All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  “Why do you keep wanting her?” I asked.

  He smiled coyly. “Some of us have to court the destructive element,” he said. “Otherwise you bloody writers wouldn’t know anything about it. Besides, she’s nice to fuck.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “You love her.”

  “It’s a good thing she thought to zip my cock,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have drowned her. I’m afraid you’ll never learn.”

  He started wading out to the bus. The sky had become absolutely cloudless and blue, and West Texas stretched away, a hundred miles to the Pecos, four hundred to the Pass of the North.

  “You don’t have any money,” I said. “I could lend you a buck or two.”

  “Thanks awfully,” he said. “I won’t need it.” He waved, squinting a little in the sun. The water was only a little above his waist. The Mexicans let him on top of the bus and in no time at all he had made friends with them. I got in the car, and as I was about to drive on I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that Godwin was talking merrily to the young woman. She was sitting next to him. I tooted my horn in farewell and drove down into the next dip. Sally was combing her wet hair, and the inside of the car smelled of wet clothes.

  That night we parked beside Highway 90, near the town of Valentine. We had all our blankets with us, so we didn’t get cold. At three I woke up and drove on, with Sally asleep in the back seat. There was a very white moon, high over the Davis Mountains. When I went through the town of Van Horn I thought of my Uncle Laredo, who lived on a ranch forty-seven miles off the paved road. I ought to have visited him, but I didn’t feel up to driving forty-seven miles on a dirt road. I would visit him if I ever came back.

  At dawn we went through El Paso. It was strange, leaving Texas. I had had no plans to leave it, and didn’t know how I felt. I drove on into New Mexico, Sally still asleep. Then I really felt Texas. It was all behind me, north to south, not lying there exactly, but more like looming there over the car, not a state or a stretch of land but some giant, some genie, some god, towering over the road. I really felt it. Its vengeance might fall on me from behind. I had left without asking permission, or earning my freedom. Texas let me go, ominously quiet. It hadn’t gone away. It was there behind me.

  From Highway 80 I could look south and see the Rio Grande, cutting through the desert toward El Paso, the Big Bend, the Valley, and the Gulf. I rolled the car window down—the air was cool and the desert had a fresh, pleasant smell. The sage was still dewy. Sally woke about that time, lovely as ever. She sat up, the blankets around her, yawning. She smelled like a girl and looked like she had looked the morning I had fallen in love with her—young, open, soft. She looked that way every morning. One thing I had been right about was that it would always be pleasant to wake up beside her. For Sally sleep canceled everything. Her face held no memory, her body had no past.

  “What’s the next town?” she asked.

  “Las Cruces. Hungry?”

  “Boy,” she said, yawning again.

  7

  UNTIL WE MOVED to California, I hadn’t met many writers. Emma and Flap and various other people I knew played around with writing, but it was pretty doubtful that they were real writers. I knew a couple of journalists who planned to knock off and write novels some day, but I couldn’t count them as real writers either. Aside from professors, the only person I knew who had actually published anything was an old man named Sickles who had written a booklet on driver training. One of the reasons I couldn’t tell whether I was a real writer or not was because I had no one authentic to compare myself to.

  California changed all that. I met young writers everywhere. They lined the streets. There was one in every bookshop. I would hear them talking about poetry in Chinese grocery stores. Fifty lived in the basement of the City Lights Bookshop. For a week or two it was very exciting, meeting writers. Just meeting them made me feel like I was one, after all. But pretty soon I began to feel depressed about it all. I didn’t feel much kinship with any of the writers I met, but that wasn’t what depressed me. What depressed me was that there were so many of them. None of them became my friends, or stayed in my life more than a day or two, but once I became aware of how many writers there were I could never stop being aware of it. I would go down in the basement of the City Lights Bookshop and look at the scores of little magazines they had there and it always depressed me terribly. Even if I was a real writer, what was the point? There were hundreds of others, maybe thousands. We couldn’t all be good enough to count. Most of us were undoubtedly mediocre—in thinking we were better we were just deceiving ourselves. I had a feeling I was deceiving myself. I kept writing pages and looking at them later and it seemed to me I was going to have to get ten times as good as I was. I didn’t know if I could get even twice as good. I wished I had stayed in Texas, so I could have postponed realizing how likely it was that I was only mediocre.

  Also, I was terribly homesick. It was supposed to be summer, but San Francisco was cold and foggy. When we got there we were both anxious to get settled, and since we didn’t know the city at all, we figured one place was probably about as good as another. All I knew was that I wanted to be somewhere near North Beach, where the Beat Generation lived. Of course most of them had stopped living there years before, but in my mind that was where they lived when they were not in Denver, or on the road, and when I walked the streets I always half expected to come around a corner and see Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. It never happened, but as long as I lived in San Francisco I continued to expect it.

  In order to make it more likely, we took a little two-room apartment on Jones Street, overlooking Alcatraz. It didn’t have much heat, and I was always cold. Finally I went down to an army surplus store and bought a huge green parka, meant for use above the Arctic Circle. I took up residence in my parka and seldom left it. Sally was never cold, that I could tell, and it soon turned out that the apartment was really hers, so it was fortunate that I had my parka to live in. We went down to the St. Vincent de Paul store on Mission Street and bought a mattress and an old table and four chairs, all for about twelve dollars. We didn’t really need to live quite so starkly, because the second week we were there I got three thousand dollars as an advance on my novel, but we were in the process of adjusting to California and didn’t have time to adjust to money too. My brown typing table was only one of the many things I missed about Houston. In the cold, gloomy late afternoons I invariably grew depressed and sat at the window for hours. I huddled in my parka, watched the gray fog envelop Alcatraz and thought wistfully of how hot and muggy it must be in Houston. The things I missed most about Texas were the Hortons’ kitchen, my typing table, and the sun.

  Sally was much happier than I was. She bought a black sweater and wore it everywhere. Her hair got longer and she learned to tie it in a knot. She made friends with a young couple who lived on the ground floor of our building. We lived on the third floor. They had lots of room and we had lots of view. They were the Beaches, Willis and Andrea. Andrea was a skinny girl from Michigan; for some reason she distrusted me to such an extent that I never really got to make friends with them. Willis was blind but very well adjusted. Andrea worked for IBM and made lots of money and Willis stayed home and listened to classical music. He had an FM radio and sixteen hundred classical record albums. In the afternoons he practiced the cello. He was very good at it and Andrea was very good at whatever she did for IBM. Willis was very fat, probably because he sat around all day and ate cheese and drank wine while he listened to his records, but he was nice enough and he didn’t seem to mind being blind. The Beaches’ mutual competence turned me off a little. I would have thought it would turn Sally off, but it didn’t. She became their friend. She went down to visit Willis from time to time and on weekends took long walks with Andrea.

  My friend in the building was a writer named Wu. Wu was from mainland China and was writing a novel about conditions there. He was standing in the doorway of his apartment when I carried my typ
ewriter into ours, and the first words he said to me were “I’m glad you are an author, too.” He always referred to us as authors. He was very dignified in manner, but the effect was spoiled by the horrible gray clothes he always wore. They made him look like a Korean refugee, whereas in reality he was a refugee from somewhere deep in China. He talked about China constantly—like Texas, it was apparently a hard place to leave behind. Sally thought Wu was about on par with Petey Ximenes. She begrudged him air space in our apartment. Wu was prone to long Oriental silences when she was around, and Sally matched him with long Sallyesque silences. Anything I said at such times sounded silly, but I talked anyway.

  Wu let me read his novel, which at the time of my arrival had reached a length of eighteen hundred pages. Wu was almost fifty years old and had been working on the novel for the entire nineteen years he had been in America. He was a great believer in revision and revised each section of the novel six or eight times before he went on to the next one. The novel was a kind of literary Great Wall. It filled all the shelves of Wu’s pantry. Its bulk really awed me—my first novel was only three hundred and eighteen pages in manuscript. Wu’s was nearly six times as long and it wasn’t even finished. Every time I went to visit him I carried home a hundred pages or so to read. It was called “The Hotbed of Life.” In many respects it reminded me of Henry’s screenplays, though I don’t believe the Seventh Cavalry ever appeared in it. It was full of the wildest improbabilities, some of which were never explained. In one sentence the story might leap thirty years ahead, and then in the next leap sideways two thousand miles across China. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I loved to read it. It was obvious to me that it could never be published in America, and probably not in China either. Wu was tranquil about it. It was his life work. He was studying English literature at San Francisco State College and he spent a lot of time reading the metaphysical poets.

  Also, he liked to play ping-pong. I liked to too. In no time at all it became one of the props of my life in California. We played at a Chinese ping-pong club on Grant Street. There were twenty tables in one room, all constantly being used by intent Chinese ping-pong players. All the members seemed to play with maniacal frenzy and earnestness. It was like being in a room where twenty small-scale wars were going on. I expected a lot of courtliness and bowing, but instead there were screams of vexation and what I guess were Chinese curses. The racket of twenty balls constantly hitting tables and paddles would have driven any non-devotee mad, but oddly the ping-pong club was one of the few places in San Francisco where I felt at peace. For me it was the California equivalent of Emma’s kitchen—not as nice as Emma’s kitchen but the best I could do. I could even muse sometimes while playing ping-pong.

  For a fifty-year-old man, Wu was a whiz of a ping-pong player. Sometimes I won, but usually I didn’t. Wu was all defense. He never hit a slam in all our games together. He just hit my slams back. I hit better slams at ping-pong than I did at badminton, but nine times out of ten Wu hit them back and sooner or later I’d miss. I didn’t care. I liked hearing all the balls. I liked being among the darting Chinese. It freed my spirit for an hour or two, and my spirit needed all the relief it could get. I bought a very good nine-ply paddle, and Wu and I played every day. After drinking iced tea all my life I found I liked hot tea, so when we came home from our daily ping-pong game, if Sally wasn’t there, I made some hot tea and Wu would peer into my paperbacks as if they contained the secret of America. He was poor and owned only anthologies himself. I don’t know why he chose English literature to study. He talked mostly about the wars he had seen and the frustrations of his life. He had had much difficulty at borders.

  “War is not so bad,” he said pleasantly, sipping tea. “If war is over here, I go over there. If war is over there, I go over here. Always can move faster than war unless there is a border. But getting across border is where the trouble starts.”

  Wu was very eager to read anything I wrote, and because I was eager to have him as a friend, I usually let him. The problem was that I wasn’t writing much. The move had disoriented me as a writer. I no longer had my writing table to sit at and a tree full of squirrels to watch. In San Francisco I didn’t even like to get up early. Looking out at the cold fog only depressed me and made me want to go back to bed. Often I did go back to bed. In Texas I had been a student. I had classes to go to at nine thirty. If I wanted to write I had to get up and hit it before the day got out of hand.

  Some days I was sorry my novel had been accepted. If it hadn’t been I could have given up on writing and gone out and gotten a job. I was an experienced termite exterminator and could probably have gotten a job. If not, I could have gone back to school. Some days I had a great yen to read literary history, and reading literary history almost always made me yearn to be a scholar. Whatever candle of talent I had had seemed about to flicker out, and it seemed to me it would be much cozier, much more comfortable, just to be a scholar. I could sit among my books and read to my heart’s content, and be a scholar, like George Saintsbury, or C. S. Lewis. I sipped hot tea and encouraged the fantasy of myself among my books, but the only books I had were paperbacks and even as I was encouraging the fantasy I knew what was wrong with it. I loved to read and probably would love to sit among books, but I hated to write about what I read. I hated writing themes and term papers and would probably hate writing scholarship just as much. Besides, George Saintsbury and C. S. Lewis were so good at it that there was no need for me. I wouldn’t count as a scholar, any more than I counted as a novelist. I was just an apprentice, and might not ever get to be a journeyman, much less a master.

  For the first few weeks I was no match for the cold gray weight of San Francisco. On the few days when the sun shone I could see how the city might be beautiful, as beautiful as everyone else seemed to think it was, but despite those days and despite what everyone else thought, I couldn’t really feel it as beautiful. It made me too chilly, and let me sit home too much.

  Also, since I wasn’t in school, I had no real way to make friends. I was too pinched by the newness of things just to go out on the street and seize people and make them my friends. I got by on ping-pong and my parka and Wu and Market Street. On Market Street there were numerous three-feature movie houses. They were full of winos and thugs and snoring bums and they stank horribly and were overcrowded and overheated and usually showed terrible movies, but I didn’t care. They were there, and when I gave up on my novel for the day I could drift down to Market Street and pick out a couple of movies and forget things for a while. I can watch any movie, and I averaged one or two a day all the time I was in San Francisco. The hot, smelly movie houses were my Houston surrogate. I never went to the art films that were always being shown—I only went to the third-rate movies on Market Street. I didn’t want to see films that reminded me about life—I wanted to see films that bore little relation to it: Italian spectacles, horror movies, comedies, anything unreal. I was escaping from reality for a couple of hours, and wanted the escape to be as pure and complete as possible. I could always have reality—it was all around me. It was much like fog. I wanted to see Steve Reeves, in bright Technicolor, wrestling elephants with his bare hands. In one movie I saw, Steve Reeves apparently killed an elephant by twisting its foreleg. He lifted the leg and twisted it, he grunted a few times, the elephant fell dead; a beautiful Roman matron, her bosom shaking, ran out of a villa and gave Steve Reeves a hug. That was the kind of thing I wanted to see.

  Wu was not a very good novelist, but he was a smart man. He knew that I was homesick and depressed and he tried, in his way, to help me. Sometimes, in the manner of Confucius, he gave me advice, but more often his approach was gently Socratic. I puzzled him even more than I puzzled myself, and he loved to try to figure me out.

  “You do not leave Texas for any reason,” he said one day. “So. If a man leaves a place for no reason, he is not needing any reasons to go back. Is this not true?”

  “I guess,” I said. We were sitting in his place,
sipping Turkish coffee, which he loved. He had a parrot named Andrew, after Andrew Marvell, his favorite poet.

  “Then you are going back?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to stay here until I finish my novel.”

  “This is a matter of pride,” Wu said. “You are ashamed to go back to your friends. If you go back, then they are thinking you a coward. Is this true?”

  I had stopped trying to understand my own motives, and couldn’t really say if it was true or not. Wu always nodded when I spoke, no matter what I said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “You are knowing To His Coy Mistress’?” Wu asked. “Very great poem? Is this true?”

  We discussed “To His Coy Mistress” about every third day, so I merely nodded. It was Wu’s favorite poem. He could not get enough of talking about it. His asking if I had read it was merely a rhetorical opener.

  “Is not world enough and time,” Wu said patiently. “This is very clear. Nice times are so good to have. If there is no reason, you should be going to Texas and having nice times.”

  I agreed, but secretly. I wasn’t about to be coward enough to leave Texas and then go running right back. I was giving Wu a runaround. I hated Turkish coffee and much preferred drinking tea in our apartment, but it happened that Sally was there, and anyhow Wu’s sense of hospitality demanded that he serve me Turkish coffee once or twice a week. My runaround didn’t fool him and he looked a little sad when I stood up to go home. He really liked me and was always hoping he could persuade me to profit from his experience.

  “I was leaving China for many years,” he said. “Very hard country to leave. Then I was wanting to go back. But America is interesting country too. I have not been going to Texas so far. I would be going with you, if you are ever needing me to.

  “Of course Sally would not be needing me to,” he added, remembering her. It was undeniable. She would not be needing him to. His English was a little strange, but his points were not hard to get.