A Moveable Famine (5 page)

“Fairfield.”

“Never heard of it.” Harvey turned to Ridge. “Charlotte’s pretty, isn’t she? And a good poet. She studied with Lamont at Goddard. They had an affair. I don’t know what she sees in that twerp who left class today.”

“He studied with Levine,” Ridge said.

Harvey shook his head. “I remember Phil’s letter,” he said. “He wasn’t that wild about him.”

In a booth across the aisle, Lawson sat in front of a glass of white wine with members of the English Department. We overheard him saying, “In creative writing, the verb ‘to teach,’ means to chide clichés, satirize pomposities, and dull the blades of the overly competitive.” Harvey left to join them.

“He’d die if he knew I fucked Charlotte,” Ridge said, and then he reached across the table and pinched the cuff of my green and white checked flannel shirt. “No one in the workshop dresses like this. There’s a thrift store next to the hospital, a lot of us go there.” Ridge gave his advice so frankly that we were both laughing, and I looked at him as I hadn’t before: a black turtle neck scribbled with lint. On the way out I winced at my flannel reflection in the window and felt the need for a higher power, a North Star, a feeling I had once at Fairfield when I walked into a dorm room just as one of my friends was saying to his roommate, “He’s a pathetic empathy of Allen Ginsberg.” When he saw me, he turned red and his roommate hunched over his desk. They were talking about me. I didn’t know what an “empathy” was, but I could gauge his intent. I was a poor copy. Later, when I looked it up, I found it was not a noun the way they used it, but I still took the remark to heart. I did love Ginsberg. Was it showing too much? Was I drifting into a parody of the literary figures I worshipped? In desperation, I went to Sunday mass in the chapel, kneeling among my fellow students who had fallen into a deep solemnity, with bowed heads and folded hands, their focus straight at the altar. When the priest called for a response, they struck their chests, vowing with the rest, “Through my Fault! Through my Fault!” More than fifty fists and fifty exclamations underscored the final expiation, “Through my Most Grievous Fault!” A baritone passion filled the chapel accompanied by the scent from votive candles like a surfeit of bouquets at a wake, a warm, choking wave. When I walked out early, a few students looked at me with sympathetic eyes, as passengers on a ship steam away from a man overboard, and I felt the same sensation as I left The Deadwood.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

SRI CHINMOY—BEER BY BEER—THE ANTI-JINGLE BELLS—A TOUPEE IN THE SUBWAY—LA HUERTA—WORKSHOP JARGON—RAs, TAs and TWFs

H
arvey told us he addressed all his poems to his dead father and, in Problems in Modern Poetry, he played a record of Judy Collins singing “My Father” to inspire us to do the same. A student who came from an abusive alcoholic background wrote:

We called him
Dad
because we couldn’t call him an asshole and have any teeth left.

When Harvey insisted that the father must have had some good qualities, the poet opened his mouth and pulled out a bridge where his front teeth had been.

Everyone’s work was more advanced than mine, their poems formed in the workshop style. My New York School influences still gave me a tingle but interested no one. I listened intently to Harvey, and spent evenings in the library’s poetry section. Leaving there one night I passed a room where Sri Chinmoy was getting ready to speak, and I went in. Pound’s Confucian cantos intrigued me, and I felt, too, that the East might offer spiritual comfort. A professor introduced him, saying the guru slept only ninety minutes a day, had the strength to pick up cement mixers and had lifted many heads of state off the ground. Chinmoy spoke for thirty minutes about the need for world peace. When he took questions, someone asked him the meaning of life. I was so struck by the simplicity of the question that I missed the answer. I overcame my shyness and asked if there was any relationship between atman, meaning breath or soul, and the soulful jazz of musicians playing wind instruments, which came from breath. I was so struck by the convolution of my question that I missed that answer too.

Many workshop students enrolled in The Hand-Printed Book, publishing their own poems in tiny editions. Others studied photography and Chinese painting. Everyone studied drinking, and full-time instructors included Raymond Carver and John Cheever. After every workshop, I went to The Deadwood with Ridge, Pryor, and McPeak. McPeak lived across the Mississippi, in Moline, Illinois, where he taught high school. He was born there, married his childhood sweetheart and had two small daughters. Now, at thirty, he took one workshop each semester, hanging out in bars, moving toward his degree credit by credit, beer by beer. Wearing polyester pants and rayon ties, keeping his curly red hair and beard trimmed, he seemed a conventional suburbanite, which he was, except for his mania about poetry, jazz, alcohol and women.

McPeak had a crush on Brandy and asked her to go to the movies. She put her finger to her lips and said, “I don’t tink-toe.” When she left, Pryor said that the bartender, a 300-pound biker named Fenster, was her boyfriend. Ridge urged McPeak to expand his quest. He nodded at a table of female students, saying, “Each one guaranteed to have a cunt.”

Going from my parents’ apartment in Queens to an all-male college, I had scant sexual experience. I had met one girl at a Fairfield mixer, Holly Proper, pronounced, she said,
Pro
-per, from Marymount. A hippie flower child, she invited me to her midtown apartment when her parents were away over Christmas. We met at the information booth at Grand Central but, before she arrived, I found myself staring at the beautiful women, gawking, really, my eyes following a girl in a short dress. A rough voice interrupted my fantasy, saying, “You wouldn’t know what to do with it, boy!” I turned to see a smiling, unshaven man in rags sitting on a bag of rags, with a rag on his head.

Holly and I walked down Fifth Avenue, past Lord & Taylor’s windows where mechanical elves hammered toys in Santa’s workshop. Her long bellbottom jeans, torn at the heels, scraped the cement. A rattling sound surrounded her every step, like a shaking tin of coins. She hiked her frayed cuff, revealing a string of brass discs tied to her ankle by a purple cord. “Anti-jingle bells,” she said.

At her parents’ place, she showed me her collection of Richard Brautigan books. I thought his work childlike, but since she was deep into the west coast underground, I guessed I had missed something. She sat cross-legged on a couch in the living room and read:

Fuck me like fried potatoes
on the most beautifully hungry
morning of my God-damn life.

She unzipped my fly. She got on her knees and it didn’t take a moment, which surprised her. She tugged off her jeans and panties, sat on the couch and spread her legs, guiding my head there. I kissed her thick pubic hair, but the vagrant’s words at Grand Central came back to me. I realized he was right and, a few minutes later, so did she. She took off her top and pushed my lips against her large nipples as she masturbated, jingling the anti-jingle bells.

On the train to Queens I sat near the open door between cars, miserable about my sexual performance. A man in a blue Dickies work shirt and pants dozed across the aisle, undisturbed by the slamming chain handrails and wheels clanging beneath the metal coupler. He was coming home from his shift, his newspaper and lunch box beside him. He leaned farther and farther forward, nodding off, then tossing his head upright, never opening his eyes. I was reading
The Portable Blake,
and the passenger’s fatigued shoulders and unshaven face bobbed at the margins of the songs of innocence. As the train lurched, he lurched with it and a toupee dropped from the crown of his head. The now bald man continued to bend over what looked like half a hollowed-out grapefruit, with four pieces of doubled-sided tape stuck to the inside. The train shifted and rattled, the half sphere inching toward the open space between cars. I debated retrieving it for him, but hesitated each time his head snapped back. The hairpiece nudged the metal grid next to the door, about to be sucked away, and I grabbed it. As I was about to place it next to his lunch box, he opened his eyes and saw me holding his secret, a badly kept secret, and now an open secret.

“You dropped this,” I said.

“Like hell I did,” he said, snatching it and checking the seat for his lunch box. “I’m calling a cop.” He popped it on his head with the sound of a thwacked tennis ball, shook his shoulders to recover his dignity, pulled himself erect, and walked off as if peering over a crowd. I felt that if I had let it drift away, it would have been a sin, wrong to let the man lose his disguise. My Catholic guilt had gotten me in trouble. I realized, too, that my poking fun at Ruskin had come back to haunt me, and I suddenly sympathized with him. What a better time I would have had if Holly were bald as a statue.

Barkhausen stood by our table at The Deadwood and said, “I hear Belinda Schaeffer shaves her pubes.” Pulling up a chair, he lit a cigarette and ordered a shot of rye, saying to Brandy, “And make it a good, healthy shot, too.” It was the first time she seemed annoyed. Barkhausen wore a heavy motorcycle jacket with zippers and studs.

“What are you talking about?” Ridge asked.

“Someone in the workshop wrote a poem about her, that’s all I’ll say for now.”

“How’s Lawson’s class?” Pryor asked. Pryor was smarting from Barkhausen getting in.

“Great,” Barkhausen said, exhaling toward a poster of Jesse James. “But he doesn’t like much. He shoots everyone down.” He made his hand into a pistol and aimed his index finger at Pryor.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” McPeak said.

“Does he like your work, Ridge?” Barkhausen asked.

“I think so,” Ridge said, taken slightly aback. “He’s been supportive.”

“I’m disappointed in the lit courses,” Barkhausen said. “I wanted to study the Russians, not just English.”

“Like who?” Pryor asked.

“Mandelstam. Pasternak. Pushpin.”

When we laughed, Barkhausen looked puzzled. He pulled magazines out of his leather satchel, and gave us copies of the journal he published,
La Huerta.
When I opened it, I saw he was the featured poet, with a special section excerpted from his series, “The Devil’s Dance.”

“What does the
la huerta
mean?” I asked.

“The whorehouse.”

“Not really,” Ridge said. “It means the
orchard
.”

Barkhausen tapped the tip of his Marlboro toward the ashtray, sending cinders into Pryor’s drink. “If you get in

a taxi in Mexico City and say
la huerta,
the driver will take you to a woman.”

Ridge laughed. “If you say
la huerta,
the driver will take you to an orchard.”

Every song playing on the jukebox was by Elton John. After hearing “Tiny Dancer” and “Rocket Man” three times, Ridge gave a few quarters to Brandy, and we heard “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” and Scott Joplin’s theme from the movie, “The Sting.”

“This is almost worse,” Ridge said.

“I hate ragtime,” McPeak said. “My father played that shit when I was a kid, and here it is again.”

Barkhausen disagreed. “I like Scotch Opera,” he said. Ridge looked at me, and mouthed,
Scott Joplin?

Pryor said he just framed a broadside by his former teacher, the English poet, Malcolm Gee. He quoted the first line: “Your pathetic isolation dwindles me.”

“Sounds like a bad translation,” Ridge said. “And it’s self-pitying.”

Barkhausen cut in, “And a bit sedimental. Did you hear that Rimbaud drank absinthe before he wrote? He disengaged his senses.”

“You wish you could write like Gee,” Pryor said, huddling defensively over his beer.

No one seemed to notice Barkhausen’s opinion.

“Gee snorts baby chick fluff before he writes,” Ridge said.

“Remember when Stanley Elkin was here?” McPeak asked. “He met with a student and said, ‘You are the god of boredom.’ That’s how I feel about Gee.”

I didn’t know who Gee was, so I ordered another beer.

Pryor’s feelings were hurt, but Barkhausen, off in his own world, asked, “If Lawson were a baseball player, what position would he play?”

“Relief pitcher,” Ridge said. “He’d throw strikes for a few innings, that’s it. Could never go the distance.” He ordered more beer, and said that in one class there had been a debate over the difference between “gray” and “grey.” Pryor said that “gray” has a more metallic sheen. McPeak cornered Brandy under a holster holding two six-guns and asked her opinion.

Ridge had encouraged me to send my poems out and, when the others left, I showed him acceptance letters from
Chicago Review
and
Poetry Northwest
. He smiled, not unkindly, but in a way that made me feel I was displaying silly trophies. I needed the physical proof for myself. Everything else about poetry was invisible—it wafted around us and sometimes through us. So seeing a concrete thing, even a slip of paper I’d toss to the wind on my way home, and even if that paper clung to the base of a litter basket, it was no longer an idea or a feeling, but something real.