, and in walks Ruth Heaper walking Erickson’s dog and starts to talk to me persuading me to go home with her for the night.

  “But I’m living with Alyce now—”

  “But dont you still love me?”

  “You said your doctor said—”

  “Come on!” But Alyce somehow arrives at the White Horse and drags me out forcibly as if by the hair, to a cab to her home, from which I learn: Alyce Newman is not going to let anybody steal her man from her, no matter who he will be. And I was proud. I sang Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool” all the way home in the cab. The cab flashed by oceangoing vessels docked at the North River piers.

  47

  And actually Alyce and I were wonderful healthy lovers—She only wanted me to make her happy and she did everything in her power to make me happy too, which was enough—“You should know more Jewish girls! They not only love you they bring you pumpernickel bread and sweet butter with your morning coffee.”

  “What’s your father like?”

  “He’s a cigarsmoker—”

  “And your mother?”

  “Lace doilies in the livingroom—”

  “And you?”

  “I dont know.”

  “So you’re going to be a big novelist—Who are your models?” But all her models were wrong, yet I knew she could do it, be the first great woman writer of the world, but I guess, I think, she wanted babies anyhow anyway—She was sweet and I still love her tonight.

  We stayed together for an awful long time, too, years—Julien called her Ecstasy Pie—Her best friend, the dark haired Barbara Lipp, happened by circumstance to be in love with Irwin Garden—Irwin had steered me to a haven. In this haven I slept with her for lovemaking purposes but after we were done I’d go to the outer bedroom, where I kept the winter window constantly open and the radiator shut off, and slept there in my sleepingbag. Eventually that way I finally got rid of that tubercular Mexican cough—I’m not so dumb (as Ma always said).

  48

  So Irwin with that $225 in his pocket first takes me to Rockefeller Center for my passport before we wander downtown talking about everything like we used to do in our college days—“So now you’re going to Tangiers to see Hubbard.”

  “My mother says he’s going to destroy me.”

  “Oh he’ll probably try but he wont make it, like me,” putting his head against my cheek and laughing. That Irwin. “What about all the people who want to destroy me but I keep on leaning my head against the bridge?”

  “What bridge?”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge over the Passaic River in Paterson. Even your bridge on the Me
rrimac full of mad laughter. Any kinda bridge. I’ll lean my head against any old bridge any time. A spade in the Seventh Avenue toilet leaning his head against toilets or something. I’m not fighting with God.”

  “Who is God?”

  “That big radar machine in the sky, I guess, or dead eyes see.” He was quoting one of his teenage poems, “Dead Eyes See.”

  “What do dead eyes see?”

  “Remember that big building we saw on 34th Street one morning when we were high, and we said there was a giant in it?”

  “Yeh—with his feet stuck out or something? That was a long time ago.”

  “Well dead eyes see that Giant, no less, unless the invisible ink is already invisible and even the Giant’s gone.”

  “D’you like Alyce?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “She tells me this Barbara is in love with you.”

  “Yes I guess so.” He couldnt be more bored. “I love Simon and I dont want no big Jewish wives yelling at me over the dishes—Look at that sickened face just went by.” I turned to see a lady’s back.

  “Sickened? How?”

  “Got the expression of sneers and hopelessness, gone forever, ugh.”

  “Doesnt God love her?”

  “Oh read Shakespeare again or something, you’re getting even almost maudlin.” But he wasn’t even interested in saying it. He looked about in the Rockefeller Building. “Look who’s there.” It was Barbara Lipp, who waved at us and came over.

  And after a brief talk, and after we got my passport, we walked downtown just talking and just as we crossed Fourth Avenue and 12th there was Barbara again waving at us, but just by accident, really, a most strange circumstance.

  “Yeh like it’s the second time I’ve run into you today,” says Barbara, who looks just like Irwin, black hairs, black eyes, same low voice.

  Irwin says: “We were looking for the giant shot.”

  “What’s the giant shot.” (Barbara)

  “Some big shit shot.” And all of a sudden they go into a big Yiddishe controversy about shit shot I cant even understand, laughing in the street in front of me, giggling in fact. These lazy ladies of Manhattan.…

  49

  So I get my boat ticket at a seedy Yugoslavian shipping office on 14th Street and my sailing date is Sunday—The ship is the S.S. Slovenia, it’s Friday.

  Saturday morning I appear at Julien’s apartment wearing dark glasses because of sore-eyed hangover and a scarf around my neck to kelp the cough—Alyce is with me, we’ve had our last taxi ride down the Hudson River piers seeing the huge thin shanked bows of Liberté’s and Queen Elizabeths ready for the Le Havre anchor shot—Julien looks at me and cries: “Fernando!”

  Fernando Lamas the Mexican actor he means. “Fernando the old international roué! Going to Tangiers to investigate Ay-rab girls, hey-y?” Nessa bundles up the kids, it’s Julien’s day off, and we all go to my pier in Brooklyn to have a farewell party in the cabin on my boat. I have a whole two-bed stateroom to myself since nobody ever sails with the Yugoslavian fleet except spies and conspirateurs. Alyce is delighted to see the masts of ships and the noonday sun on harbor water even tho she’d cast aside Wolfe for Trilling years ago. All Julien wants to do is climb around the housing with the kids. Meanwhile I’m mixing drinks in the stateroom which is already awry due to the fact they’re loading on the port side first and the whole deck keels over. Sweet Nessa has a going-away present for me, Danger à Tanger, a cheap French novel about Arabs dropping bricks on the heads of the British Consulate. The men of the crew dont even speak English, just Yugoslav, tho they look Nessa and Alyce over with authoritative glances as tho they could speak any language at all. Me and Julien take his boys to the flying bridge to watch the loading operations.

  Imagine having to travel thru time every day of your life carrying your own face and making it look like your own face! Fernando Lamas indeed! Poor Julien with his mustache doth carry his face grimly and interminably no matter what anybody say, philosopher or not. To weave that juice mask and let it look like yourself, while your liver gathers, your heart batters, t’would be enough to make God cry saying “All my children are martyrs and I want them back in perfect safety! Why did I emanate them in the first place, because I wanted to see a flesh movie?” Pregnant women who smile dont even dream about this. God Who is everything, the Already Thus, He Whom I saw on Desolation Peak, is also a smiling pregnant woman not even dreaming about this. And if I should complain about the way they manhandled Clark Gable in Shanghai or Gary Cooper in High Noon Town, or how I’m driven mad by old lost college roads in the moon, aye, moonlight, moonlight, moonlight me that, moonlight—Moonlight me some moonshine, adamantine you mine. Julien keeps stressing his lips, plurk, and Nessa holds high cheekboned flesh in escrow, and Alyce goes “Hum” in long-haired sadness and even the children die. Old Fernando the Philosopher wishes he could tell Julien something to tell everybody over the Universal Wire. But the Yugoslav Red Star stevedores dont care as long as they got bread, wine, and woman—Tho they may glare along stonewalls at Tito as he passes, yair—It’s this business of holding your you-face to you every day, you might let it drop (like Irwin tries) but in the end an angelic question will fill you with surprise. Julien and I mix mad drinks, drink them, he and Nessa and the kids go off at dusk down the gangplank and Alyce and I lay passed out in my bunk, till eleven P.M., when the Yugoslav Steward knocks on my door, says “You stay on the ship? Okay?” and goes off into Brooklyn to get drunk with the crew—Alyce and I waking up, at one A.M., arm in arm in a dreadsome ship, agh—Only one watchman alone on the walk—Everybody drinking in bars of New York.

  “Alyce” I say “let’s get up and wash and take a subway to New York—We’ll go to the West End and have a gay beer.” But what’s in the West End but death anyway?

  Alyce only wants to sail to Africa with me. But we dress and go hand in hand down the gangplank, empty pier, and go crossing huge plazas of Brooklyn’s hoodlum gangs with me with a bottle of wine in my hand like a weapon.

  I’ve never seen a more dangerous neighborhood than those Brooklyn housing projects behind Bush Terminal pier.

  We finally get to Borough Hall and dive into a subway, Van Cortlandt line, takes us all clear to 110th Street and Broadway and we go in the bar where my old favorite bartender Johnny is tending the beer.

  I order bourbon and whiskey—I see the vision of haggard awful deathly faces passing one by one thru the bar of the world but my God they’re all on a train, an endless train, and it endlessly runs into the Graveyard. What to do? I try to tell Alyce:—

  “Leecey, I see nothing but horror and terror everywhere—”

  “That’s because you’re sick from drinking too much.”

  “But what’ll I do with the horror and the terror I see?”

  “Sleep it off, man—”

  “But the bartender gave me the bleakest look—as tho I was dead.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “Because I’m not staying with you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s solipsistic stupid woman explanation of the horror we share—”

  “Share and share alike.”

  The endless train into the endless graveyard, all full of cockroaches, kept running and running into Johnny the Bartender’s hungry haggard eyes—I said “Johnny don’t you see? We’re all made at for perfidy?” and suddenly I realized I was making poems out of nothing at all, like always, so that if I were a Burroughs Adding Machine Computer I’d still make numbers dance to me. All, all, for tragedy.

  And poor Leecie, she didnt understand Goyeshe me.

  Go to Part Three.

  PART THREE

  PASSING THROUGH TANGIERS, FRANCE AND LONDON

  50

  What a crazy picture, maybe the picture of the typical American, sitting on a boat mulling over fingernails wondering where to really go, what to do next—I suddenly realized I had nowhere to turn at all.

  But it was on this trip t
hat the great change took place in my life which I called a “complete turningabout” on that earlier page, turning from a youthful brave sense of adventure to a complete nausea concerning experience in the world at large, a revulsion in all the six senses. And as I say the first sign of that revulsion had appeared during the dreamy solitary comfort of the two months on Desolation mountain, before Mexico, since which time I’d been melanged again with all my friends and old adventures, as you saw, and not so “sweetly,” but now I was alone again. And the same feeling came to me: Avoid the World, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. But what to do instead? And here I was relentlessly being carried to further “adventures” across the sea. But it was really in Tangiers after an overdose of opium the turningabout really clicked down and locked. In a minute—but meanwhile another experience, at sea, put the fear of the world in me, like an omen warning. This was a huge tempest that whacked at our C-4 from the North, from the Januaries and Pleniaries of Iceland and Baffin Bay. During wartime I’d actually sailed in those Northern seas of the Arctic but it was only in summertime: now, a thousand miles south of these in the void of January Seas, gloom, the cappers came glurring in gray spray as high as a house and plowed rivers all over our bow and down the washes. Furyiating howling Blakean glooms, thunders of thumping, washing waving sick manship diddling like a long cork for nothing in the mad waste. Some old Breton knowledge of the sea still in my blood now shuddered. When I saw those walls of water advancing one by one for miles in gray carnage I cried in my soul WHY DIDNT I STAY HOME!? But it was too late. When the third night came the ship was heaving from side to side so badly even the Yugoslavs went to bed and jammed themselves down between pillows and blankets. The kitchen was insane all night with crashing and toppling pots even tho they’d been secured. It scares a seaman to hear the Kitchen scream in fear. For eating at first the steward had placed dishes on a wet tablecloth, and of course no soup in soupbowls but in deep cups, but now it was too late for even that. The men chewed at biscuits as they staggered to their knees in their wet sou’westers. Out on deck where I went a minute the heel of the ship was enough to kick you over the gunwale straight at walls of water, sperash. Deck lashed trucks groaned and broke their cables and smashed around. It was a Biblical Tempest like an old dream. In the night I prayed with fear to God Who was now taking all of us, the souls on board, at this dread particular time, for reasons of His own, at last. In my semi delirium I thought I saw a snow white ladder being held down to us from the sky. I saw Stella Maris over the Sea like a statue of Liberty all in shining white. I thought of all the sailors that ever drowned and O the choking thought of it, from Phoenicians of 3000 years ago to poor little teenage sailors of America only last war (some of whom I’d sailed in safety with)—The carpets of sinking water all deep blue green in the middle of the ocean, with their damnable patterns of foam, the sickening choking too-much of it even tho you’re only looking at the surface—beneath all that the upwell of cold miles of fathoms—swaying, rolling, smashing, the tonnages of Peligroso Roar beating, heaving, swirling—not a face in sight! Here comes more! Duck! The whole ship (only as long as a Village) ducks into it shuddering, the crazy screws furiously turn in nothingness, shaking the ship, slap, the bow’s now up, thrown up, the screws are dreaming deep below, the ship hasnt gained ten feet—it’s like that—It’s like frost in your face, like the cold mouths of ancient fathers, like wood cracking in the sea. Not even a fish in sight. It’s the thunderous jubilation of Neptune and his bloody wind god canceling men. “All I had to do was stay home, give it all up, get a little home for me and Ma, meditate, live quiet, read in the sun, drink wine in the moon in old clothes, pet my kitties, sleep good dreams—now look at this petrain I got me in, Oh dammit!” (“Petrain” is a 16th Century French word meaning “mess.”) But God chose to let us live as at dawn the captain turned the ship the other way and gradually left the storm behind, then headed back east towards Africa and the stars.