My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (14 page)

Celt-spirit here, pre-Roman slush, plunder, spoils, a Darkness embraced? Gatwick was snow-cold but under a rainstorm of mice-turds. Professor Frank Poole picked him up; delivered him to the Bickenhall, a modest hotel on Gloucester Place near Baker Street. A little twitchy man, Poole left and Mason was glad. He went for a walk in the neighborhood: had fish and chips in a restaurant just over on York. Even Poole was
possibly a spy. In front of the liquor store next door an old toothless hag (also a spy?) surrounded by six police dogs, held forth with her begging cup and a cackle. He picked up the
Herald-Tribune
from a vendor at Marylebone Road . . . Betty Boop wasn't going to come. The hotel wasn't there when he got back. The rules here are gonna keep changing? Wrong street. He caught an Al Pacino flick. Slept restlessly: mam'zels teasing him from shadows of lace. He was writing a novel in which he couldn't figure out the difference between what was real and not: Painted Turtle told him it was ‘cause he drank too much. His blood sugar. He needed to see a doctor. He was crazy. He accepted her verdict. There were too many women in his novel, he fucked them all too lightly. He needed a conference on morality with the authorities. He was a sinful beast, a pig—a fink. Then he was on this bus that turns a sharp corner on a mountain road and slides off plunging down into the sun-splashed green valley. How could such a thing happen on such a nice day? Naturally he flies up out of the damned thing—Painted Turtle with him. Locked in an embrace they fall in slow motion to the dry riverbed: “We're going to die.” When the crew arrives in a yellow metal bird, he and PT are still alive. The letter he'd sent just the day before to an imaginary person has been returned. The helicopter pilot hands it to him. A gunshot goes off in the valley. Sirens start up. Pilot says, “In French it says Return to sender. Are you the person?” In the morning Mason arrived at King's College at nine and after a brief introduction by flubbering, fumbling stuttering Emeritus Professor of American Literature, Basil Llewellyn Ceconhann, he faced his tiny bunch of enigmatic graduate students keen on some word about Afro-American Lit. His talk was a yellow dog. Later, in Mick's, a coterie of these grads bought him beer and chips and revealed themselves as desperately clinging to the end of the rope of academia. He had a double shot of faith-building scotch in a bar off Oxford where a couple of old neighborhood drunks were making a mutt do tricks in exchange for chips. Harry Schnitzler's left word for him to call. In the morning he was expected at Brixton College and tonight at
the Young Vic for a poetry reading. What was IHICE up to? Schnitzler sounded (on the phone) like a nervous twit: “We're mindful, too, of the Fulbright people: they might want you. And ICA . . . ” Anna Birly called at the last minute: she couldn't pick him up as planned. Could he take the tube? Yes. He was only five six minutes from the Baker Street Station. Birly, his host and organizer of the Punk Rock Poetry Festival, was waiting in the flurry. They shook. She was visibly hassled. Punk Rock with added Black attraction: like Miles at rock concerts in the sixties? Not quite. Backstage he sat in the dressing room sipping bourbon from a paper cup. Sebastian, the great Punk Rock poet, was combing his long green hair. It stood out in all directions. His eyelashes were orange. From the corner of his mouth hung a weed. Tamara Polese, in Nazi uniform, was helping Etta Schnabel, lesser-known Punk poet, undress. Etta wanted to read in her birthday suit with a rose sticking out of her cunt. Kicks. Her stuff was Protest: biting. Tamara finished Etta and took the bourbon from Mason. “What's this?” She sipped. Birly, uneasily, answered for him: “Hog piss, honey.” The trio called Hot Hips (composed of Sylvie—from France, Cornelia and Punk poet Estelle) went on first. Mason with the others went up and stood behind the curtain to watch. They screamed bloody murder at the audience (young punkies mostly): shook their purple short hair at each turn of each line and beat muscled fists out toward screaming voices: “Wash your mother in blood, rinse your father in the comfort of his own suds . . . ” It gave Mason the chills. How would such an audience receive him? Tamara went on kicking and screaming for war: “I shoot shots from my M-1 . . . put your fuck-finger in my barrel . . . ” then Etta—as a naked belly-dancer—coughed up and hissed a Goethe poem about deals with the devil and Kafka's doomed soul and the end of the West. Thomas Mann was a jerk who moved to L.A. And so it went: Sebastian. Then Mason: slightly nervous but well-received. Politely. And the show ended with straight poet Sven Strom from Sweden, trying to be interesting dangerous exciting but not making it: “ . . . I come bullets into your military-complex
asshole! . . . ” In the morning the slicker went out to Brixton in the rain. Spoke sang cried to a group of scorcheyed West Indians Africans Anglos East Indians Palestinians. Shy and untrusting, these kids were not impressed by the author's so-called “lack of anger.” Their highland was a lowland. How could a Black poet write other than
anger.
? What emotional osmosis'd created this freak? At the end one Black kid said “You nigger to the white man, like me. What good you think your sweet verse do to liberate us? You waste your time.” The audience cheered. Mason's next stop was at Africa Center, that night. Ironically, there were more English than Africans in the audience. Africans were downstairs in the cozy dimly lighted little bar quietly drinking away their London blues. When the show ended Mason and manager Steven Mackie too went down and started working on a cure for the British funk. Mason went back by way of the tube. A shopping bag had just exploded (people were saying) at one station and mobs were being rerouted out of Marylebone Station to other lines. Two dead, six injured. By ten o'clock news some “terrorist” group would phone in word of responsibility. Revolutionaries? Causes and causes. At a Whitechapel community arts center that night he conducted what is known as a creative writing workshop: eight students. The group normally met at this time—eight—every week to read and discuss their works. Mason was added attraction. Simon, group leader, sat next to Mason and as he analyzed a selection of poems by various members, Simon amened him step by step. One girl wanted to know if Mason believed in love. He said he did. But his poems were
so
depressing. He read a love poem. They said but that's not a love poem. He swore to them he had hope. They laughed and gave him cupcakes. He refused to eat with them. They passed around more photocopies of their own poems. One girl there—Colette—who looked not a bit French, in Mason's opinion, wrote excellent poems about peeling vegetables and discovering the nature of the universe through simple acts like shelling peas or following the journey of a bug along a branch, was also looked upon by the rest with some hesitation. They asked Colette why
she didn't write about relevant things. She said but I do. By the end of the workshop Colette was depressed. Along with Simon and a couple of the others, Colette too, Mason walked back to the tube. They all thanked him and shook his hand. That night the King of Illusion-Deceit-Fraudulence-Cheating-Shenanigan-Confidence pulled his own leg in his sleep: trying to center chubby pretty Colette onto the end of his hardon, he experienced a disaster: she turned into a faithful photograph of the Milky Way just as he got it in. It was chewed off by the speed of cubistic light. The Great Bear barked at him with his pants down. He shot for cover. Hid behind General Leclerc in the Square. A couple of old vegetable peddlers started beating him over the head with blette. (Later Colette sent him a batch of her new poems. He saved them till he felt like going up to Terrasse Frederic Nietzsche. Alone he sat on a stone rail at eight in the morning with Nice beneath him. Blue sea. Full stretch. And Bego to the North snow-capped in crisp contrast with the Cimes du Diable. He read her lines: “ . . . you unbutton my shirt/ which is your shirt/ and eat/ the cabbage tips/ of my tits . . . ” She'd signed all her poems with the pen name: Terry Gottlieb.)

Now, Berlin is another story. He was met at the airport by professors Wolfgang Proeschel and Heiner Graf, both Americanists. Had lunch at a student hangout where World War One saddles and spurs hung on hooks from the ceiling over the bar. Eye drift. Amesville was carved right into the wood of the table top where he calmly rested his arms.
He
wasn't alarmed. Already he felt more at ease in Germany than in France: but for the shabby reason everybody spoke his language. Hmmm. Proeschel was round and kindly through thick glasses; Graf was younger and lean with a twisted face holding tiny untrusting eyes. At two he was introduced by Graf to about a
hundred students in a classroom on the second floor of the John F. Kennedy-Institut fuer Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universitat. He cleared his throat and said how happy he was. Then: “I once went to a Private Eye for help. I needed him for a novel. He gave me a full report on my problem. It cost a lot. I didn't get my money's worth. I'm talking about writing. So in the end I had to invent the character I paid him to find . . . ” and when he finished the questions were intelligent (political, historical, social, reluctantly literary). Mason did his best. That night there was a dinner party at Proeschel's. Mason had only an itsybitsy German: he'd mostly skipped fruehstueck—since the fries were bullets and the steak disguised, rawhide. After the party around the dinner he and Heiner went out on the town. Little sneaky-eyed guy turned out to be quite a number. He took Mason in search of the myth of Berlin: the 1930s? A thirst for sekt? for weisswein? A bar called Sloe Gin and Sin (already America, huh!) in the Mitte area. Chilly and damp night. But the little guy knew his way: he led Mason into the indirectly-lit decor of Early Longhair: slender paste-white women in long black dresses wearing Garbo-wide hats with mysterious veils holding ivory cigarette holders in delicate fingers away from the flutter of their own eyelids. Music was Duke's and Whiteman's—not at the same time. Latter-day filmstars millionaires mistresses of bankers or bankers themselves? Mason felt slightly ruffled here: a little too tweedy: mock formality. After the sweetness of the hard liquor and his own cigarettes rubbed him the wrong way he suggested they leave. They were both quite drunk by now. Graf even pissed in the mouth of the alley outside. They fell into a Spanish restaurant and demanded gazpacho and cocido escabeche de pesado—hoping to sober. Night lights showed them the way to filmed cunts: and they gazed at them: Mason was seeing double already—and seeing crazy: a naked man was hanging upside down in a closet: he had a hypo stuck in the base of his spine: for the umpteenth time he fought off Jesus trying to whip him over the head with a blackthorn cane. In Son of Sloe Gin and Sin, Heiner told him to get ahold of himself. He was staggering in
respectable places. He saw Melba there: said she was moving to Yoknapatawpha County to avoid the fact that figleaves are shaped like male genitals. But he said they have figs down there! Giggling and staggering together holding each other up in the rain he and Heiner broke their way into a dingy joint where he saw one of his sons—Keith? Arthur? another one whose name . . . ?—a soldier leaving with a German woman. Oh, my oh my, thought Mason! Party time! But the young American soldier and his—date? girlfriend?—“companion” walked right by him as though he were a stain on the carpet: despite the fact that Mason cried out: “
Keith
! I love you! I'm your father!” But no dice. And Mason and Heiner held each other up as they stumbled past the reception desk from which Mason snatched a big antique vase (with hand-painted ladies in a garden along its central swell). Roses stuffed in it. Hmmm. Under street lights he cackled till he fell in the gutter—but he didn't lose the flowers. Heiner helped him up and Mason saw this woman in mink coming walking with her poodle. As he approached her with the vase she lost faith in humanity and ran. Immediately he turned and bumped into a girl perhaps eighteen: he rammed the vase into her chest, she automatically wrapped her arms around it and laughed. She got the joke. And he and Heiner continued to follow the flute sounds of some Pied Piper. After Heiner vomited in the gutter and on the fender of a VW he started blabbering about Spanish food again. A place called Castell de Ferro. They stopped a taxi. Mason told the driver: “Take me to my mother's place. It's on Drexel.” Heiner punched him lightly. “No, no. Pal, we not—listen we're in Barcelona. Didn't you
know
 . . . ?” “No,” said Mason. “I don't want to go to Drexel. Take us to
my
place in the Village. Edith'll cook something for us. Even if she's asleep she'll get up. You'll like her, Cowie.” “My name's not Cowie.” “Okay. Okay.” The driver said, “Which hotel?” Heiner's pronunciation was good even through the haze. The driver delivered them and they managed to pay him—twice. But it wasn't the right hotel. Across the street a bunch of people stood huddled together in a plastic tube waiting for the bus. Then it happened. Blam! Mason's
eardrums refused to take the sound. It was the end of the earth. The people in the tube flew to pieces—arms, heads, legs. A flash. It wasn't anything but a movie: couldn't be real. Must be watching TV. Yet . . . there was something different about this movie. He could
smell
it. They stumbled across the street through jammed traffic! . . . didn't notice people running crazily from the scene. Mason touched a bloody arm on the hood of a parked car just outside the bus-stop area. Is that a
real
arm? The fingers were cold. But, Jez, uh, the damned thing
felt
real. Where was Heiner? There: squatting over—what was that?—a dead horse? No, an old man, probably: too much blood to tell. Sharp smell of burning plastic. Gelignite? Screaming from a gathering mob of stick-like figures dangling against darkness and the profusion of glittering pin-points. And approaching sirens. Gotta wake up. Just force yourself up out of it. Now there was pushing. Who'd he been with? German guy. What's his name? Mason fell. Feet lifted over him. It took ten years to get on his knees—the ground was ice cold—and to crawl from pavement to snow-covered dog-shit smeared grass. There he climbed to his wobbly feet at the edge of the mob. It seemed to him that something was really happening. Was he on a train being searched by Feds? If not then why was that rumbling going on beneath his feet? Perhaps some hanky-panky on the part of MRF? He heard ’em up there in the dark even now: geese flying overhead. Bright red and white lights flashing. Cops. Medics. He stumbled back into bluer shadows. Wasn't that Edith there at the edge of the crowd—dressed as Kitty in
Gunsmoke
? Without a coat . . . Mason touched the wetness on his beard. Held his hand out under a beam of light coming through fractured tree limbs: blood. It was warm blood and his . . . He felt his teeth. Big one right in front on the left was loose. Ah, Holy Kabbala! Cable Cab Calloway! He was losing his grip. With his tongue's tip he held the big chopper in place.
Heiner Graf wiped the blood from Mason's face. An irreducible self looked out of Mason up at the Taurus one above him. If this were the world in microcosm Mason wanted nothing to do with it. “Come! Off to the Potsdamer! We have a train to catch!” Mason lifted himself to an elbow. Bettle lava had his tongue glued to his mouth roof. Despite the slat stone and sting of the winter night, Mason was sweating rutabagas. And where were they going? He felt a blazing need for Wongo's galaxy of advice. This insane journey was driving him bananas. Who was this grief-stricken maniac pulling at his arm? Hadn't they just swam the Spree all the way to a fruit barge anchored near the Reichstag and the Friedrichstrasse. And hadn't he fallen into a soot-covered barrel of coal covered with kerosene-smelling snow. And who was it that saved this Taurus clown from his own skullduggery when a bunch of workers at the Anhalter Bahnhof wanted to nail him to a fence beneath a billboard that said, “Shop at The Karstadt!” Then wasn't it just hours ago that they'd gone to the bloody railroad anyway and hadn't they travelled some distance. And got mixed up with a bunch of strikers and beaten by the police in front of a factory gate in north Berlin. And it couldn't have been too long ago that this same man led him along the aisle of a devil-out-of-hell S-Bahn car filled with people as stunned and stiff as figures in an Ernst Fritsch or a Cesar Klein. They were all armed with cubist costumes. So why go anywhere else? What was the point. Mason didn't want to get up. Something, perhaps his left knee, was frozen. An asteroid churned in his lower stomach. He felt the lunar blues. Yet Graf pulled him up and leaned him against a car that looked like a middle-aged nude by Grosz. This had to be a frame-up. Else why had he seen Florence Soukhanov, a fictional character of his own making, in a coffee shop on Potsdamer Strasse spying on him from behind a crisp copy of
Der Sturm.
And why had he been unable to convince Graf that she was a spy for Painted Turtle. Graf claimed he'd never heard of Painted Turtle. He also denied knowing Little Sally Walker too. But Mason knew something was fishy about this whole situation. It
wasn't just his well-justified paranoia. As Mason attempted to sink like a wet noodle, Graf held him up. “Care to dance?” “Not funny,” Graf said. “Well miss the train. If we're going to do this thing right we should go all the way. You haven't seen the winter bathers at the Wannsee Standbad. I must take you to the grave sites too. Look! There's a cop coming. Let's move! Can you walk?” They were on a one-way street.