That night I left my room and headed toward the stairs. I passed Mary’s room and saw my mother in there, small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed. I went downstairs. I sat on the rocker for a while. Then my father called me and I descended the steps into the basement.
Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.
PART THREE
7
Passing them on the roads as they journeyed toward their own interior limits, one might easily be inspired to twist the thumb of a famous first sentence. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. On foot they traveled, in old and new cars, in motorcycle packs, in trucks and buses and camp trailers, the young and the very young, leaving their medieval cities, tall stone citadels of corruption and plague, not hopeless in their flight, not yet manic in their search, the lost, the found, the nameless, the brilliant, the stoned, the dazed and the simply weary, shouting their honest love of country across the broken white line, faces lost in disbelief and hair, the drummer, the mystic, the fascist, an occasional female eye peering from a rear window, the noise at the back of her head a short song of peace.
We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.
With us all the way had been Sullivan’s three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.
When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.
I taped many of our conversations.
“This big blue yawning country,” Brand said early one evening over sandwiches. “I want to piss on all the trees, tumble down hills, chase jackrabbits, climb up rooftops, crucify myself on TV aerials. I want to say hi neighbor to everybody we meet. It’s beautiful. It’s too much. Baby, it’s wild. It’s the strangest, wildest, freakingest country in history. Davy, keep me bland.”
“Tell us about your novel,” Sullivan said.
“Writers never talk about work in progress,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Bobby? It destroys the necessary tension. If they talked about it, they wouldn’t have to write it anymore. Essentially people write to break the tension. Right, Brand? If the creative tension is broken prematurely, the original motivation is lost. I’m surprised to hear you ask a question like that, Sully. You of all people.”
“It’s about a man who turns into a woman,” Brand said. “He’s the former president of the United States. He’s completed his two terms but he’s still very popular and he’s always speaking at important banquets. At the same time he’s turning into a woman. He’s beginning to grow breasts and his genitals are shrinking. His voice is becoming high and faggy. He wears a garter belt for the secret thrill it gives him. He’s a WASP, the ex-president. But de new president is black. He’s patterned after Sonny Liston. He’s very hip and magical. He turns on every night and he’s making it with all the wives and daughters of the southern senators and even with some of the senators themselves. It’ll be over a thousand pages long. It’s called Coitus Interruptus. The theme is whatever you want it to be because appearance is all that matters, man. The whole country’s going to puke blood when they read it.”
“I want to talk about this idea I’ve got for a movie,” I said.
“We’re all ears,” Pike said.
“I’m thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I’d like to do out here in the Midwest, if that’s where we are—a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that’s part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I’d like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film.”
“How long will that take?” Sullivan said. “You’ll be filming Indians in a couple of weeks.”
“We’ve got time. The part I want to do now will take only two or three days. Either three days or seventeen years. I’ll use available light. I don’t care how primitive it is technically. Besides, I won’t be filming Indians personally. I won’t actually be handling a camera. My job will be to supervise and be supervised. The movie I want to make will be a different kind of thing completely. I’m just starting to get it straightened out in my head. It’s funny how it came to me. I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something else. And it’s still changing.”
“I wasn’t finished talking about my novel,” Brand said.
Pike was exploring his ear with a toothpick wrapped in tissue paper. When he was done he went up front to drive. It was dusk now, bent rust powdering the western sky, neon-blooming motels, the dull sulfuric cast of roadlights, a jalopy abandoned in a field, hood raised like the peak of a baseball cap, a scene from the rural thirties. Sullivan hummed a medley of what appeared to be antiwar tunes. Brand was curled up with his British-made rolling machine and Zig-Zag cigarette paper. We seemed to be passing a resort area now. There were the white toy cottages with pink shutters from Hansel and Gretel and the filling stations of the back streets of small towns with a lone old pump and a dog asleep in grease. I remembered to turn off the tape recorder. Then I turned on the radio. Ali Akbar Khan was performing an evening raga, a sad liquid joy spilling from the strings of his sarod, and I thought of a blind Bengali walking a tightrope over nothing. I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between beginning and end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence. Maybe it was her hair. Maybe it was the way she moved as she cut the hedge, with the beautifully stylized bearing of a child who knows she is being watched. Sullivan kept on humming. A police helicopter appeared over the trees and went beating past us down the highway. Brand sucked smoke deep into his body.
“Where the fuck have all the flowers gone,” he sang, hurrying the words to make them fit.
Pike turned onto a side road and eventually pulled into an A&P parking lot,
fitting the camper between two station wagons waiting to be gorged. We entered by the great glass omniscient door, which knew we were coming and opened of itself. Brand and I peeled off from the others and followed a dark attractive woman down a side aisle to the peaches and plums. Her fingers skipped among the peaches, testing and prodding, and we moved alongside, our cart nudging her cart.
“Peaches,” Brand said.
She gave us no sign.
“Look at the word come out of my mouth all moist and fuzzy. Peaches. It’s the perfect word for the perfect thing. Now we’re all standing here. If we all watch my lips, we’ll all see it come out. Peaches. What do you think, miss, if that’s your name. Should we pick up a pound or two? We’re just a couple of good-looking guys from the East Coast, especially him. Listen, I’ve got some grass back at the plastic bitch.”
She moved over to the plums and we followed. She was tall and her hips swung terrifically behind the shopping cart.
“Come on back to the truck with us and let loose for a while. We’ll eat plums and smoke dope. I’m writing a novel using the direct interior monologue technique.”
She looked around for a rescuer and I studied the plum in her fine Mediterranean hand. She was the kind of woman you imagine meeting in Port Said, older, wiser than you, pigmented of earth and made of many bloods, amused at your blond boyish Yankee ways, dispensing shattering truth in short sentences, and here she was, incredibly, among the plums of Middle America.
“Air is not invisible,” Brand said.
She soon vanished. We put our cart into reverse. The shelves were long and brilliant, and I thought of my father. This was his spangled ark, cans of dessert-whip with squiggly pricklike tops, mythology and thunderbolts, the green giant’s loins, buckets of power and white beyond white, trauma in the rectangles of evangelistic writ. (You have to move the merch off the shelves.) A baby sat in a grocery cart, crying; his mother gave him a stalk of celery to play with and he was content. “Who loves mommy,” she said. “Say who loves her, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, baby loves mommy. Say it, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, yes, yes.” Women put their heads into monstrous freezers and came out alive. Checkout girls moved their hips against the cash registers. An old lady fell down.
In time we came to a town called Fort Curtis. I was alone up front, driving slowly, wearing my green shades and a pair of old khaki trousers with huge back pockets that might have been designed to conceal rope, flashlights and barbwire cutters. It was late afternoon, an unseasonably warm day, bug juice all over the windshield, an idle insect hum coming from the tall grass by the river. The river might have been the Wabash or the Ohio or the Mississippi for all I knew. I drove slowly through the town’s shady dead streets. Brick and frame houses stood under large elms. The porches had carved posts. There were lilac bushes in the gardens, moss at the base of telephone poles and a bandstand in the park at the edge of town. I drove around a little longer and then stopped in front of a three-story white frame hotel. We needed baths.
There were four elderly people sitting in the lobby, turning the pages of identical magazines. I got a room with a bath and then went back out to the camper. Brand and Sullivan were asleep on cots. Pike was sitting at the table in his World War I side-button shorts, drinking bourbon and smelling his armpits. I woke up Sullivan. She put some things into an overnight bag and went into the hotel. I waited ten minutes and went up to the room. As I reached for the doorknob I heard water running in the tub. The door was open. Some of her clothes were on the bed. I studied the plain brown robe, an item suitable for Lenten mortification. The room was painted a surly municipal green. Dust, paper clips and scraps of plaster had been swept into a corner. There was no TV set. The fabric on the armchair was thinning out. I heard Sullivan sink into the tub.
“Those dear old things in the lobby,” she said. “What’s the name of this place—the Menopause Hilton?”
“How did you know I was here?”
“My secret will die with me, Igor.”
“Listen,” I said. “When you wash your legs, do you lift one leg way up out of the water and sort of scrub it slowly and sensually like the models in TV commercials?”
“No.”
“Can I come in and watch?”
“No, she said.”
“Why not? We’re adults.”
“Exactly.”
“If I promise to keep one hand over my eyes, can I come in and scrub your back?”
“Where are you sitting?”
“On the bed.”
“See if you can find my cigarettes.”
“They’re not here,” I said. “Want me to go down and get them?”
“Don’t bother.”
I tossed the cigarettes and matches under the bed.
“Sully, would you mind if we stayed around this town for a couple of days?”
“For your movie?”
“I’ll look around this evening and then decide.”
“What’s so special about this place?”
“It seems old and simple and dull.”
“I don’t mind. Have you asked the others?”
“I think they’ll go along with it. Everybody’s pretty exhausted. We can use a few days of rest.”
“Where are we anyway?” she said.
“It could be Indiana. But it could be Illinois or Kentucky. I’m not sure.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I ask, but what’s west of here?”
“Iowa, I think. Although maybe Iowa is further north. I’m trying to remember what’s below Iowa.”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I asked.”
I sat on the bed listening to the room tone, or general background noise, and filming in my mind a line of light and shade across the armchair. The room seemed beyond time, beyond present tense at any rate, in tone, in appearance, in the very quality of its light and air. I thought of it as the kind of room which, years before, or decades, had little purpose but to await the hardware salesman and his whisky flings. Most likely the room had looked as shabby then as it did now. Maybe that was the dream in those days, a touch of cluttered lust, long gone now, for a new image had awakened our instincts, brides and bawds and gunmen of the West, an image to fit our ascetic scheme, the rise of the low motel, neat and clean at ground zero, electronic rabbit at the end of the bed. An arm and breast hung from the open door of the bathroom. I picked her robe off the bed and tossed it toward her wrist. The room’s mood was dead. It was thirty years or more dead and gone.
That evening I got out my camera and went for a walk. It was a 16mm Canon Scoopic, modified to work as a sync rig with my tape recorder, a late-model Nagra. The camera didn’t have an interchangeable lens but it was light, easy to handle and went to work in a hurry. Originally all I had wanted to do on the trip west was shoot some simple film, the white clapboard faces of Mennonite farmers, the spare Kansans in their churchgoing clothes. But now my plans were a bit more ambitious, scaring me somewhat, at least in their unedited form. I clutched the handgrip, rested the camera on my right shoulder and walked through the quiet streets. Soon a small crowd was following me.
8
Remarkably the bench wasn’t green. It was light blue and it faced the yellow bandstand. The playground area, off to the side, was even more cheery in color, perhaps to counterbalance the stark forbidding nature of much of the apparatus. I sat on the bench and watched a small girl sail a book of matches in a puddle below the water fountain. I waited and slowly they approached, six welcomers in two loosely joined teams of three. First came an old man and two old ladies; then a teen-age boy leading two men who looked as though they might have shared a watch or two on a tin can off Guadal (in the Warner Brothers forties) and talked about the body-and-fender shop they would open when they got back to the States. Of course it was the camera they were interested in, that postlinear conversation piece, and they gathered around me in stages, introducing themselves, asking questions, being exceedingly
friendly, secretly preparing their outrage for the moment of my incivility. But I remained well-mannered throughout, a guest in sacred places.
The old man was Mr. Hutchins, who said he liked to be called either Mr. H or Hutch, the latter name being favored by his Florida cronies. The women were his wife and his sister, Flora and Veejean, and they appeared to be in their mid-sixties, beautiful, smiling and silent, a pair of lace curtains fixed in sunlight. Hutch had once owned an Argus that he’d sent away for. He said the whole works only cost him one hundred fifty dollars—camera, projector, tripod screen, camera case, roll of film. His footage of the Everglades had been shown to a packed house in the basement of the Methodist Church.
The other men were Glenn Yost and Owney Pine and the boy was Glenn Yost Jr., who preferred to be called Bud. It turned out that each group knew the other only by sight, living in different ends of town, having been collected here, as it were, by the sight of the camera, the boy’s curiosity equal to the old man’s.
“How much the camera cost?” Bud said.
“Twelve hundred and change.”
That was good for a whistle from Mr. H.
“I might get a super 8 this summer,” the boy said. “I’m hoping the Bolex 155. We have a club at school. So far I haven’t done much because the equipment they have is pretty limited. But if I can get a Bolex, I’d go right out of my mind. What kind of diopter range that thing give you?”
His father stood behind him, reflective and gloomy, left eye jumping, head tilted far to one side, almost resting on his shoulder, and I was reminded of the ancient relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm standing on the mound waiting for the sign to be given, fingers knuckling along the seams of the ball, men on first and third and none out, nobody caring anywhere in the world. There was a young man with a guitar sitting on the edge of the bandstand.