65
My mother provided me with the means for peace and good sense—She didnt tear at her slip and rant I didnt love her and knock over dressers of makeup—She didnt harpy at me or croon at me for thinking my own thoughts—She only yawned at eleven and went to bed with her rosary, like living in a monastery with the Reverend Mother O’Shay—I might lie there in my clean sheets and think of running out to find a raunchy wild whore with stockings in her hair but it had nothing to do with my mother—I was free to do so—Because any man who’s loved a friend and therefore made the vow to leave him and his wife alone, can do the same for his friend his father—To each his own, and she belonged to my father.
But wretched leering thieves of life say no: say, “if a man lives with his mother he’s frustrated”: and even Genêt the divine knower of Flowers said a man who loves his mother is the worst scoundrel of them all: or psychiatrists with hairy wrists like Ruth Heaper’s psychiatrists trembling for the snowy thighs of young patients: or sick married men with no peace in their eyes ranting at the bachelor’s hole: or deadly chemists with no thought of hope: all say to me: “Duluoz you liar! Go out and live with a woman and fight and suffer with her! Go swarming in your bliss hair! Go ratcheting after fury! Find the furies! Be historical!” and all the time I’m sitting there enjoying and injoying the sweet silly peace of my mother, a lady the likes of which you wont find any more unless you travel to Sinkiang, Tibet or Lampore.
66
But here we are in Florida with two tickets to California waiting standing for the bus to New Orleans where we’ll change for El Paso and L.A.—It’s hot in May in Florida—I long to get out and go west beyond the East Texas Plain to that High Plateau and on over the Divide to dry Arizonies and beyond—Poor Ma is standing there absolutely dependent on me, foolish as I’ve been as you see. I wonder what my father is saying in Heaven? “That crazy Ti Jean is carting her three thousand miles in wretched buses just for a dream about a holy pine tree.” But a kid is talking to us waiting in line at our side, when I say that I wonder if we’ll ever get there or the bus will ever come he says:—
“Dont worry, you’ll get there.” I wonder how he knows we’ll get there. “You’ll not only get there, you’ll come back and go elsewhere. Ha ha ha!”
Yet there’s hardly anything in the world or at least in America more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means—More than three days and three nights wearing the same clothes, bouncing around into town after town, even at three o’clock in the morning when you’ve finally fallen asleep there you are being bounced over the railroad tracks of Oshkosh and all the lights are turned on bright to reveal your raggedness and weariness in the seat—To do that, as I’d done so often, as a strong young man, bad enough, but to have to do that when you’re a 62-year-old lady … I really wondered quite often what my father was thinking in Heaven and prayed for him to give my mother strength to make it without too much horror—Yet was she more cheerful than I was—And she devised a terrific trick to keep us in fairly good shape, aspirins with Coke three times a day to calm the nerves.
From mid-Florida we rolled in the late afternoon over orange grove hills towards the panhandle Tallahassees and Mobile Alabamas of morning, no prospect of New Orleans till noon and already fair exhausted. Such an enormous country you realize when you cross it on buses, the dreadful stretches between equally dreadful cities all of them looking the same when seen from the bus of woes, the inescapable bus of never-get-there stopping everywhere (the joke about Greyhound stopping at every post) and worst of all the string of fresh enthusiastic drivers at every two or three hundred miles warning everyone to relax and be happy.
Sometimes during the night I’d look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness. God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!… No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway—I know it’s ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp with rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with The Only One, that we will not be ourselves any more but simply the Companion of The Only One, and that’s what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, dont deny her that, that’s her way of stating the fact. If there cant be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Therefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate America between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath—Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I’m talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking “What is there to laugh about in that?” “How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?” “Who makes fun of misery?” There’s my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads—Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?
And when Ma wakes up in the middle of the night and groans, my heart breaks—The bus goes belumping over back lots of Shittown to go pick up one package in a dawn station. Groans everywhere, all the way to the back seats where black sufferers suffer no less because their skin is black. Yes, “Freedom Riders” indeed, just because you’ve got “white” skin and ride in the front dont make you suffer less—
And there’s just no hope anywhere because we’re all disunited and ashamed: if Joe says life is sad Jim will say that Joe is silly because it doesnt matter. Or if Joe says we need help Jim will say that Joe’s a sniveler. Or if Joe says Jim is mean Jim’ll bust down crying in the night. Or something. It’s just awful. The only thing to do is be like my mother: patient, believing, careful, bleak, self-protective, glad for little favors, suspicious of great favors, beware of Greeks bearing Fish, make it your own way, hurt no one, mind your own business, and make your compact with God. For God is our Guardian Angel and this is a fact that’s only proven when proof exists no more.
Eternity, and the Here-and-Now, are the same thing.
Send that message back to Mao, or Schlesinger at Harvard, or Herbert Hoover too.
67
As I say, the bus arrives in New Orleans at noon and we have to disembark with all our tangled luggage and wait four hours for the El Paso express so me and Ma decide to investigate New Orleans and stretch our legs. In my mind I imagine a big glorious lunch in a Latin Quarter Abalone restaurant among grilleworked balconies and palms but as soon as we find such a restaurant near Bourbon Street the prices on the menu are so high we have to walk out sheepishly as gay businessmen and councilmen and tax collectors dine on. At 3 P.M. they’ll be back at their office desks shuffling quintuplicates of onionskinned news concerning negative formalities and shoving them thru further paper machines that will multiply them ten times to be sent out to be done in triplicate to end up in wastebaskets w
hen their salaries are in. For all the strong food and drink they get they give back triplicates of paper, signed, tho I cant understand it how it’s done when I see sweating arms digging ditches in the streets in the Gulf shattering sun—
Just for the hell of it Ma and I just decide to walk into a New Orleans saloon that has an oyster bar. And there by God she has the time of her life drinking wine, eating oysters on the half shell with piquante, and yelling crazy conversations with the old Italian oyster man. “Are you married, ey?” (She’s always asking old men if they’re married, it’s amazing how women are looking for husbands right up to the end.) No, he’s not married, and would she like some clams now, maybe steamed? and they exchanged names and addresses but later never write. Meanwhile Ma is all excited to be in famous New Orleans at last and when we walk around she buys pickaninny dolls and praline candies all excited in stores and packs them in our luggage to send back by mail as presents to my sister in Florida. A relentless hope. Just like my father she just wont let anything discourage her. I walk sheepishly by her side. And she’s been doing this for 62 years: at the age of 14 there she was, at dawn, walking to the shoe factory to work till six that evening, till Saturday evening, 72-hour workweek, all gleeful in anticipation of that pitiful Saturday night and Sunday when there’d be popcorn and swings and singing. How can you beat people like that? When Feudal tithe-barons made their grab, did they feel sheepish before the glee of their peasants? (surrounded as they were by all those dull knights all yearning to be buggered by masterful sadists from another burgh).
So we get back on the El Paso bus after an hour standing in line in blue bus fumes, loaded with presents and luggage, talking to everybody, and off we roar up the river and then across the Louisiana plains, sitting in front again, feeling gay and rested now and also because I’ve bought a little pint of booze to nip us along.
“I dont care what anybody say,” says Ma pouring a nip into her ladylike portable shot container, “a little drink never hurt nobody!” and I agree ducking down beneath the driver’s rear vision seat and gulping up a snort. Off we go to Lafayette. Where to our amazement we hear the local people talking French exactly as we do in Quebecois, the Cajuns are only Acadians but there’s no time, the bus is leaving for Texas now.
68
In reddish dusk we’re rolling across the Texas plains talking and drinking but soon the pint runs out and poor Ma’s sleeping again, just a hopeless baby in the world, and all that distance yet to go, and when we get there what? Corrigan, and Crockett, and Palestine, the dull bus stops, the sighs, the endlessness of it, only half way across the continent, another night of sleeplessness ahead and another one later, and still another one—Oh me—
Exactly 24 hours and then six more after arriving in New Orleans we are finally bashing down the Rio Grande Valley into the wink of El Paso night, all nine hundred miserere miles of Texas behind us, both of us completely doped and numb with tiredness, I realize there’s nothing to do but get off the bus and get a hotel suite and get a good night’s sleep before goin on to California more than another thousand bumpy miles—
And at the same time I will show my mother Mexico across the little bridge to Juarez.
69
Everybody knows what it feels like after two days of vibration on wheels to suddenly lie in still beds on still ground and sleep—Right next to the bus station I got a suite and went out to buy chicken-in-the-basket while Ma washed up—As I look back on it now I realize she was having a big adventurous trip visiting New Orleans and staying in hotel suites ($4.50) and now going to Mexico for the first time tomorrow—We drank another half pint and ate the chicken and slept like logs.
In the morning, with eight hours till bus time, we sallied forth strong with all our luggage repacked and stored in 25¢ bus station lockers—I even made her walk the one mile to the Mexico bridge for exercise—At the bridge we paid three cents each and went over.
Immediately we were in Mexico, that is, among Indians in an Indian earth—among the smells of mud, chickens, including that Chihuahua dust, lime peels, horses, straw, Indian weariness—The strong smell of cantinas, beer, dank—The smell of the market—and the sight of beautiful old Spanish churches rising in the sun with all their woeful majestical Maria Guadalupes and Crosses and cracks in the wall—“O Ti Jean! I want to go in that church and light a candle to Papa!”
“Okay.” And when we go in we see an old man kneeling in the aisle with his arms outstretched in penitence, a penitente, hours like that he kneels, old serape over his shoulder, old shoes, hat on the church floor, raggedy old white beard. “O Ti Jean, what’s he done that he’s so sad for? I cant believe that old man has ever done anything really bad!”
“He’s a penitente,” I tell her in French. “He’s a sinner and he doesnt want God to forget him.”
“Pauvre bonhomme!” and I see a woman turn and look at Ma thinking she said “Pobrecito” which is exactly what she said anyway. But the most pitiful sight suddenly in the old Juarez church is a shawled woman all dressed in black, barefooted, with a baby in her arms advancing slowly on her knees up the aisle to the altar. “What has happened there?” cries my mother amazed. “That poor lil mother has done no wrong! Is it her husband who’s in prison? She’s carrying that leetle baby!” I’m glad now I took Ma on this trip for her to see the real church of America if nothing else. “Is she a penitente too? Dat little baby is a penitente? She’s got him all wrapped up in a leetle ball in her shawl!”
“I dont know why.”
“Where’s the priest that he dont bless her? There’s nobody here but that poor leetle mother and that poor old man! This is the Church of Mary?”
“This is the church of Maria de Guadalupe. A peasant found a shawl in Guadalupe Mexico with Her Face imprinted on it like the cloth the women had at the cross of Jesus.”
“It happened in Mexico?”
“Si.”
“And they pray to Marie? But that poor young mother is only half way to the altar—She comes slow slow slow on her knees all quiet. Aw but these are good people the Indians you say?”
“Oui—Indians just like the American Indians but here the Spaniards did not destroy them” (in French). “Içi les espanols sont marié avec les Indiens.”
“Pauvre monde! They believe in God just like us! I didnt know that, Ti Jean! I never saw anything like this!” We creeped up to the altar and lighted candles and put dimes in the church box to pay for the wax. Ma made a prayer to God and did the sign of the cross. The Chihuahua desert blew dust into the church. The little mother was still advancing on her knees with the infant quietly asleep in her arms. Memère’s eyes blurred with tears. Now she understood Mexico and why I had come there so often even tho I’d get sick of dysentery or lose weight or get pale. “C’est du monde qu’il on du coeur,” she whispered, “these are people who have heart!”
“Oui.”
She put a dollar in the church machine hoping it would do some good somehow. She never forgot that afternoon: in fact even today, five years later, she still adds a prayer for the little mother with the child crawling to the altar on her knees: “There was something was wrong in her life. Her husband, or maybe her baby was sick—We’ll never know—But I shall always pray for that leetle woman. Ti Jean when you took me there you showed me something I’d never believed I’d ever ever see—”
Years later, when I met the Reverend Mother in the Bethlehem Benedictine Monastery talking to her thru wooden nunnery bars, and told her this, she cried …
And meanwhile the old man Penitente still kneeled there arms outspread, all your Zapatas and Castros come and go but the Old Penitence is still there and will always be there, like Coyotl Old Man in the Navajo Mountains and Mescalero Foothills up north:—
Chief Crazy Horse looks north
*
Geronimo weeps—
with tearful eyes—
*
no pony
The first snow flurries.
*
&n
bsp; With a blanket.
70
It was also very funny to be in Mexico with my mother for when we came out of the church of Santa Maria we sat in the park to rest and enjoy the sun, and next to us sat an old Indian in his shawl, with his wife, saying nothing, looking straight ahead on their big visit to Juarez from the hills of the desert out beyond—Come by bus or burro—And Ma offered them a cigarette. At first the old Indian was afraid but finally he took a cigarette, but she offered him one for his wife, in French, in Quebecois Iroquois French, “Vas il, ai paw ’onte, un pour ta famme” so he took it, puzzled—The old lady never looked at Memère—They knew we were American tourists but never tourists like these—The old man slowly lighted his cigarette and looked straight ahead—Ma said to me: “They’re afraid to talk?”
“They dont know what to do. They never meet anybody. They come from the desert. They dont even speak Spanish just Indian. Say Tarahumare.”
“How’s anybody can say dat?”
“Say Chihuahua.”
Ma says “Chihuahua” and the old man grins at her and the old lady smiles. “Goodbye” says Memère as we leave. We go wandering across the sweet little park full of children and people and ice cream and balloons and come to a strange man with birds in a cage, who catches our eye and yells for our attention (I had taken my mother around to the back streets of Juarez). “What does he want?”
“Fortune! His birds will tell your fortune! We give him one peso and his little bird grabs a slip of paper and your fortune’s written on it!”
“Okay! Seenyor!” The little bird beaks up a clip of paper from a pile of papers and hands it to the man. The man with his little mustache and gleeful eyes opens it. It reads as follows:—