Americana (36 page)

* * *

Sullivan tapped a few ashes from her cigarette into the salad she was tossing.

“We used to sit around our quarters after a strike,” Brand said. “There’d be Thaw, Hoppy, Bookchester and this kid Eldred Peck who went to some obscure college down South where he wrote his master’s thesis on the swastika in history. You know, tracing it way back to the early Buddhists, way back almost to the dawn of man. That was his favorite phrase. The dawn of man. And Eldred invented this game we’d play sitting around our quarters after a strike. Except it wasn’t a game really. It was really a peculiar form of conversation, almost a religious chant. It even had a name. It was called Godsave. Eldred always started it off. He was younger than any of us and he had hair that was more white than blond, so white it was almost pink, a thin skinny kid who almost disappeared every time he put on his G-suit. Godsave the 94 women and children I vaporized this morning, he’d say. And
we’d all follow in turn. Godsave the blind monk I incinerated with nape, Hoppy’d say. Godsave the nursery school I reduced to fine ash. Godsave the old folks’ home I expunged with a 750-pounder. Godsave the 328 librarians I strafed into Swiss cheese. Godsave the team of neutral observers I burned to a crisp. Godsave the interdenominational missionary group on their 17-day excursion who never knew what hit them. After about a month Eldred refined the chanting. He made it more orthodox, more rigid; he purified it. He made us recite the same words every time. Each man had his own chant and it was the only one he was allowed to use and we’d go through the group in order, Eldred first, then Bookchester, Thaw, Hoppy and me, repeating the godsaves sometimes for two hours or more, the same five lines, one for each of us. Godsave the testaments of the increasingly real world. Godsave the poor bastards on our own side who get ubiquitized into all-pervasive spiritual flotsam by our well-intentioned bombs. Godsave our loved ones at home and may their vaginas expand and flourish. Godsave the dawn of man, which is once again imminent in the cyclic time-reversal mode. Godsave God. That was my chant. Godsave God. It was like a religious ceremony but full of ironies you don’t find in most religions. And sometimes we laughed all through the chanting. Eldred was a strange kid. He was something like the way I am now. But he was way ahead of his time. He anticipated the comeback of the real world. Things become more real in proportion to the unreality of individual lives. The world has never been more real than it is now. I didn’t learn that at Yale. I learned it from Eldred. The sky devoured him. He was the first to get it. But that wasn’t the end of the godsaves. All we did was drop his chant and change Thaw’s. Godsave Eldred Peck and his little pink pecker. Then Bookchester and Thaw got it on the same day. Hostile aircraft. Bad guys. Godsave God, I chanted that night. But Hoppy just slopped down his beer.”

“Would you like me to roll one?” Sullivan said.

“Thank you, lady. But I think maybe later.”

We ate lunch and then Sullivan and Brand decided to walk into town and find a place where they might buy a chess set. I was slightly annoyed at this because I didn’t know the game at all. After they left I watched Pike tilt back his head and swallow, face cracking as the whisky burned its way down.

“We can leave for Colorado in a week or so if you like.”

“What for?” he said.

“You want to confront a cougar before you die, don’t you? No iron bars in the way. We’ll go up into the Rockies.”

“Pass me that ashtray.”

“You want to go, don’t you? That’s why you came along in the first place, isn’t it?”

“In Baltymore once I saw all manner of beast and fowl without leaving my room. I was blast-ass drunk for two, three weeks. Who needs the Rocky Mountains? This life isn’t so big that it won’t fit inside a bottle.”

“Sully told me once that you saved her life. Did she mean that literally?”

“She means everything literally. Don’t kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally.”

“How did you save her life?” I said.

“She had a fly eating her brain. This tiny fly had got stuck in her ear and then somehow crawled into her head. The buzzing was driving her nuts. Then it started eating her brain. She could hear the chewing in there. So we went up to her studio and I performed delicate brain surgery despite my unsteady hands. That fly was just a baby fly when it got in there but by the time I opened up her head and got it out after all the eating it did it was about the size of a good-size snail.”

“Who pays for all the liquor you drink? I can’t believe you’ve made that much money in your whole life.”

“Take off, Jack.”

“Name’s Dave.”

“Jack. Jackoff. Jackass. Jackdaw. Jackal. Jackal feeding on
dead cougar. Jackal B. DeMille. What do you know about making movies?”

“I’ve spent twenty-eight years in the movies,” I said.

* * *

Austin Wakely was a fledgling actor and there was no mission he would not undertake to please the ego of the camera. He had been given only four hours to learn his lines but he professed to be never readier. I played with the tape recorder’s giant dials.

“You know, this interview technique isn’t anything new.”

“I’m inventing the primitive,” I said. “The others, in their anxiety, were merely stumbling upon certain pseudo-archaic forms. I myself did something of the sort for a TV show of my own devising. But that was TV.”

“Can you pan with that tripod?”

“Not tonight.”

“Don’t you have a lavalier mike I can wear?”

“Nope.”

“You know, they have things called diffusion filters that you can use to soften the actor’s face in tight shots.”

“Austin, let’s dispense with terminology and see if we can weave a spell over this April evening. There won’t be any tight shots. I want you standing against that bare stretch of wall. Is Carol married, by the way?”

“News to me if she is.”

“Interesting girl,” I said.

“Drotty thinks she’s too intense. He wants her to exteriorize.”

“Okay, we’re ready. Try to avoid theatrical pauses. And keep inflection to a minimum.”

I sighted on Austin against the wall and then started shooting, my voice a cheerful machine designed for the interrogation of the confused and the dislocated.

“Marital status.”

“Divorced.”

“Children.”

“None.”

“Appendix.”

“Excised.”

“What do you think of the war?” I said.

“I’ve seen it on television. It’s sponsored by instant coffee among other things. The commercials are very tasteful in keeping with the serious theme of the program’s content. Some of the commercials are racially integrated. Since I worked for seven years as an employee of the network responsible for the warcasts, I am in a position to point out that the network and the agency joined forces in order to convince the sponsor that integrated commercials were desirable. Their argument was that the war itself is integrated. Balanced programming has always been one of the network’s chief aims.”

“Draft status.”

“I took my physical right after college. Trick knee. Terminal dandruff. They were more discriminating in those days.”

“How long were you married?”

“About three years.”

“Can you tell the camera why you didn’t have children?”

“We wanted to have fun first. We decided that children could wait until after the fun was over, after Europe, after we became established.”

“Did you go to Europe?”

“Not until we were divorced. We met in Florence and drank orangeade. I was staying in a fourteenth-century palazzo. In the dining room one evening I began a conversation with a very unattractive girl who turned out to be both German and lame. We spent part of the night in her—not my—room and in the morning I met my ex-wife on the Ponte Vecchio and we walked through the city for hours. By early evening she had developed a slight limp and I discovered I did not want to be with her anymore.”

“What caused the divorce?”

“My image began to blur. This became a problem for both
of us. However, we have continued to be very fond of each other. Divorce is a wonderful invention, much better than protracted separation or murder. It destroys tension. It liberates many wholesome emotions which had been tyrannized by the various mental cruelties. Divorce is the most educating route to a deep understanding between two people. It’s the second and most important step in arriving at a truly radiant form of self-donative love. Marriage, of course, is the first step.”

“Parents.”

“Mother deceased.”

“Father.”

“He’s buried alive but still breathing. I don’t really look forward to his death. But I admit it would bring relief.”

“Why?” I said.

“I remember the sound of his bare feet on the stairs. He never wore slippers, my father. People were always giving him slippers for Christmas. But there is a certain kind of American masculinity which precludes the wearing of articles of clothing which might possibly dull the effect of the brutal truth of one’s immediate environment.”

“The camera dislikes evasiveness. As Mr. Hitchcock says, one must not use flashback to deceive. What are you proud of, if anything?”

“I’ve made many short movies of one kind or another. Weekend films. Orgy-porgies. Nonplot things with friends. More than a hobby but not much more. Until this point, of course. And I used to be proud of one of the things I did. It was done in Central Park during a ceremony following one of the assassinations. There was an old Negro couple standing at the back of the crowd. The man was tall and lean with a face like a rock pointing out to sea. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with a high starched collar, rounded at the edges, and a black tie knotted about an inch below the top button of his shirt. He held a black hat in his hand. The woman was almost as tall as he was and her face in its own way was just
as strong, but softer somehow, not rock but earth. The word dignity is unavoidable. And I felt for some reason that they were not husband and wife but brother and sister. Whatever they were, they looked like pillars of the black Baptist Church. They stood listening to the speeches and music, standing absolutely straight, absolutely motionless, and I raised my camera and began to shoot. From time to time I’d go into the crowd or train the camera on one of the platform speakers. But I’d always come back to the old Negro couple. I must have looked at that scrap of film fifty times. It meant a lot to me. I was proud of it. It wasn’t just a day in the park or something you see on the seven o’clock news. Those two faces seemed more enduring than the republic itself. The film began with them and ended with them. They framed a sense of confusion. At least that’s what I thought. It took me a long time to see how wrong I was. The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell the camera?”

“Simply hello. Hello to myself in the remote future, watching this in fear and darkness. Hello to that America, whatever it may be doing or undoing. I hope you’ve finally become part of your time, David. You were always a bit behind, held back by obsolete sensibilities.”

“Do you have any particular ambition in life?”

“To get out of it alive.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I shut down all systems, tape and film, and we talked for a while on subjects of no interest to either of us. Then Austin left and I took a blank piece of paper, crumpled it into a tight sphere and began tossing jump shots at the wastebasket. I pretended to be Oscar Robertson against Jerry West. An hour
later I banked in a long left-hand hook and went to bed. It was the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death.

I bought a hat, the first I had owned since childhood, a gray plaid bop cap which I wore with a magical child’s belief in the infinities of common things. During the drive from New York to Maine I had worn at times a khaki fatigue cap, borrowed from Pike, but he had taken it back and buried it in his sea bag; no war games allowed with his private battle gear. On the hotel bed I rested, cap over my eyes. A full morning brushed through the shuddering blinds. Fellini, master of hats and noses, understands the philosophical nature of costume. My twenty-eight years in the movies. Making of a life so easily made that a hat on the head could become the man. The hat wore me. Arrivato Zampanó: the trailer and the road, her flawed boy’s body announcing the strongman, and he in chains, bellowing. My teeth clicking in the dark at the Bleecker Street Cinema as they dance across the sky, a necklace of chessmen, hands locked in the northern dawn. Eyes closed, I inhaled some industrial gloom from the hat’s soft lining, L. S. Stratford Ltd., bit of Finney falling down the stairs. I looked between the cracks inside the dark. Burt Lancaster toweling his chest: (and we live there, grubbing, in the pores). Bell looking at the poster of Belmondo looking at the poster of purposeful Bogart. Old man on the swing, Watanabe, singing to his unseen infancy. I took a walk around the bed, missing those stale chambers on the West Side, nicely epicene in their way, a touch of seedy glamour drifting in off Needle Park, pale tapering men who live for the films of the thirties. Shane rides toward the immaculate mountains.

* * *

I walked out to Howley Road, a cool night frozen over with stars. The light was on inside the camper and as I approached there worked up through my stomach the boy’s delightful feeling of being a scout moving into enemy territory, moving
through the darkness toward an outpost where the unsuspecting enemy sits smoking, just seconds from silent expert death.

“Today’s my birthday,” Brand said. “We’re trying to think of ways to celebrate.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“You’re two years older than I am. What’s it like to be thirty? A friend of mine told me three things happened when he reached thirty. He gained weight around the middle. He stopped reading novels. And he had a recurring year-long dream about a tapeworm in his stomach that gets so big it begins literally to outgrow him. It feeds on his vital organs, getting bigger as he gets smaller and weaker, until finally when it works its way out of his mouth, eating his gums and teeth in the process, it weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, most of it him, and he’s down to thirty pounds of bone and translucent skin and he falls on the floor and sees the huge slimy jaws of the tapeworm fitting themselves around his head as he wakes up. Warren Beasley told me that story, the radio personality.”