A Moveable Famine (24 page)

Hankard handed me the pen and notebook. I wrote my name in the most beautiful letters that ever flowed from my fingertips.

“Some writers care about their writing utensils,” Hankard said. “What do you care about, Creeley?”

“I care about the freedom to be absolutely who I am at any given moment. I thank the sun for that every morning when I open my eye.”

We stood, leaving Hankard with Vince, but Vince left him with the words, “Did you just say
cosmologically speaking
?” and moved to the bar. Porter told Creeley that the Old Colony was a short walk, and part of a bad restaurant called The Sea Pool, nicknamed The Cesspool.

The OC’s rafters hung with the name of local businesses, many of them defunct, and many unreadable from years of smoke, dust and grease. Duarte Motors. The
Provincetown Advocate.
Days Propane. At a corner table, Corso sat wrapped to the nose in a brown blanket, looking more like a tepee than a man. A young blonde talked to him earnestly.

“Gregory!” Creeley called, a thunderclap booming from his hands.

Corso tossed his blanket and embraced his friend. We sat at the table and Porter went for drinks. Corso introduced us to the blonde, saying, “I just gave her an Indian name,
Angel with Jet Lag
.”

“What’s your Indian name?” I asked.

“Crazy Cowbell.”

Creeley and Corso had a lot to catch up on, so Porter and I went to the Back Room, a dance floor with a swimming pool on the bay. It was two-for-one night, the whole place reeling. Loud music made conversation impossible, but keeping to yourself amid the rollicking atmosphere was a certain pleasure. An hour later, Corso entered in a gold lamé gown. Creeley wore the blanket and headed straight for the bar where he pretended not to speak English, and made gestures until the bartender served tequila. When Creeley approached our table, Porter advised not matching him drink for drink. Corso joined us, and despite Porter’s wisdom, we continued amid the voices of Barry White and Gloria Gaynor. Creeley suddenly pounced onto the floor, his dancing a kind of running in place. Corso snatched a bag of chips from the adjoining table that held a dozen empties. The two women didn’t seem to mind, which Corso took as a sign to slide his chair over and sip their bottles of Bud. Despite the deafening music, which blared through the air without a halt, I could hear Corso screaming at them, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!” The women remained calm but after a few more pronouncements from Gregory, the larger of the women stood, and with one great motion, gathered all the bottles into the crook of her arm and swiped them into Corso’s lap. Creeley’s dancing had devolved into jumping jacks, which he stopped only to pilfer drinks from surrounding tables. When the bouncer grabbed him by the collar, he pretended not to speak English again and we left followed by Corso who couldn’t stop laughing. We were heading for Porter’s when Creeley threw himself across the hood of a patrol car, pounding it with both hands. He was cuffed and taken away. Corso vanished. Porter and I sat on the benches in front of town hall with cups of coffee until I left him at two a.m. The streets thickened with a fog so dense that pedestrians banged into each other. As I neared the Bull Ring, I heard music. On the corner I recognized the song, and in the parking lot I recognized the singer. Wayne perched on the top deck, strumming his guitar and hitting a bass drum with a foot pedal. He sang into a microphone, which had a kazoo taped to it.
Here comes the sun, Toot-Ta-Toot-Toot. Here comes the sun. Toot-Ta-Toot-Toot. It’s all right. . . . .
I waved and he nodded as best he could. I fell onto my couch, drifting asleep to Wayne’s one-man band, and I promised myself to start writing the next day.

The next day I was too dehydrated to do anything but walk to the A&P for a can of soup. I met Kurt in the juice aisle where he had regained his human shape. He held a piece of tailpipe in one hand and a can of V8 in the other, hoping to find the right circumference to patch his exhaust system. I called Hester from the pay phone in the vegetable section.

“You missed a good time last night,” I said.

“How was the reading?” she asked. “I was erstwhile occupied.”

“Great,” I said. “And so was the party.”

“What can I do for you, John?”

I said I just wanted to tell her about the reading and we said good-bye. Over the next weeks, I saw Hester walking into Dave’s Clockhead, a gay bar with a wall of cuckoo clocks; knocking on Zoe’s door at the Work Center; strolling with Synchro, the owner of Café Blase, and sometimes with his business partner, Arnie, and sometimes arm in arm with both. A car passed me, and a man with a condom over his head poked it out the passenger side window. Hester was driving. I saw her with the transvestite Musty Chiffon and the puppeteer Wayland Flowers.

She was not going to be my girl.

Stanley was leaving for New York in mid-November, and Porter advised me to make an appointment with him. He had told me Stanley’s life story, his father killing himself when his mother was pregnant with him, that he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard but was denied the teaching post automatically granted to those with that honor because he was Jewish. I sorted through my best poems from a year ago and in doing so realized that Stanley’s presence, his faith in all of us, had intimidated me into editing myself before I even began to write. As Post-Elliot had become an author of titles alone, I was a one-line wonder. I saw myself years later, next to him on a bar stool, our collected works amounting to a few inches of text.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

NOT MANY BUT MUCH—PO-BIZ IN THE GARDEN—THE ART SPIRIT—PIPE STEMS—NEW FRIENDS

I
’d been circumnavigating The Fo’c’sle’s beckoning beer mugs and rocks glasses by cutting over to Bradford Street until I was beyond it, then walking back to Commercial, making a circuitous box of a path. I went that way to see Stanley, who lived near land’s end. I opened the metal gate to tiers of flowers and herbs that curled over the timber edging their beds. Oriental cherry trees and weeping birches added privacy. Bluestone squares led to a porch where, to my surprise, Stanley sat with a large man in suspenders and a straw fedora. Chet Cunningham directed the Poetry Society of America and, when I shook his hand, he nodded to the rolled-up poems I carried and asked if I had come to see the oracle. Stanley explained I was a fellow. I took a seat next to them, our three chairs facing the garden. Stanley looked at me over those enormous bags under his eyes and said, “We’re talking po-biz,” and chuckled.

“Make all the connections you can while you’re here,” Cunningham said.

Stanley seemed embarrassed. “I don’t know about that,” he said.

“Sure!” Cunningham said. “Visiting poets tell editors who they met. Stanley, I wouldn’t mind giving a reading and spending a few days in P’town.”

“I think Porter already has the list,” Stanley said, “but we’ll see.”

“If someone cancels, I’m here!” he said, poking his palm with his index finger. “Tell Porter. He’s in charge, right?”

“That’s right,” Stanley said in his singsong way.

“Where have you published?” Cunningham asked.

“Not many places,” I said. “A few quarterlies.”

“Keep sending your stuff out,” he said. “Reputations are made by quantity.”

“The Italians have a saying,
Not many but much.
I think that’s a better way,” Stanley said.

“Why not both?” Cunningham said. “Swing for the fences! By the way, Stanley, did you see that the governor asked Rod McKuen to that group he invited to Albany? There are a hundred better poets.
I
would have gone!”

Stanley’s wince was not enough to stop Cunningham.

“Don’t you think I’m right Stanley, it’s a disgrace?”

“He’s no worse than many who were invited,” Stanley said.

“I know you don’t mean that, Stanley,” Cunningham said. “You just can’t mean that.”

“Let me show you the garden,” Stanley said.

“Love it,” Cunningham said.

We followed Stanley as he passed each specimen, concerned over some, joyful at others, like the Montauk daisies. We reached a stretch of herbs. Cunningham took me aside and asked me to tell Porter he’d like to be a visiting poet, as he felt Stanley might forget. Stanley bent down, tore off a few green curly leaves, and brought the cluster close to Cunningham’s face. “What’s this?” Stanley asked.

“I don’t know,” Cunningham said.

“Catmint,” Stanley said. We took a few more steps, and Stanley pinched another clump. “And this?” He pushed it under the big man’s nose.

“Not sure, Stanley.”

“Thyme.”

“I don’t know herbs, Stanley,” Cunningham said.

“Um hmm,” Stanley said, bending again and repeating the same gesture.

Cunningham didn’t answer.

“Calendula,” Stanley said. He did the same with comfrey and wormwood. Cunningham put his hands in his pockets and said, “I should be going.” Stanley poked another sprig at him. This time, he didn’t wait for an answer. He looked Cunningham in the eye and said, “Chive.”

Stanley turned, and Cunningham touched his shoulder to get his attention, saying loudly that he was leaving, but Stanley kept walking and raised the back of his hand in farewell.

“Good to meet you,” he said to me, and left.

Stanley pointed out a darkened basement window next to a rank pile of compost. I looked into his study—a desk and chair, two bookcases. The room was smaller than mine at the Bull Ring. We entered the house from the back, walking through the kitchen to a round coffee table near the porch.

“Isn’t he awful?” Stanley said, shrugging and laughing. “He’s making a mess of the poetry society, everyone’s quitting. He wanted my advice.”

I told Stanley how much I liked his last book, particularly, “An Old Cracked Tune.” He said that when he was a boy, he was taunted in his neighborhood with the anti-Semitic jingle, “My name is Solomon Levi! My name is Solomon Levi!” He made a poem of the ridicule:

AN OLD CRACKED TUNE

My name is Solomon Levi,

the desert is my home,

my mother’s breast was thorny,

and father I had none.

The sands whispered,
Be separate,

the stones taught me,
Be hard.

I dance, for the joy of surviving,

on the edge of the road.

Stanley put on his glasses and read my poems while I browsed through stacks of new books. The mailman placed packages in the basket on the door, but Stanley did not break his concentration. When he finished reading, he spread them across the table, saying I should work on texture, and to pay attention to my endings, which he said “came thudding to a close.” I agreed with the texture. Flat language was a weakness. But the endings! I worked so hard on my endings! Stanley said the poems were just getting interesting when they circled back to the first lines. Worst of all, I was not realizing my whole self and soul.

“In these poems, you’re only halfway down the well,” he said. “You must rake the bottom slime.” I couldn’t resist quoting the edict that drove my lines across the page like battalions on a forced march. “What about Yeats saying that a poem should close with a click like the lid on a box?”

“The ending should be a door and a window,” he said. “It should close, but you should be able to look through it.”

I followed him into the kitchen where he made martinis. We took our glasses to the porch. Stanley’s neighbor, Jack Tworkov, entered the garden. He sat with us and praised the flowers, asking Stanley how he found the time. Stanley said he did a lot of his work there, it was meditative, and he didn’t like to be interrupted. He said Rothko never forgave him for not inviting him in when he passed by, but Stanley considered the garden his real study.

Jack said he had just wiped away most of a big painting he had worked on for weeks. He crushed his bald head with the palms of his hands, but his gesture of angst had more than a bit of hope in it. He was eager to get back to the studio. Stanley said I had just shown him some poems. Jack said he gave a crit to a fellow but it went badly. He wondered if he had been too harsh.

“When you point out someone’s flaws,” Stanley said, “they sometimes resent you for it. But when a mirror reflects our ugliness, we call it a good mirror.” He peeked over at me, chuckling.

“How’s your fellowship going?” Jack asked.

I went into a long monologue mentioning my sliding typewriter, the Bull Ring’s noise, the temptations of the bars and female fellows, my doubting my ability, my writing only first lines—in general, the answer of an idiot.

Jack said, “You can draw a dream with a number two pencil if you’re open to the dream.” Stanley walked him to the gate then hopped to his study, returning with an old paperback of Robert Henri’s
The Art Spirit
that he said I could keep.

“You’ll see why,” he said.

In my motel room, I opened Henri’s book to the sentence, “A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.” Stanley had written about perishing into work and, at our first meeting, Dugan pointed out that we were at the Fine Arts
Work
Center. He lent me Rilke’s book on Rodin, whose first sentence read, “Rodin was solitary before he became famous, and he was more solitary after he became famous, for what is fame, but the accumulation of misunderstandings that surrounds a name.” I had brought Pavese’s
Lavorare Stanca,
or
Hard Labor
with me, but Pavese meant the labor of everyday life. Here I was free of that, and yet everywhere I turned I saw work I wasn’t doing. The
New Yorker
took a poem by Ted Page and we were all thrilled. At Iowa, the news would have sent students and teachers running with their heads in their hands. Stanley said, “Live in the layers/not on the litter,” and poetry business, gossip and envy were all consigned to the litter. That there were larger issues than craft had escaped me, issues that could be addressed in a dank study near a compost heap, or with a humble nub of lead.