While he was bent over the sink and filling a glass with cold water, he heard a growling which did not come from the radio. Then the set went off. For two seconds, there was no sound except that of running water. The growl behind him came again.
"Goddamn! I told you and I told you! Keep that fucking noise down! Or, by God, I'll throw the goddamn radio through the window! And close the fucking refrigerator door!"
The voice was low in volume but deep in tone. It was his father's, his legal master's. The voice that had filled Jim with dread and wonder when he was a child. It had not seemed to be human. Jim still found it hard to believe that it was.
Yet, he could remember moments when he had loved it, when it had made him laugh. That was what confused his attitude toward his father. But he was not mixed up now.
He straightened up, turned the faucet off, and drank from the glass as he wheeled slowly around. Eric Grimson was tall, red-faced, red-eyed, puffy-lidded, fat-jowled, and big-paunched. The broken veins in his nose and cheeks reminded Jim of the cracks in the ceilings.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
Another parent-child confrontation, as the school psychologist called it. One more time locking horns with a shithead, as Jim thought of it.
His old man sat down. He put his elbows on the table and then his face between his hands. For a moment, he looked as if he were going to cry. Then he straightened, his open palms striking the tabletop loudly and making the sugar bowl dance around. He glared. But his hands, when he lit a match to a cigarette, were shaking.
"You turned it on loud on purpose, didn't you? You won't let me sleep. God knows, you know, too, your mother knows, I need it. But no, will you let me sleep? Why? Goddamn nastiness, pure orneriness, the mean streak you got from your mother, that's why! And I told you to close the refrigerator door! You. . . you. . . snake! That's what you are! A goddamn snake!"
He slammed his right hand against the table. The cloud of stale beer issuing from his mouth made Jim wrinkle his face.
"I won't put up with that crap from you anymore! By God, I'm going to throw that goddamn radio through the window! And you after that!"
"Go ahead!" Jim said. "See if I care!"
His father would not take him up on that dare. No matter how furious Eric Grimson got, he would not destroy anything that might cost him money to replace.
Eric rose from the chair. "Get out!" he yelled. "Out, out, out! I don't want to see your fartface around here, you long-haired freak-weirdo! Get out right now or I'll kick your ass all the way to school! Now! Now! Now!"
His old man was trying to provoke him to hit him, Jim thought. Then he could break a few bones in his son, bloody his nose, slam him in the belly, kick him in the balls, kidney-punch him.
Which was exactly what his son wanted to do to his old man and was going to do some day.
"All right!" Jim screamed. "I'll go, you drunken bum, hopeless welfare case, parasite, loafer, loser! And you can shut the door yourself."
Eric's cement-mixer voice got lower but louder. His face was red, and his mouth was wide open, showing crooked tobacco-yellowed teeth. His eyes looked like blood clots.
"You don't talk to me like that, your father! You fucking hippie, stinking. . . stinking. . ."
"How about pink Commie bastard?" Jim said as he sidled by his father, facing him, ready to strike back but trembling violently.
"Yeah! That'll do fine!" his father roared.
But Jim was running down the hall. Just before he entered his bedroom, he saw a door open at the far end of the corridor. From the narrow rectangle between door and wall came a flickering light and a strong odor of incense. His mother's face appeared. As usual, she had been praying and fingering her beads while kneeling before the statues in the room. Then, hearing the uproar, instead of coming out to defend her son, she had hidden behind the door until peace and quiet came again or, at least, seemed about to break out.
"Tell God to shove it!" Jim shouted.
His mother gasped. Her head disappeared, and her door closed slowly and softly. That was his mother. Slow and soft, quiet and peaceful. And no more effectual than the shadow she resembled. She had lived so long among ghosts that she had become one.
Chapter 5
JIM, NOW DRESSED and holding his school book bag in one hand, leaped through the front doorway. Behind him, standing in the doorway, shouting insults and threats, was his father. He was not going to pursue his son outside his territory, on which he felt safe. He was the cock of the walk and the bull of the woods on his own land. Which, actually, was the bank's, if you wanted to get technical about it. Which, if the tunnels and shafts under the house kept collapsing, might soon be Mother Earth's.
The sky was clear, and the sun promised to warm the air up to around the low seventies. A great day for Halloween, though the radio weather report had said that clouds were supposed to appear later in the day.
That was the outside weather. Jim felt as if lightning was banging around in him like an angry ogre cook throwing pots and pans around. Black clouds were racing across his personal sky. They bore news of worse to come.
Eric Grimson kept on shouting though his son was now a block down the street. A couple of people were sticking their heads out their front doors to see what the commotion was. Jim plunged ahead, swinging his bag, which held five textbooks, none of which he had opened last night, pencils, a ballpoint pen, and two notebooks the pages of which mostly bore Jim's attempts to write lyrics. It also contained three tattered and dirty paperbacks, Nova Express, Venus on the Half-Shell, and Ancient Egypt.
His mother had not had time to fix his lunch for him. Never mind. His stomach hurt like a fist gripping red-hot barbed wire.
Too much too long.
When was he going to blow up in his own Big Bang?
It was coming, it was coming.
In a notebook was his latest lyric, "Glaciers and Novas."
Burn, burn, burn, burn!
Nothing tells how hot I am.
Words're shadows; fury's the substance.
Uncle Sam will blacken my fire.
Uncle Sam's a grinding glacier,
Five miles high, a-grinding
Mountains down to flatness.
Glacier wants everything flat,
Glacier wants to quench all fire.
Pop and Mom are ice giants
Coming to get me, cool my fire.
White house frost giant,
FBI trolls,
CIA ogres,
Werewolf Fuzz are circling me.
Jailhouse fridge'll freeze the fire.
Ahab chasing Moby Dick,
Chasing his own dick, it's said,
Ahab tearing the mask from God,
Bombshell heart about to explode,
His anger's a candle, mine's a klieg.
Eons on, ages on, eons on, eras on,
Old switchman Time reroutes the tracks,
Express-train Sun rams head-on
In destined doom the Nova Special,
Blows, explodes, incinerates all,
Splattering Pluto with pieces of Mars.
Glacier gives up my frozen corpse,
Glacier gives itself to fire.
Frozen corpse will burn again.
Righteous fire is never quenched.
Burn, burn, burn, burn!
That said it all, yet it was not enough.
That was why movies, paintings, and the beat of rock -- above all, the beat of rock -- were sometimes better than words. The unsayable was said. Better said, anyway.
For a moment, the street around him seemed to become wavy. It was as shimmering and as unstable as a mirage in a desert. Then it cooled off and became unmoving again. Cornplanter Street was as solid as it had been a few seconds ago. Just as squalid, too. Seven blocks away, above the roofs of the houses, the gray-black smokestacks and upper stories of the Helsgets Steel Works mills were metal giants. Dead giants because no stinking and black smoke poured from them. Jim remembered when they had bee
n alive, though that seemed so long ago that it might have been in another century.
Cheap foreign steel had shut down the area's industrial steel complex. Since then, or so it seemed to Jim, his parents' troubles and, thus, his own troubles, had started.
Though the busy furnaces had poured clouds of dirt and poison over the city, they had also showered prosperity. Now, hand in hand with cleaner air had come poverty, despair, rage, and violence. Though the citizens could now see a house two blocks away, they could not see the future and were not sure they wanted to.
This street, the whole city, was Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row."
Jim shuffled along the cracked sidewalk in his dirty and scarred cowhide boots. He passed two-story bungalows built just after World War II ended. Some of the front yards were fenced in; some of these fences were white with paint and had been repaired not too long ago. Some of the yards sported nice-looking lawns. Those with little grass or none at all were occupied by old cars up on blocks or motorcycles partly torn apart.
The morning sun was glorious in the unflecked blue sky. Yet the light in Belmont City had seemed for a long time to Jim to be unlike the light elsewhere. It was particularly harsh and, at the same time, gritty. How could sunlight in clear air be gritty? He did not know. It just was. He did not know when it had first seemed so to him. He suspected that it was about the time his pubic hair began to grow. SPOING! There It was, the irrepressible It. SPOING! It rose and swelled like an angry cobra at just about anything, as long as that anything hinted of sex. Anything in movies, photos, ads, you name it, unaccountable stray thoughts and mental images -- all called It up like a witch waving a magic wand. SPOING! There It was, no matter how embarrassing.
That was when the sunlight in Belmont City had started to be harsh and gritty.
Or was it?
Maybe it had begun when he had had his first "vision." Or when his "stigmata" had first appeared.
Jim saw his best buddy, Sam "Windmill" Wyzak, a half block away down Cornplanter Street. Sam was standing by the white picket fence on his front yard. Jim stepped up his pace. Only Jim's grandfather, Ragnar Grimsson, the Norwegian sailor and locomotive engineer, and Sam Wyzak really loved him. All three had souls like forks attuned to the same pitch. But his grandfather had died five years ago (maybe that was when the light got harsh and gritty) and now only Jim and Sam vibrated on the same frequency.
Sam was six feet tall and very skinny. His sharp and pointed face could have been a model for that of Wile E. Coyote of the "Road Runner" cartoons. He looked just as hungry and desperate, but his deep-brown and close-set eyes lacked Wile E.'s never-quenched light of hope. His glossy black hair was unruly and bushy, almost an Afro.
When Jim got closer, Sam called out, "Jimbo! My man!" in a high-pitched and whiney voice. He danced a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo while he sang the first six lines of a lyric of Jim's. Jim thought it was good, but the Hot Water Eskimos had rejected it as "not rock enough." Its first line was a phrase used by Siberian Eskimo shamans when they worked magic, words that organized chaotic lines of force into powerful instruments for good or evil.
The song in its entirety went thus:
ATA MATUMA M'MATA!
You in trouble, deep in crap?
Hire the ancient Siberian shaman.
Wizard magic guaranteed to work.
Shaman chants a Stone Age spell:
ATA MATUMA M'MATA!
Gather all these witchy items!
You don't get these at Neiman Marcus!
Angel's feather,
Dracula's breath,
Polar bear's malaria,
Politician's unbroken promise,
Scream from Captain Hook's toilet stall,
Earwax from Spock of far-off Vulcan,
Nielsen rating of Tinker Bell,
Turnip blood -- Rh-negative,
Jack the Ripper's love for women,
Needle's eye which traps the rich,
Belly buttons of Adam and Eve,
Visa stamped by Satan himself.
Mix them like you're Betty Crocker.
Stir the bubbling brew around!
When it cools and when it shrieks,
Drink it down, drink it down!
ATA MATUMA M'MATA!
"The 'Ata Matuma M'Mata' spell won't work, Sam," Jim said. "I'm down, way down. I'm also pissed, really got the red-ass."
Mrs. Wyzak was looking out a window at him. She was big and had Mother Earth breasts and was a mighty big mother herself. She was, unlike his mother, the powerhouse in the family. Mr. Wyzak was no wimp, but he was his wife's shadow. When she moved, he moved. When she spoke, he nodded his head.
Mrs. Wyzak had a peculiar expression. Was she wishing that Jim was also her son? She had wanted at least six kids, a brood, a pulsation of progeny. But she had had a hysterectomy after Sam, her firstborn. Mr. Wyzak, in his less charitable moments, and he had many, said that Sam had poisoned her womb.
Or was her face set so oddly because she thought that Sam's friend was so odd? A boy who had had such strange visions and who suffered from stigmata was not your normal playmate for your child.
Jim's mother. . . that was a different case. She had thought at first that Jim was a latter-day St. Francis because of the unearthly things he had seen and his unexplainable bleedings. But when Jim got older she had put aside her dreams of sainthood for him. Now she was not so sure she had not mated with the devil when she was sleeping and Jim was their child. She had never said so, though Jim's father had. But Jim believed that his father was repeating what she had told him. However, his father could have made it up. He did not put in full time hurting his son, but that was only because he had other things to do. Like getting drunk and gambling.
Jim waved at Mrs. Wyzak. She stepped back as if startled, then moved to the window again and waved at him. Since she was not afraid of anyone -- he wished to God that his mother was like her -- she must have been thinking something bad about him. For a moment, she had been ashamed. Or was he, he thought, too damn sensitive and self-centered? That was what his father and his school counselor had told him.
Jim and Sam walked away. Sam shook his head, and his near-Afro waved like the plume on the helmet of a Trojan warrior.
"Well?" Sam whined in Jim's ear.
"Well, what?"
"Jesus, you said you were down, way down, and we've walked a whole block, and you ain't said a word! Down about what? Same old story? You and your old man?"
"Yeah," Jim said. "Sorry. I was thinking, lost in my thoughts. One of these days I'm going to lose my way and never come back. And why should I? Anyway, here's my sordid and sad tale."
Sam listened, interjecting only a grunt or a "Weird, man! Weird!" When Jim was finished, Sam said, "Ain't it the shits? What can you do now? Nothing -- ccording to The Man. But it won't be long 'til you're eighteen, and you can tell your old man to go fuck himself."
"If we don't kill each other first."
"Yeah. Th-th-that's all. f-f-folks! Period. No Continued Next Chapter. You're pissed off? Listen, me and Mom got into it this morning, about some of the same things you and your Dad argued about. But, you know, with Mom it's always the music.
" 'I worked my ass off,' she says, 'so you could take music lessons, and now you can play the piano and the guitar. But I didn't work myself to a frazzle as a grocery clerk and a baby-sitter and God knows how many other jobs and pinch my pennies so you could be a rock musician. And now you want to dress up like a punk, look like some drunken murdering redskin, embarrass me and your father and my friends and Father Kochanowski! The saints help me, the Virgin Mary help me! I wanted you to be a classical musician, play Chopin and Mozart, be somebody I could be proud of! Look at you!' And so on. Same old shit.
"Then I said what I should've never said, but I was seeing purple by then."
Sam rotated both arms several times, the lunch bag in one hand. "Windmill" Wyzak was really going into action.
" 'Worked your ass off?' I said. 'What do you call
that? A camel?' I pointed at her big ass. God forgive me, I do love my mother even if she's mostly a pain. Anyway, I had to run for my life. Mom threw dishes at me and took after me with a broom. I had to run through the house and then into the backyard with her screaming at me and the old man laughing like crazy, rolling on the floor, glad to see somebody besides him being picked on by her."
Jim was hurt by Sam's seeming not to care about his troubles with his father. Jim was open, panting and slavering, for sympathy and understanding and advice. So what was his supposed best friend doing? Ignoring his friend's absolutely pressing crises to talk about his own problems, which Jim had heard too many times.
Chapter 6
THEY TURNED OFF Cornplanter Street onto Pitts Avenue, which led straight for six blocks to Belmont City Central High School. Cars loaded with students sped by them. No one in the vehicles waved or shouted at the two pedestrians, though all knew them. Jim felt like an outcast, a leper whose only skin disease was acne. That made his mood blacker, his anger redder.
Jesus H. Christ! Those uppity snobs didn't have any right to look down on him because his father was out of work and the Grimson family was pisspot poor and lived in a run-down low-class blue-collar area. The students who had their own cars were not so rich themselves, except for Sheila Helsgets, and her family wasn't doing so well either. The closing of the steel mills had socked it to her father. He probably wasn't now worth more than a million or so, and that would be mostly just property and low-value stocks and bonds. At least, that's what he had heard about the Helsgetss'.
Sam had no idea how madly and badly in love with her Jim was. Jim held some things back from his old buddy because he didn't want to be laughed at. Like his passion for Sheila Helsgets and his writing "straight" poetry at the same time he was writing rock lyrics and reading many books and his vocabulary, which was much larger than Sam's and that of the other guys he hung around with though he wasn't always sure of the precise meaning of the words he used.