Tough Guys Don't Dance

  So a few began to call him Warpo. Since he had, however, a tangle of curly blond hair over a face as rubbery as the great comedian (albeit considerably more scarred: after pro football, he played semipro without a helmet) Harpo it remained.

  In any event, he was named for the harpoon, not Harpo Marx. Harpo Veriakis was famous for saying, “That’s a beautiful girl over there. I wish I was man enough to harpoon her.” So, some called him Poon for poon tang, some still called him Harpoon. I mention this as a way of indicating how hard it was to locate his place. On the Cape in winter, nothing ever came right to the point.

  Well, I found his turning, and he was in, which made two surprises, but I still did not believe he had pricked the tattoo into me since I did not even know he practiced such an art, and besides, I could not understand how I would ever have found his place in the dark while drunk, but once I climbed the outside stairs to his loft, my doubts were gone. He looked up from feeding his cats (he lived with five such pets in lieu of one beautiful girl) and the first thing he said was “Is your arm infected?”

  “It’s itching.”

  He didn’t say another word to me while spooning out the rest of the can, although he did speak to a couple of the creatures who were rubbing around his ankles like connubial little fur pieces, but as soon as he was done with that, he washed his hands, removed my bandage, got out a plastic bottle of some disinfectant and laved it over my upper bicep. “It don’t look infected too much,” he said, “and that’s good. I was worried. I don’t like to use the needles when the atmosphere is screwing me up.”

  “Was something wrong?” I asked.

  “You were shit-face.”

  “All right. I drink and get shit-face. What’s new about that?”

  “Mac, you wanted to pick a fight with me.”

  “I must have been crazy.” (He was strong enough to lift a car by its rear end.) “I didn’t really try to pick a fight with you?” I asked.

  “Well, you were showing off.”

  “Did I have a woman with me?”

  “I don’t know. She might have been downstairs in the car. You kept yelling out the window.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You kept yelling out the window, ‘You’re going to lose your bet.’ ”

  “Did you hear anyone answer?”

  One of the virtues of the people I live among is that none of us is ever surprised by a friend’s inability to remember a vivid hour.

  “There was a lot of wind,” said Harpo. “If it was a woman, she was laughing like a banshee.”

  “But you think there was a woman in my car?”

  “I don’t know,” he said sepulchrally. “Sometimes the woods get to laughing at me. I hear lots of sounds.” He put away the bottle of disinfectant and shook his head. “Mac, I begged you not to get a tattoo. Everything was in fearsome shape. Before you walked in, I almost went on the roof. If there had been lightning, I would have had to.”

  Some would argue that Harpo was psychic and some that he was punchy from playing without a helmet, and I always expected that he was both, and each reinforced the other. For that matter, he had been in Vietnam, and his best buddy, so went the story, had blown up on a land mine twenty yards from Harpo. “It deranged me” was what he told a few. Now he lived in the heavens, and the words of angels and demons were major events to him. Several times a year, when the clans that threatened existence massed among the cloud banks like medieval armies, and lightning came with great rain, Harpo would climb up on the ridgepole of his roof and dare the forces above. “If they know I’m standing there, they offer respect. They don’t know whether I can exorcise them. But it makes me cry like a baby. It’s awesome, Mac.”

  “I thought you only went up on the roof when it’s raining.”

  “Never follow a law to its absolute,” he said hoarsely.

  I could rarely be certain what he was talking about. He had a deep and hollow voice with such groundswells of echo (as if his head were still ringing from collisions you could never bear) that he would ask for a cigarette and the request itself would sound gnomic. He could also make the most extraordinary confessions. He was like those athletes who talk about themselves in the third person. (“ ‘Hugo Blacktower is worth one million dollars playing center in the NBA,’ says Hugo Blacktower.”) So Harpo could make the first person nearly equal to the third person. “Your wife is most attractive,” he said at one of our summer parties, “but she makes me afraid. I could never get it up with her. I respect you for being able to.” Extraordinary stuff came out of him like a roll of the dice. Now he said, “The day of the hurricane, I stood on the ridgepole for three hours. That was why the hurricane didn’t come.”

  “You held it off?”

  “I know it’s going to fuck me up. I had to take a vow.”

  “But you held off the hurricane?”

  “To a degree.”

  Anyone else would have thought I was mocking him by my next question. He knew I was not. “Are the Patriots,” I asked, “going to win today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this your professional opinion?”

  He shook his head. “It is my impression. I heard it on the wind.”

  “How often is the wind mistaken?”

  “In ordinary matters, one time in seven.”

  “And extraordinary matters?”

  “One time in a thousand. It fixes on the problem then.” He grasped my wrist. “Why,” Harpo asked, as if we had not already spoken of this, “did you cut down your marijuana just before the storm?”

  “Who told you?”

  “Patty Lareine.”

  “What did you say to her?” I asked. He was like a child. If he was ready to tell, he would tell all.

  “I said she should warn you,” he replied in his gravest voice. “It would have been better to lose your crop than cut it down suddenly.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said you wouldn’t listen. I believed her. That is why I didn’t take offense when you came here two nights ago shit-face. I figured you’d been smoking your own stuff. Your stuff has evil in it.” He said this word as if evil were a high-tension wire fallen to the ground and now writhing in sparks.

  “Did I come here,” I asked, “for a tattoo?”

  “No.” He shook his head vehemently. “People don’t know I am able to do that. I only work for people I honor.” He stared at me somberly. “I honor you,” Harpo now said, “because you are man enough to fuck your wife. Beautiful women make me timid.”

  “You are saying,” I replied, “that I didn’t come here for a tattoo?”

  “No,” he repeated. “I would have shown you the door.”

  “Then what did I want?”

  “You asked for a séance. You said you wanted to find out why your wife was hysterical during the last séance.”

  “And you wouldn’t help me?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “There could not have been a worse night.”

  “So you said no?”

  “I said no. Then you said I was a phony. Terrible things. Then you saw my kit. My needles were on the table. You said you wanted a tattoo. ‘I’m not leaving empty-handed,’ you said.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Not at first. I told you that a tattoo must be respected. But you kept going to the window and shouting, ‘Just a minute!’ I thought you were talking to them, except it could have been a person. Then you started to cry.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “You told me that if you couldn’t have the séance, I had to give you the tattoo. ‘I owe it to her,’ you said. ‘I wronged her. I must carry her name.’ ” He nodded. “I understood that. You were asking someone for forgiveness. So I said I would do it. Right away you ran to the window and yelled out, ‘You’re going to lose your bet!’ That provoked me. I doubted your sincerity. But you didn’t seem to know I was angry. You said to me, ‘Put on the name I gave you at the Truro séance.’ ‘What name is that?’ I asked. T
im, you remembered.”

  “Didn’t I say at the séance that I wanted to get in touch with Mary Hardwood—my mother’s cousin?”

  “That’s what you said for the others, but to me you whispered, ‘The real name is Laurel. Tell them it’s Mary Hardwood, but think of Laurel.’ ”

  “That’s what I told you?”

  “You also said, ‘Laurel is dead. I want to reach her, and she is dead.’ ”

  “I couldn’t have said that,” I told him now, “because I was hoping to find out where she is.”

  “If you thought she was alive, then you were trying to take advantage of the séance.”

  “I guess I was.”

  “That may be the reason for the chaos.” He sighed at the weight of all human perversity. “Two nights ago just as I was starting your tattoo, you said, ‘I can’t fuck you over—the girl’s real name is not Laurel. It’s Madeleine.’ That fouled me up very much. I’m trying to be in touch with the forces around me when I put in the first needle. That is basic protection for all. You injured my concentration. Then, next minute, you said, ‘I changed my mind. Make it Laurel, after all.’ You messed up your own tattoo. Two times you messed it up.”

  I was silent as if to respect his words. When I felt that enough time had gone by, I asked, “What else did I say?”

  “Nothing. You fell asleep. When I was done with the tattoo you woke up. You went downstairs, got into your car and drove off.”

  “Did you come with me?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look out the window?”

  “I did not. But I believe people were with you. Because once you were outside, you got very loud. I think I heard a man and a woman trying to quiet you. Then you all drove off.”

  “All three of us in my Porsche?”

  Harpo knew the sound of motors. “There was only your car.”

  “How did I get two people into one bucket seat?”

  He shrugged.

  I was about to leave when he said, “The girl you call Laurel may still be alive.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “It feels like she is on the Cape. She is damaged, but she’s not dead.”

  “Well, if you get it from the wind, that’s six to one you’re right.”

  Outside it was dark, and the highway back to Provincetown was being scourged by the last dead leaves to cross the hardtop from one part of the forest to the other. The wind was in a fury, as if indeed my last poor jest to Harpo had displeased it, and gusts that could have knocked over a sailboat slammed against the side of the car.

  Once, a couple of years ago, I had been to another séance. A friend of Harpo’s had been killed in an auto crash on this same highway, and Harpo had invited me together with two men and two women I did not know, and we sat in a dimly lit circle around a small end table with thin legs. Our palms were on the table, our extended fingers touched. Then Harpo gave the table its instructions. He spoke to the table as if there were no question that his voice would be heard, and he told it to tilt up on one side and then come down, thereby tapping the floor once for yes. If the table wished to say no, it would have to rise and fall twice. Two taps. “Do you understand me?” Harpo asked.

  The table went up on two legs with the same obedience a trained dog will give to the command to beg. Then it tapped the floor. We proceeded from there. Harpo expounded a simple code. One tap would be for the letter A, two for B, on up to twenty-six taps for Z.

  Since he had to be certain he was talking to the friend who had been killed the week before the séance, he began by inquiring, “Are you there, Fred?” and the table, after a pause, tapped once. To verify this, Harpo asked, “What is the first letter of your name?” The table gave six slow taps to indicate the letter F.

  We went on. That event also took place on a November night. We sat about in Harpo’s small Wellfleet loft, not leaving the table from nine in the evening until two in the morning, and we were, all but for Harpo, strangers to each other. There was time to observe every likelihood of a trick. Yet, I could see none. Our knees were visible, and our hands rested lightly on the surface, too lightly for anyone to tip the table by himself. We sat so closely that one could not fail to detect physical exertion in the others. No, the table tipped in response to our questions as naturally as water may be poured from one glass to another. It did not seem spooky. Rather, it was tedious. It took a long time to spell each word.

  “How does it feel,” Harpo asked, “where you are?”

  Seven taps came back. We had a G. A pause, and a new series of slow taps began, the table tilting two of its legs a clear foot off the floor, but slowly, rising slowly like one half of a drawbridge, and then, as leisurely, descending for the tap. The next sequence took eighteen taps and several minutes. We now had an R. That made GR …

  “Great?” asked Harpo.

  The table tapped twice: “No!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Harpo. “Continue.”

  Now we received fifteen taps. We had a G, an R and an O.

  It was only when we arrived at G-R-O-O-V that Harpo said “Groovy?” and the table replied with a single tap.

  “Fred, is it really groovy?” asked Harpo.

  Again the table went up, again it came down. It was not unlike conversing with a computer.

  So we continued for five hours and heard a bit of small talk about Fred’s new state on the other side. No information came to us that would shake the foundations of eschatology or of karma. It was only past two in the morning, driving home through a wind like this, that I realized how a common end table, in defiance of many laws of physics, had been able to rise and fall hundreds of times in order to send a word or two across a divide whose gulf I could no longer measure. It was then, alone on the highway, that the hair stiffened on the back of my neck, and I knew I had been present at an eerie and incomprehensible evening. Whatever had made it possible might still be in the air around me. I was alone with it on a windswept highway not far from the depths of the sea—no, I had never felt so alone in my life. The awe I had hardly experienced while it was happening was now all about me on the road.

  Next day, however, I was as apathetic as if my liver had been pounded against a cement wall, indeed, was left in such depression that I had not gone again to a séance until the night in Truro when we embarked on our fiasco. I was ready to believe that one could communicate with the dead. It was just that I could not afford the funds it required.

  Arriving back at my house, I started a fire, poured a drink, and was just beginning to search for any recollections I could recover of a trip out to Wellfleet two nights ago, carrying two other people in one small Porsche, when there was a thump on the door knocker, or so I would swear, and the door blew open.

  I do not know what entered, or whether it left when I bolted the door, but I heard that clapper as a summons. I had a sniff again of the intolerable odor of corruption I had breathed beneath the overhang, and could have cried out at the inexorable logic of the demand on me. For with all the weight of a decree I could not refuse came the bidding to go back to that wood in Truro.

  I held out for as long as I could. I finished my drink and made another, and knew that whether it took an hour or three days, whether I finally went forward sober or became so drunk I could live in flames, I must indeed go out and search the burrow. There could be no release until I did. That force which went into the tapping of the table had now seized me—by my entrails and my heart. I had no choice. Nothing could prove worse than to remain here and live through the hours of the night ahead.

  I knew. Once before I had been held in the grip of an imperative larger than myself, and that was the week twenty years ago when I walked each day to the Provincetown Monument with cold oil in my lungs and sick worms in my belly, stared up at the climb and saw, with a gloom equal to losing all reason itself, that the ascent could be attempted. As high as I could see, handhold by handhold, there were indentations in the mortar and small ledgelike irregularities in the granite bl
ocks. It could be done, and I could do it, and I stared so hard at the base that—can you believe me?—I never contemplated the overhang. All I knew was that I must climb it. If I did not make the attempt, something worse than panic would befall me. Maybe I learned nothing else from those old seizures of terror in the middle of the night when I used to sit bolt upright in bed, but, at least, I gained (could I term it that?) some small measure of compassion for all who are afflicted by the compulsion to go out and do what is absolutely not to be done—whether it is the seduction of little boys or the rape of adolescent girls—at least I knew the nightmare that blazes beneath the stupefaction of those who never dare to come near to themselves, or disaster will ensue. So in all of that week when I wrestled with this strange will so external to myself, trying to convince this foreign presence that I did not have to climb the Monument, I also learned about the varieties of human insulation. For to keep from encountering that fiend who dwells in the sweet Kundalini of our spine, so do we take on our booze, our pot, our coke, our nicotine, our tranks and sleeping pills, our habits and our churches, our prejudices and our bigotries, our ideology, our stupidity itself—that most vital of the insulations!—and I encountered nearly all of them in the week before I tried to climb the Monument and conquer the unmanageable in myself. Then, with a brain inflamed by speed, tilted one way by pot and the other by drink, squealing within like an unborn child in terror of suffocation before it finds the light, feeling as murderous as a Samurai, I tackled that wall and found, no matter how absurd the outcome, that I was better afterward, if by no more than the reduction of my terror in sleep.

  So it had been worth it. I knew that must be true now. I had to go back and look upon the face of the blonde who was dead. Indeed, I must do it not knowing whether her end came from my hands or belonged to others. Will you ever comprehend me if I say that such knowledge, while crucial to my self-preservation—was I in danger of the law, or of all that was outside the law?—was still not what called me forth so much as the bare impulse to go: that came from the deepest sign I could recognize—the importance of the journey must be estimated by my dread of doing it.