Moise and the World of Reason

  What is the future of a being with a chronically inflamed libido when the bird of youth has flown out of body and spirit? There’s no empyrean into which it ascends like a paraclete. Unless it is corrected or controlled, it could take you to the baths someday and that’s where dignity stops and all pretension to it. That is the time of eyes inflamed toward daybreak as the libido, and the haunting of wanting unassuaged by no matter how many mouths. Lance used to tell me about an inscription on the wall of a cubicle in a Boston bath. “Wonderful night of fun. Had ten cocks, took eight biggest up ass.” This triumphant inscription on the wall was signed “The Size Queen of Back Bay.” No. Repeat no. I would prefer the castration of early death to that sort of future.

  A few months ago I ran into a black from Harlem who was into the history of Harlem music and dance from Blues through Jazz and Be-bop and its moods through the wild to the cool and now into the mellow, and he said something that stuck in my mind. “God don’t come when you want Him but He’s right on time.”

  Oh, God, I’ve taken it out of my pants and I’m holding it in my hand and

  At home and alone the libido, during these hours, is bound to enter you like an incubus, and if your resistance is down he will control your hand and direct it to where he makes you think you live. You’ve got to shout to him, “No, I don’t live there, not in Place Pig Alley any more than in Sacré Coeur de Montmartre but

  Where do you live when alone?

  Slowly and sadly, now, I put it back in my jeans and button them up on it as I ask myself that question, “Where do you live when alone?”

  In a corner of the dayroom of that asylum on that island in that river to the east?

  Words!—don’t suffice. . . .

  I have just now discovered a very old laundry cardboard, the kind inserted in a laundered shirt, dating from those days when shirts of mine were sent out to be washed and ironed at a laundry no longer existing that was called the Oriental. It is far from an ideal surface for the pencil, having turned darker than its original gray and curling up at the ends and smelling of

  I will say it, cockroaches, insects which are so abhorrent to me that I shudder as I

  This dates back to the kitchen in Thelma, Alabama, this cockroach phobia of mine. Even in my childhood I associated sleeping alone with death and I would get up barefooted at night to enter the kitchen and before I could reach the light switch there would be that awful crackling and squishing sound underfoot and I’d know I’d stepped on one. That awful content of it, yellow as mucus. I’d sit on the edge of the sink running cold water on the sole of my foot till it was removed, all of it, and I felt clean again.

  To be cleansed of defilement is so lovely a thing, and thinking of it, I recall an incident in Thelma when my first symptoms of puberty were appearing, the faint down over the groin and in the armpits, the changed voice, and the penis, rising in sleep, in a dream, to an ecstatic emission of sperm, “the damp initial of Eros,” as I once called it in a poem much later.

  The incident is this.

  A strange limousine had arrived in the city containing four strange young men. No one could fail to notice their elegantly slow drives about the town and the lingering and staring out at male adolescents employed at the stave mill, and Thelma being an innocent town, their reason for this behavior was not suspected correctly. No one knew where they stayed if they stayed anywhere except in the limousine. During the daytime they never rolled down the limousine windows but at night they did to call out in soft voices to youths on the walks. They were there for two days and nights only and it was most commonly rumored of them that they were from Tuscaloosa or Birmingham and were visiting Thelma to attempt to stir up union trouble among the stave mill employees.

  On the second night of their stay in Thelma, it was not a stave mill employee but to me that one of the four called out, soft as a dove’s voice, from a rapidly rolled-down window of the limousine which was dark as their reputed reason for being in Thelma.

  “Son, boy, want a lift where you’re going?”

  The light of a corner streetlamp shone on his face. He was the blond of the four: I was attracted by the soft voice, the charming intensity of his pale eyes, and simply by the courtesy of the offer of a lift in the handsomest car that I’d even seen in Thelma.

  I had been to a Gary Cooper movie at the Bijou and had been so entranced by his face that I’d barely followed the story.

  “Why, yes, thanks.”

  Quickly, silendy, the back door of the limousine opened to admit me, and the blond who’d spoken to me lifted me across his knees to the space between him and a sculpturally motionless young man with equally intense-looking eyes.

  No sooner than I was sitting between the blond and the dark than the window was raised and the limousine purred into motion.

  The blond did all the talking at first.

  “Where are you going, boy?”

  “Home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The corner of Cherry and Peach Street.”

  As I mentioned this location of home, someone in the front seat broke into laughter which all of the four occupants of the limousine echoed a bit. It was a private joke among them, it would seem, the street-names of the corner I lived on.

  “How old are you, boy?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Aren’t you scared to be in a car with four men you don’t know?”

  I began to shiver at this question, especially since it was accompanied by a hand of the dark man and a hand of the blond each falling rather tightly onto my knees as if I were being taken a prisoner between them.

  But I answered,

  “No, why should I be?”

  “A pretty young boy like you?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean but I’d like to get out now.”

  In response the limousine picked up speed and not in the direction of my home but out into dark open country. “You’re not driving toward Peach and Cherry.”

  Again the chorus of laughter. The blond laughed softest and said, “Have a little fresh country air with us first.”

  “No, no, I want to get out.”

  By this time I was scared crazy, for the limousine and the mysterious four were out into dark moonless country and the hands of each beside me had advanced from my knees to my upper thighs and were rhythmically squeezing as women shoppers do melons to see if they’re ripe.

  And now the blond’s had closed gently over my groin and he inquired, “Doesn’t this feel good?”

  Whether it did or didn’t, I was too frightened to answer.

  Then abruptly the limousine stopped and the dark one seized my hand and placed it in his lap and held it there tightly and I felt his large erection, and then it was he that spoke.

  “Get his pants off him, undress him, let’s give him instruction.”

  “Such as what?” asked the blond in a suddenly harsh, reproving voice.

  “How to suck and.”

  “Listen, bitch,” said the blond, “this boy is only a child and we’re driving him straight home to Peach and Cherry. Come here, boy. Sit in my lap. Don’t let that bastard touch you.”

  He lifted me onto his knees and opened them wider and held me tight between them.

  Apparently he had the power among them, for the limousine started again and turned about toward the town.

  The blond also had an erection but made no suggestions to me, just held me protectively between his tight thighs.

  The limousine lurched to a stop at Peach and Cherry. There was a moment of stillness. The blond had inserted his hand inside my white shirt.

  “His heart’s beating like a wild bird.”

  “Get him out,” said the dark one.

  The door on the blond’s side opened, his thighs released me, and as I got up to get out, I felt his hand on my ass, not squeezing but caressing, and he said to the dark one, “It would have been lovely if you hadn’t fucked it up.”

  “Nobody’s fucked nothing.”
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  “Not yet,” said the blond, “but you’re going to sit on my cock all the way back to Mobile and I hope the road is bumpy.”

  I didn’t step out of the limousine but fell out.

  The blond leaned out the window.

  “Are you okay, baby?”

  I got to my feet. The blond was still leaning his beautiful head out the window.

  It was I that kissed him, a soft, lingering kiss.

  “Take care, take care,” he whispered, and the limousine drove away.

  Thinking back upon that adventure, now sixteen years past, I have a feeling that those four strangers have gone further than Mobile through a night much deeper. There was about them an atmosphere of death on the invisible road map of existence not far along it despite the fact that the driver of the limousine, whose dark head never turned toward me, drove with an exceptional skill and ease as if he were a part of the machine, a controlling extension of it, one that owned a commanding block of units in the stock of a corporation, the limousine, although I am sure it was actually the property of the blond one. But death. It did seem to have been written in disappearing ink on each of their individual road maps of existence at separate little distances, four deaths like a cluster of darkly luminous dials which I glimpsed on the dashboard, and I believe that this feeling belongs in the realm of the parapsychological in which I’ve grown to have total faith.

  When there is one of a thing there is likely to be another or even two more and I have discovered a second laundry cardboard a bit further under the bed than was the first, whose writing surfaces are now covered. I reduce the size of my penciling to a point at which it will be legible only to myself so that this barricade of words against loneliness can be longer maintained.

  Of the four young men who drove away to Mobile and my intuition of their lives being completed not long after they left Thelma, I have only one more thing to confess in my relation to them and it is that I would like to have held the blond one in my arms, over my lap, at the time of his passing. This is an erotic feeling, needless to tell you. I would like to have felt the spasmodic motions of his prone body as it surrendered its warmth of being and to have placed one hand on his forehead and the other over his groin to comfort him at the two places where he lived most intensely and would have most resisted ravishment by the non-living, by the mineral kingdom.

  Certainly not all nor most of my adventures in Thelma, Alabama, were of the sort that seem inclined to surface on the currents of my unconscious tonight. What I am doing tonight is what I have done all nights that I’ve spent alone in this space flimsily partitioned from a much, much larger and darker space that inevitably reminds me of the unmentionable which I keep mentioning which is the vastness of the nothing, the nowhere, out of which emerges the momentary light-flicker of being alive and drops back into it so precipitately, even in lingering cases, with the miraculous swoop of an aerialist at the top of a circus tent, swinging between a pair of trapezes with no net beneath him. It is the act, the moment of brilliance: and then the failure to fly, the plummeting out of light to the heart of the black, with no great public gasp of terror and dismay that is comparable to that which occurs in his heart as he finds that he has miscalculated his leap at the cost of his being.

  Oh, God, what am I doing with this affectation of a style like Pierre Loti’s at the century’s turn?

  I was saying that I’m doing tonight what I have done every night when alone since entering the “broken world of love” except that I am not naked in bed and turned upon my stomach to press the warmth of my half-tumescent prick against the space deserted by Lance on tour.

  “Baby, you want to write but you got no education,” he said to me once, annoyed that I remained seated at BON AMI with Blue Jay, pencil scribbling, instead of coming to bed.

  “You mean formal education, no adequate schooling, you mean.”

  “Baby, you got less than I got.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Shit, the truant officer was hot on your heels when I met you.”

  “Only according to Mama, a mythologist of the first order. Actually in Thelma, Alabama, I got about as much schooling as the poet Arthur Rimbaud got in Charleville when he grabbed the school prize and quit.”

  “What cat is that?”

  “If you don’t know, you better not brag about your education.”

  “Shit, when I met you, you were certainly listed by the Bureau of Missing Persons.”

  “Yes, and I still am.”

  “Baby, ain’t you well-fucked? The answer to that is yes, not no, and so if you’re missing, you are not missing much.”

  “I would like to be something more permanent than a receptacle for sperm which is sometimes infected with germ cells by anonymous donors you encounter at midnight on tour with an ice show.”

  “Don’t sit there talking to me like a little library queen.”

  “Don’t lie there talking to me like a hustler that gives it away for residence in this godforsaken pad.”

  “If you don’t like my life-style”

  “Do you?”

  “A man’s life-style should fit his future more than his present, and in my future I won’t be the star of the ice show, I will not be the living nigger on ice forever, baby, but I will be a junkie and this pad here will be appropriate to my condition then.”

  “I don’t contest the point since I know your habits, but how about me, should I adjust my life to the future of a”

  “Nigger junkie?”

  “You said it, man, not me.”

  “The red-neck is coming out in you, and lemme warn you, it brings out the hellcat in me.”

  “You’ve got hazel-speckled green eyes like a fire-cat, Lance, you burned your way into my life and you’ll burn yourself out and I will be left burned-out behind you like a village of thatch-roof huts that you’ve set fire to and sacked and ravaged and don’t!”

  He was trying to haul me off the box onto the bed and I knew it would be not for love but for revenge.

  “This could be our last communion,” he warned me, and his hand slackened its hold.

  “Yes, without any sacrament to it.”

  “Okay, let’s lighten it up. Tell me more about your self-education in Thelma, baby.”

  I drew a long breath before resuming our talk, which turned out to be our last one, and then I said evenly as I could with his fire-cat eyes burning holes through my bare back, “In Thelma I went every evening to the public library which was endowed by a wealthy old widow and contained all the classics translated from the Greeks to the young poet Rimaud whom I resemble.”

  “How do I know what he looked like, you or not?”

  “Because,” and I snatched out a page removed from a Thelma, Alabama, library book which was the famous portrait of Rimbaud when he’d first come to Paris and was seated among the Paris literati of that day in the picture Au Coin de la Table.

  “Is this you, baby?”

  “See, it almost could be, but it’s the poet Rimbaud and I tore it out of a Thelma, Alabama, library book about him. I had to do it secretly so I went into the stacks which I had permission to enter and I coughed very loud to cover up the sound of tearing it out.”

  “So you were a little library queen in Thelma who ripped off pictures from books and that makes you educated enough to be a New Yawk writer, is that the pitch?”

  “That is the truth, not a pitch. Oh, I never got into trigonometry or Plato’s discourses in Greek, but as a writer, I am not handicapped by illiteracy as you think.”

  His large hot hand caught roughly hold of my shoulder and he jerked me off BON AMI onto the bed.

  “You are turning me off with this literary shit.”

  He leaned very tall from the bed to blow out the kerosene lamp by which I wrote on BON AMI and by which I’m still writing on it.

  “I wish you’d pursue your literary career when I’m pursuing mine on ice which is not literary.”

  In this I return to the confession t
hat few of my adventures or experiences in Thelma were of a precociously erotic kind.

  I did, indeed, go every evening to the Thelma public library and by the age of ten I had read all of Shakespeare, for instance, in preference to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzans and the Fu Manchu books.

  “Good evening, little prodigy,” was the greeting which I received from the lady librarian, sarcastic, I suppose.

  It may be pertinent to my character that I preferred Titus Andronicus to Hamlet, and almost to Othello and Macbeth.

  Reading it, I had to laugh at the outrageous excess of the Queen of the Goths being served up a meat pie at a banquet, and the meat being the flesh of her two sons who had ravished Lavinia.

  (I suppose that writers are predisposed to laugh at all excesses but their own.)

  Then there were the retired minister and his wife, the Reverend and Mrs. Lakeland, who were trying to survive on a sub-subsistence level and yet who sat on their gray porch as tranquilly as if their lives contained no trials at all. And yet they sat there with their chair-arms touching, he in his rusty-looking clerical suit with freshly starched round collar and she in a clean white dress with yellow polka dots on it as faint as the dabs of color on Moise’s final (?) canvas. And it was rumored, too, that she was wasting away from an internal illness of a painful nature but would take no morphine for it because morphine cost more than they could afford and they were too proud or something to accept it without charge.

  “Good evening, Reverend Lakeland, how are you, Mrs. Lakeland?”

  “Fine, thank you, were just fine. And how are you all doing?”

  I would hear this periodically all late summer afternoons in Thelma since they lived in the house next door.

  Their voices were lifted with a valiant effort.

  Still they declined to accept, or rather to keep, the baskets of provisions that were sometimes placed anonymously at their door. The Reverend Lakeland would pass these charities along to a cotton-topped black man, even older than the Reverend, who would drop by now and then.