The Ancient Minstrel

  He had been distressed a long time by this nominal experience which wasn’t nominal to him. It was more like a resounding crack of doom. So much of his life since youth had been consumed thinking about women.

  One late afternoon when he and his neighbor John had sipped two bottles of good wine rather than one he had impulsively confessed that sex had “fled” his life.

  “Sic semper tyrannis,” the man said.

  “I forgot what that means.”

  “It means your tyrant is dead. Sex is the most powerful bully in our lives. Last year I saw an extraordinary number of young women going in and coming out of your place. They rarely lasted more than an hour. It all was an amusing diversion while I was cooking dinner. I certainly questioned your timing.”

  “I had to get at those before I got drunk which would render me unworkable. The minute they left I was free to have a big drink of whiskey or whatever.”

  “I assumed you were feeding them also.”

  “Not so, except some good cheese and Spanish olives I get Fed Exed from New York. It’s my only food habit.”

  “You might not have figured out that I’m gay though I have a daughter from an early unfortunate marriage I made to please my parents. They had figured out that I was gay so I married to show them otherwise. You met my daughter two years ago.”

  “Yes, a lovely woman.”

  “It was mannerly of you not to make a run at her.”

  “When you had gone inside and I said something flirtatious to her she said she preferred boys from the car wash to academic men.”

  He had made a great deal when his novellas sold to Warner Bros. He wanted to quit teaching but his wife wanted him to hold on. She had her own money but was a maniac on the subject of saving for retirement. He had noted that she got this from her father who had saved a fair amount but then promptly died within a year of retiring. Her mother also had her own money but with the death of her husband she speedily went off to live in a nunnery for older women in Kentucky, an escape she had long planned. Since retirement was at least twenty years away he could not quite imagine that condition.

  A dour confusion took hold of him. It slowly became apparent that it was caused by the quadri-schizoid nature of writing his own poems and novels, teaching, and now writing screenplays for what to him was lots of money. Starting out he received, he learned, the minimum fee of $50,000, which exceeded his academic salary for the entire year. Early the next year his agent got him $150,000 for a screenplay that was needed right away. He wrote it in three weeks. They said they “loved” it but never made the movie. Contrary to what he expected success had made him angry and unhappy. The reasons were elusive except that he had been thoroughly out of balance. He loaned a lot of money to friends and never got paid back except a thousand dollars apiece from two Native American couples who lived near his cabin and needed to pay off trapping fines. Both couples visited in the following years with their debt contained in a cigar box and counted it out slowly. He didn’t learn anything from being stiffed but kept stupidly waiting for people to repay. It occurred to him that times had changed. His father had taught him that a personal loan was like a gambling debt, a first priority.

  The first signs of his wife wanting them to separate into different residences were at a time when he was drinking a great deal. Her point was well taken. He was no longer the man she had married who was calm, intelligent, mannerly, and slender. She used to love his body but his total weight gain since their marriage was seventy pounds. In his periods of walking mania he’d sometimes drop twenty-five pounds, and one year by dint of pure will he knocked off forty but wrote poorly. His very best work had come during a period when he was utterly indulgent at the table. How could he write well if he was thinking about food all the time? It didn’t work to try to write about sex, doom, death, time, and the cosmos when you were thinking about a massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Of course all the extra weight had a bad effect on their sex life. He was too heavy for the orthodox missionary position plus his breath was bad from his gorging. She could only make love to him with her back turned. Also he was chronically fatigued. There was little left of him after a full day of writing. All that he wanted at the completion of the workday was a big drink, at least a triple. The tavern named a drink after him which was a quintuple tequila with a dash of Rose’s lime juice. He quit drinking it when the price of his favorite tequila, Herradura, skyrocketed due to an agave disease in Mexico and the fact that fine tequila had become fashionable in Japan. He could afford it but resented it like the poor boy he once was. He had become a free spender with his habitual table always full with friends and acquaintances, some of the latter hanging in there for free drinks.

  In a peacemaking ceremony with his wife he agreed to have no more hard liquor in the home, just wine. He played it honest for about a month, then began to feel like a deprived artist. When he shopped for wine at the liquor store he would buy a half dozen shooters. He continued buying and hiding them, mostly in his studio, until he had fifty. Such were his alcohol needs that he made a clumsy map of the hiding places knowing his own forgetfulness. Now that he had devised this stupid rule to please his wife he could sneak a shooter with the glass of red wine he had late in the afternoon. To his credit he never drank while writing except for a sip as he drew his work to a close for the day. He and a friend had a game while they were reading Faulkner, finding passages where it was easy to see that the great man was deep in the bag. Faulkner would fall off his horse and then get drunk to alleviate the pain. Anything could make him go on a comatose bender, even getting the Nobel Prize. A horrid photo of his face after shock treatment was fortunately blocked from publication, though it later surfaced. Seeing it actually made the award-winning poet think about quitting drinking, a very rare and insincere impulse. His own father drank sparingly, not much beyond a cold beer when he was grilling on a hot summer day. He explained that when you had five children and a small salary it was one of the things you cut out. He himself tended to overdrink both when he was broke and when he had extra money. One excuse was that drinking too much guaranteed marital fidelity. He had never told his wife this because he didn’t want to be closely observed during sober periods, but it is a well-known fact among drinkers that too much and you won’t get the necessary hard-on. He never met anyone accessible anyway except the tavern tarts. He had tried one the year before but she puked within a minute of entering the motel and the smell made his tender organ instantly wilt. She rinsed her face and then finally said, “What’s wrong with you?” He was too well mannered to say that the smell of vomit turned him off.

  Students were strictly off-limits these days, in no small part due to feminism, but in the old days when he was teaching everything was possible and ignored by all. He clearly recalled some domestic horror caused by professors and their student lovers. Once he had taken a lovely girl on a ride to a big woodlot outside of town not knowing that his wife was following with his pistol at a distance in her car. She had become suspicious when she found a note in his jacket that said, “I just love it when you go down on me.”

  His wife crept cautiously down the log trail and through the woods. She knew the area well from bird-watching. She had seen many spring warblers in the carapace of hardwood trees, also morel mushrooms to pick whose season was the same time as the warblers arrived from the south.

  She was now close enough to hear the sound of their coupling and the habitual overloud shout of her husband’s orgasm. She pulled the .38-caliber pistol from her shoulder holster and fired the pistol near the open window of their car. It was immensely loud.

  “I’m shot. I’m dead,” he yelled, dramatically.

  The girl bailed out the far side of the car and sprinted down the log road deeper into the woods. She was nude from the waist down which would be a problem with mosquitoes. She ran amazingly fast and another shot was fired in the air to encourage her and perhaps discourage fucki
ng another married man. His wife leveled the pistol at him who had recovered enough to swig from a pint of Canadian whiskey.

  “I can legally shoot you,” she said.

  “Tell someone who gives a shit,” he replied jauntily with whiskey courage.

  She tilted the gun and shot out the far window. He cringed and yelled “No” beginning to sob. She looked down at his guilty peter thinking of shooting him there but it had retreated like a turtle’s head. She threw the pistol into the woods after he said, “Don’t kill me before I finish the screenplay or you’ll be out a hundred grand,” his whisper choking him.

  She walked back to her car feeling rather light-headed after performing a comic marital scene. “Finishing a screenplay” became a family joke whenever she wanted to torment him or truncate one of his prepared marital speeches.

  Later on when he thought about this event his heart gave an extra thump and he felt lucky that he hadn’t shit his pants. A few days later, after his class on the modern novel, the girl said that her ass was covered with mosquito bites. This turned him on and he wanted to see the bites but she said, “Nothing doing. I better get an A or I’m telling your chairman that you’re a sexual deviant.” She knew her power and didn’t bother writing a term paper. She merely doodled on her finals. He couldn’t blame her, wondering how she had made it home half nude. Later he found the pistol with difficulty in the woods. It was a keepsake to him. It had been his father’s and grandfather’s, an old-fashioned Colt revolver. The story was that his grandfather had shot at a neighbor he suspected of setting fire to his barn. The neighbor moved away with a hole in his leg which ended the argument.

  He grew quite tired of the early beliefs that he felt were forced upon him. His mother had pounded into him certain children’s books of a semireligious nature. One of them maintained that above all he must be “strong, brave, and true.” To his usual questioning his mother was hasty in her explanations. To her all of his questions had become maddening because she frequently could see that he didn’t believe her answers. “How do birds fly?” was a killer that she left to her husband. They went to the town library and checked out many helpful texts. He recalled from walking in the woods that when you picked up a dead bird it was startling how light it was, even a comparatively large crow. Strong, brave, and true wasn’t so hard except for “true” which remained something of a mystery. “Strong” had always been the easiest because at his father’s insistence even as a boy he exercised relentlessly so as not to become “puny,” an ugly word his father used. He also worked and would weed gardens and mow lawns for fifteen cents an hour. He disliked washing cars so he charged a full quarter for that. He became by far the strongest boy in his class at school and well into his forties he could beat the workingmen at arm wrestling contests at the tavern.

  Of course he knew that strength of this sort was quite irrelevant in today’s world. Nothing beyond the ability to depress a computer key was wanted, except if you worked in construction or needed a cement block layer which he had been after he flunked out of graduate school. They lived a threadbare existence because back then out of pride he had refused to let his wife take any money from her well-off parents. It was utterly brutal work, especially in cold weather. You added a little salt to the mortar if it was below freezing though this was illegal or dishonorable as it weakened the bind between blocks. Once he was shivering so hard holding up an eighty-five-pound corner block that he dropped it, crushing several toes. At emergency they had to cut off his heavy Red Wing boot. During his recuperation, brief because they were broke, he made the understandable decision to return to graduate school to get a master’s degree. The department was pleased to accept him back because he had published a first book of poems with W. W. Norton and a novel with Simon and Schuster. Later on he frequently regretted what a heartless prick he had been. Success didn’t help that much because it couldn’t wipe away the years of bad behavior. In one shabby rental house he kept the thermostat at fifty-five degrees because they couldn’t afford much fuel. Why suffer from cold due to pride?

  Their first child Robert died almost immediately from a bad heart. They had two daughters, one ten years after the other, who were the joy in their life. But when they married and left home he was saddened thinking, “What now?” There was always alcohol. What saved his sorry neck was buying a fairly remote cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a place to escape to. Typical of him, he didn’t even go inside the cabin before he bought it. Since he obviously didn’t care for the human race to speak of he kept happy with the profusion of birds and the more than occasional bear that entered the yard to rob the bird feeder. A bear would take a big mouthful of sunflower seeds then become ruminative as he chewed. He got to know one old male so well that when he came home from the tavern late at night quite polluted he’d stop on his two-track driveway, the bear would approach and put his chin on the windowsill, and he’d scratch his ears. This was admittedly stupid and when he learned more about bears from his friend Mike he stopped doing it. He’d leave out any surplus of fish on a stump at least a hundred yards from the cabin. Finally, the old male no longer visited and he deduced that it had died of old age or had been shot by the oversupply of bear hunters who visited the area each fall with their hounds.

  Both of their daughters moved to Montana and after a few years of loneliness and longish late-summer trips he and his wife gave up on the beauties of ever more crowded northern Michigan, sold the farm, and moved to Montana. It was harder for his wife than for him. She made all of the moving arrangements and could only find an unpleasant rental to stay in for the few weeks of searching for a house. She found a big farmhouse on about thirty acres and she made extensive remodeling plans with carpenters and then returned to their little casita near the Mexican border for the fall, winter, and cold rainy early spring.

  Eventually despite his wife’s caution he was sprung forever from teaching by screenwriting which gradually became its own hell because out of pure greed he took on too much work. He couldn’t quite believe he was making so much money but there was absolutely no positive emotional quotient to the money. It largely depressed him. A morning phone call from Hollywood could ruin a day’s work. During these years in Montana he fished constantly, a boyhood obsession, but occasionally missed the morbid routine of teaching. Years before he had been hired at Stony Brook out on Long Island through the graces of an ex-professor who had become powerful. The work was very easy. He taught only one course and also assisted the chairman. He had a corner office into which he moved an easy chair. No straight back chairs were in the office. The easy chair was awkward for the countless professors who came in to complain about the injustices of teaching. The chairman allowed him to decide who taught what and he was widely disliked for his arrogance. He taught one very popular course in twentieth-century poetics, which was the real reason for the easy chair. At the time miniskirts were obligatory and attractive girls from his class would come in and plop in the deep chair. The visuals were wonderful.

  With his students he was sometimes coarse and abusive when they asked him for writing advice. He had been hired to teach recent American literature not creative writing. He had gotten off on the wrong foot with his colleagues over and over by maintaining Gabriel García Márquez was an American writer in the larger sense. Both north and south of the United States were the “Americas” including Canada. Objections surrounded him but he didn’t care because his work was doing very well. It was up to Margaret Atwood if she wanted to be American or Canadian not the English professors of the world.

  He would act in the manner of Leo Tolstoy who, when Rilke told him he must write, said, “Then write for God’s sake.” Even nastier was Faulkner who in answer to the question of what a writer needs said, “Paper and pencil.” In other words, figure it out for yourself, there are no shortcuts. You have to give your entire life to it.

  He looked forward to his seventieth birthday and it finally arrived as it mus
t. On this birthday he planned on becoming a free-floating geezer, above criticism from both others and himself. He drank when he chose and after a couple of notorious sexual failures he was deterred and stopped trying. He finally asked a doctor friend who told him that the nine pills he took daily since his spinal surgery would kill sex for an elephant or a whale. He thought of discarding his pills but then he didn’t want to die quite yet. As a beginning writer he had planned on publishing books until the moment of death, hopefully twenty of them at least, a nineteenth-century program but as a young writer he fashioned himself a nineteenth-century man, vigorous, athletic, hardworking, bold. Unfortunately he was ten books behind schedule. In recent months he had completed both a novel and a book of novellas but now at seventy he was utterly exhausted. Once again he consulted his doctor drinking friend who diagnosed complete exhaustion and that he had blown out his adrenals. Since he didn’t know what adrenals were and wasn’t curious he settled for the fact that they were blown out. He quit work of any sort except for an occasional poem and the journal he kept and took to sleeping a great deal of the day plus the night. The shingles and neuralgia left him without REM sleep at night because his salves and pills didn’t last for long, but in the day he could apply a lot of salve and nap for an hour in comfort. He recovered from the overexertion of writing two books at once but the exhaustion would never completely go away.

  At the bar since his seventieth birthday his friends had taken to calling him “old man.” This amused rather than troubled him. Most were in their fifties. A couple in their twenties were permitted at the hallowed table because he judged them to be good writers. Three of the men at the table were old friends, and artists, who were always more vivid than writers. They also cooked much better than poets and novelists, he had no idea why. He was the putative master of ceremonies of the table and had the errant talent of keeping the conversation going whenever everyone flagged. Occasionally Dolly, a poet, would join them. She was brave enough to withstand the vulgarity of their dialogue and answer them in kind, sometimes going over the edge and embarrassing them. It was comic to him that several of his friends refused to acknowledge the advent of aging. Maybe subconsciously they realized it because they often acted afflicted with a false heartiness, telling stories of totally fictional seductions without realizing that no one believed them. He thought long and hard about male vanity and the need to prolong these manly delusions past the point of any possible credibility, similar to wanting to go to war until you actually got there. He remembered the old quote he had read somewhere, “There is no God but reality. To seek him elsewhere is the action of the fall.” What was the point in pretending you were any age but the one you were?