The “top of the world” was where I went when I had ceased to function on the road. After fleeing Chicago in early 1957, I had lived in many cities, and in the late fall of that year had ended in jail in Miami where I was brought before the splenetic judge and told I was a “fatuous lunatic.” Those words stinging me into numbness, I decided it was time to head north. Because my mother had for years been remarried to a man I scarcely knew, I had qualms about doing so. I was aware that her husband owned a business that would put food in my stomach, and that as a wedding present he had bought her an old limestone farmhouse at Pamelia Four Corners (an irritant in the highway some ten miles north of the city) where I could—if I were taken in, and utterly divorced from the comings and goings, the struggles, the victories, the defeats of other men—ask myself where things had gone wrong; but this awareness did not mitigate my fears of being turned away. That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge’s gratuitous “fatuous” carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; and I had visions of arriving at my mother’s door, garbed not in the “attractive,” melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid. That I feared my mother would turn even the latter away indicates the extent paranoia had already dented my psyche. Offering the excuse that she wasn’t good at “things like that,” my mother never learned to drive a car. It was not that simple. The melody of her life was as unvarying in its scale as a moon-June rhyme put to music: she believed in wholesome food, clean clothes, and warm beds for her family, and she viewed things like driving automobiles as extraneous, perhaps decadent, as if the artless melody would be burdened down with precious and contrapuntal themes. Such a blunt engagement with life never failed to astonish and charm her family, though there were times when we grew impatient with it: we yearned for her sophistication and longed to make of her a swan-necked lady with lorgnette. Deferring to such yearnings, she once in fact took a driving lesson.
With my father play-acting the amused and tolerant tutor in a world of buffoons and in a jolly, whimsical style preceding her into the front seat of our Model A Ford roadster, she got behind the wheel, on his direction shifted into first gear, accelerated the gas pedal, released the clutch, and froze. Before doing so, and for reasons unfathomable, she had “strangled” the wheel violently to the left, and the Ford went round and round the churchyard in increasingly large circles. Losing his suave tutorial cool and going ramrod straight, my father bellowed at her to relax. Doing so tentatively, my mother’s partially lax hands on the wheel caused the weird and ever-enlarging circles. At the same time, the released energy dispersed to her foot and weighted the accelerator, so that with each new and widening circle the car accumulated maddening speeds. At the edge of the yellow field stood my brother and sister and I, not knowing whether to shriek with laughter or terror. There was only one massive, horny-trunked elm in all that great yard; and when it became evident that on the next lap, or certainly the one after, the blameless Ford and the innocent elm would meet, we stood agape and tremulous with anticipation. At the last possible moment, having regained his impressive nonchalance, my father thrust his leg over the shifting gear and trenchantly applied the brake, halting the car only inches from the tree and giving both Mother and himself a thumping forehead crack against the flush and
durable windshield of that marathon automobile. In its frustration the Ford rocked thwartedly back and forth. From underneath its biting tires there arose great clouds of August dust. The car shook itself to a stall, the dust settled, and silence descended. Breathless, my brother, my sister, and I ran to them, where we remained speechless, searching for bruises, for dangling limbs, for those obscene gashes ready to yield up
their torrents of fatal blood. Unable to gauge the condition or temper of the car’s stunned occupants, we were frightened. When finally they disembarked, both were ashen but, exceptfor their already ballooning brows, they appeared to be unhurt. With my brother, who was the eldest, taking the lead, we laughed joyously with relief. Joined quickly in the laughter by my father, who pensively rubbed his brow as he laughed, we watched my mother thunder angrily toward the cottage. She was pained and humiliated at our amused reaction to her already professed insistence that she was not good at “things like that.”
In the long winters my brother and I went on wind-swept Saturdays to the Strand and Olympic and Palace; and for ten cents, and between viewing Jane Withers in Little Miss No body and the Three Stooges in Crisis at the Antarctic and Johnny Mack Brown in Yellow Stallion Canyon (Johnny always spurned the pig-tailed lass in calico and rode off into a black-and-white sunset with a bewhiskered and lovable old ragamuffin named Fuzzy, so that even now it is something of a miracle to me that I didn’t end in some remote YMCA embracing some other, more comely, Fuzzy)—between viewing what we now know to have been these not so virginibus puerisque flickers, we got during the newsreels our first looks at the madmen who govern the great world. We did not laugh at first. Watching the ample-assed and cretinous-looking Hitler review his goose-stepping legions, or the statuesque and farcical posturings of the raving Mussolini, we watched with the morbid fascination of children being exposed for the first time to lunacy. Withering, shrinking down in our seats, and smiling weakly there in the darkness, we felt embarrassment and compassion for what were obviously sick men. Taking our cue from our elders and gurus (Mencken, who hated claptrap because there was so much of it in himself, and others convinced us that these uniformed grotesques were really no more than naughty boys), we did laugh later; we stood and laughed and jeered and clamorously pounded the rickety seats in front of us. Hooting, we had no idea that my brother, who jeered as loudly as anyone, would in no time at all be in a rather ludicrous uniform of his own, with a few million other Americans called upon to pay the heavy toll for having failed to recognize insanity for the pernicious evil it is.
Other wars were imminent. My father had begun to cough. Standing over the toilet bowl, he woke us to that cough. His hack was like some alarm clock with faulty gears. He hacked and hacked and hacked. Shivering, we lay in a state of acute wonder, listening, anticipating that his chest would explode. He would raspingly clear his throat and emit the ponderous glob of cohesive sputum. The hacking would begin again, again the cleared throat, again the spitting. Into that sputum one awful day would come the minute crimson clot heralding the start of a war—unlike that which my brother and other men would fight simultaneously—that could not be won.
My mother’s war was perhaps the most sapping of all. Not only had she to follow my father from hospital to hospital; she had to keep the family together. When, hope exhausted, she finally brought my father home from Ray Brook at Saranac Lake to die, he was placed in the Jefferson County Sanatorium, a lovely hospital with sweeping, tree-shaded lawns at the top of Coffeen Street hill in Watertown. Unable to comfort my mother, my brother, at seventeen, was off at the ends of the earth fighting the “naughty boys”; at an age too “tender” to witness the horror of lingering death, my sister and I were packed off to a sympathetic and generous aunt in Westchester; and because she had not the means to view such a costly death in philosophical leisure, my mother took a job in the cafeteria of the telephone company. She made bean soup and tuna-fish sandwiches for the clerks and operators of that lunatic corporation, and each afternoon, after washing the dishes and diligently preparing the next day’s menu, she got on a bicycle (never having mastered driving), rode it to the city’s outskirts, disembarked, and began the long walk up Coffeen Street hill to hold my father’s hand.
On first hearing of that bicycle in one of my mother’s let ters, I was dumb with amazement. Then I began to laugh. Almost as quickly I was embarrassed, overwhelmed with the crushingly self-centered embarrassment of adolescence. My mother was a heavy woman, and the thought of her pedaling about town nettled me immeasurably. Trying to envision it, I hoped that, like a wealthy matron out exercising, she would affect a beau monde
haughtiness. But I knew she wouldn’t. Guileless, she would simply pump. Awful possibilities suggested themselves. I especially imagined my high school friends (from whom I was now separated) spotting her and saying, “Jesus, ain’t that old lady Exley?” Perhaps they would even jeer her. “Hey, Ma! Hey, get a horse! Hey, would cha?” 0 lord! And though I never saw her ride that bicycle, my vision of her doing so stayed, and will stay, with me all my days. So much did the image of her pedaling haunt me at one period of my life that I became obsessed with the question of how, on reaching the bottom of Coffeen Street hill, she had managed to get both herself and bicycle up to the hospital. The question was with me always; on a hundred different occasions I meant to ask it, but I could never find the casual tone with which to speak the words. I couldn’t because her probable answer had somehow taken on a dreadful significance for me. As though I were the Sphinx and she Oedipus, I came to fear that on hearing her answer I would, in mortification, cast myself off the rock and perish. It was only some weeks after returning home that I finally did ask her. Lying eyes ceiling-ward on the davenport, I tried to bring lightness into my voice. My mother did not understand the question. “I mean,” 1 said, “when Dad was dying up at the San, how did you get the bicycle up the hill? Ride it up? Walk it up? Leave it at the bottom of the hill, or what?” “I walked it up,” my mother said dispassionately, the question having no relevance for her.
On first arriving from Florida, I brought my mother’s face close to mine, slid into a pair of well-worn loafers, some faded dungarees, and a royal-blue, zippered sweatshirt; piled the marble-topped coffee table adjacent to the davenport high with long-neglected volumes; walked into the kitchen and from the pantry closet removed a package of Oreo Creme Sandwiches; returned to the living room and flicked on the television, which after a momentary lull began its incessant and hypnotic drone; invited Christie III, my mother’s saucer-eyed, russet-and-white cocker spaniel to share the davenport at my feet; and then lay down until the spring of 1958.
In a land where movement is virtue, where the echo of heels clacking rapidly on pavement is inordinately blest, it is a grand, defiant, and edifying gesture to lie down for six months. Lying with my legs wide apart, I saw what I saw of the world—a sad-eyed, bewildered canine—through the weary V of my feet. With my neck comfortably braced up by luxurious, pliant cushions, I lay with my left hand on my crotch, my fingertips conscious of the inert penis through the coarse denim of the dungarees. A supernumerary check of the member’s reality, there was nothing erotic in the gesture. It was a palliative. In it there was something of the parvenu scanning and rescanning his accounts, as though those soothing figures had no reality beyond his sight. Awakening to my body for the first time, I heard the rhythmical, occasionally syncopated, and always audible contortions of my heart, now and then hearing from beneath the monstrously hot layers of flesh the plangent and ominous rumblings of unimaginable visceral parts. I made sublime discoveries. I learned, for example, to distinguish between the odor of a sweat produced in a passion of labor or love and that of the effluvium from the stationary body, the latter having a foul, self-conscious stench. After a time I became acclimated to the stench, to the hotness of my flesh, to its alien rumblings; and by then I had drifted into a subliminal world and was insensible to touch or odor or taste or sound or sight, so that the immediate world—this penis, this hum from the television, this sentence on the white page, this scratching of the dog, this taste of chocolate—all existed in a dawnlike realm where I seemed to be aware of absolutely nothing.
Seemed to be is the secret; for there are only two kinds of time (time-future being the province of melancholy seers, joc ular quacks, and somber religionists promising kingdoms they haven’t the conge to promise): there is time being lived, and that same time as it is relived in the mind five minutes, five years, five centuries later; and because these times are never analogous, the historian (browsing amidst his ponderous tomes and dusty parchments and, by comparison with the shabby rest of us, imagining himself a creature of consequentially high purpose) lives the biggest lie of all. Though I believed that during those months I had reached a plateau whereon I was insensible to everything and at twilight could never remember anything that had occurred that same day, by the time in early spring when I began to hear from my mother’s bedroom, above the unsettling whispers, the words sick and psychiatrist and hospital and knew that my days at the farm were over, I had made every significant self-discovery I would ever make; so that if the coming years of hospitalization were necessary to me—and they were—they were necessary only in that one man might make his peace with a new and different man. All this I see in time-relived; I then believed that nothing whatever was at work, that I was drifting quite aimlessly on a davenport, when in fact that davenport was taking me on an unwavering, rousing, and often melancholy journey.
During those months I discovered that just as my mother hadn’t been able to come to an easy intimacy with our Model A Ford roadster, neither did my heart know repose con fronted with the new dynamics. Continuously emanating from the television, in both flickering image and somber rhetoric, were invitations to the languid viewer to join some bright-eyed, clean-jawed men in galactic journeys. I especially re member the recurring image seen from the ass end of a space ship as it exploded as stealthily as smoke through the firmament; stars as big as Bijou popcorn glimmered brilliantly and moved ferociously by as the earth receded and receded until, in a matter of moments, it was a dark, pitted lump in aeons of frigid space. My mind wasn’t up to it. With the American Indian I suffered the belief that Sweet Earth was born when my eyes first feasted upon it; and as I watched this same earth recede into indefiniteness, my being seemed to extinguish in staccato pops as trees blurred into plains, plains into mountains. In childhood I had never been up to those travelogues opening with the habitual stock shot (invariably disfigured by the akimbo prop of the airplane’s wing splitting the screen) of the teeming Technicolored jungles of Borneo or Brazil; as the plane ascended, took on speed, and traversed entire green subcontinents at finger snaps, my mind went blank; and by the time the reassuring tones of Mr. Fitzpatrick had brought me back to earth and were showing me the sacred horned oxen of the River Ganges, I was lost and sat, a sweaty and forlorn child, in the foul-stockinged odor of the dark and cavernous theater. Whenever on the davenport I tried to discover an adventure commensurate with my timid soul and contractile mentality, I was forced into dim history. The most I was capable of was seeing myself as a velveteen-knickered first mate to Bartholomeu Dias as, astrolabe in hand, we floated in the equatorial waters off the Dark Continent, waiting for a breeze that would carry us to the tip of Africa in search of the fabled Indies. Such pioneerings into the unhurried past, though, were as close as I could come to envisioning myself a grim-jawed astronaut seeking commerce with pink, antennaed men whose overdeveloped skulls held the forbidding secrets of the universe.
It wasn’t possible for me to adopt the wherewithal by which my mother lived in consort with the modern horror. Each morning on my stepfather’s departure for work, she made and received her daily telephone calls; and though at the time I believed I heard not a word of these conversations, I heard every word. Certain businesses in Watertown were now giving Plaid instead of S & H Green Stamps. From an inspection of the Plaid Stamp catalogue, it was believed that the Plaid People offered a greater variety of goods than the Green People, though someone “in the know” claimed that the Green People offered a higher-quality merchandise. The pros and cons of the two stamps were ardently debated; and, like all scrupulous magistrates, the women ominously reserved judgment. A new shopping piazza containing an A & P supermarket, a beauty salon, a Fanny Farmer candy shop, a tonsorial expert, a liquor store, a Marine Midland bank branch, an apothecary, a Grant’s department store, a Dairy Treat luncheonette, a Christian Science reading room, a tailor-dressmaker, a Family Bargain center, and possibly a Chinese restaurant, was scheduled for opening somewhere on the outskirts of the city. T
he women decided unequivocally and (since it never opened) with unerring correctness that Watertown wasn’t ready for more Oriental cui sine, Willie Gee’s familiar place downtown lending our fair northern city whatever cosmopolitan touch it needed.