Desolation Angels (40 page)

I think it was because I looked like the older catatonic brother, at least Laz told me so.

Later I went to visit my old friend Deni Bleu.

Deni Bleu is that fantastic character I lived with on the West Coast in my road days, who stole everything in sight but gave it away to widows sometimes (
Bon coeur
, good heart) and who was now living meanly I'd say in an apartment on 13th Street near the waterfront with an icebox (in which nevertheless he still stored his home made special recipe chicken consommé)—Who'd put on Chef hats and roast whole huge Turkeys on Thanksgiving for parties of Village hipsters and beatniks who only ended up sneaking out with drumsticks in their coats—Only because he wanted to meet a cool Greenwich Village chick—Poor Deni. Deni who had a telephone and a full icebox and bums who preyed on him, sometimes when he went away on weekends the bums'd leave all the lights on, all the water running and the doors to his apartment unlocked—Who was continually being betrayed, even by
me,
as he claimed. “Now Duluoz,” says this big 220-pound blackhaired fat Frenchman (who'd stolen and now only
scrounged
for what was
due
him), “you have always messed me up no matter how you tried to do otherwise—I see you now and I feel pity for you.” He whipped out some government bonds with photos of him pointing at the government bonds and in red ink is written:
I shall always be able to afford consommé and turkey.
He lived only a block away from the Ruths. “Now that I see you so scroungy, and sad, and down on your luck, and lost, and cant even buy yourself a drink, or even say ‘Deni, you've fed me many times but will you please lend me so and so?' because you've never,
never
asked me to lend you money” (he was a seaman and a furniture mover between trips, an old prepschool friend of mine my father'd met and
liked
) (but Julien'd said his hands and feet were too small to go with his huge powerful body) (but who you gonna listen to?) he now says to me: “So I'm giving you this genuine vicuña coat as soon as with this razor blade I cut out the very important fur lining—”

“Where'd you get the coat?”

“Never
mind
where I got the coat, but since you insist, since you're angling for some way to mess me up, since
en effet vous ne voulez pas me croire,
I got this coat in an empty warehouse while I was moving out some furniture—It so happens that I had information at the time that the owner of the coat was dead,
mort,
so I took it, do you under
stand
Duluoz?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah he says” and looking up at his Angel-like Tom Wolfe's brother. “All he's got to say is ‘Yeah' and I'm about to give him a two-hundred-dollar coat!” (It was only a year later the Washington scandal about vicuña coats, unborn calf coats, was about to start) (but first he took out the fur lining). The coat was huge, long, hung to my shoes.

I said “Deni, do you expect me to walk around the streets of New York with a coat hanging to my shoes?”

“Not only do I expect that,” he said putting a woollen ski cap on my head and yanking it down over my ears, “but I expect you to keep stirring those eggs like I told you.” He'd mixed six scrambled eggs with a quarterpound of butter and cheese and spices, turned on a low flame, and had me stir with a tablespoon while he busied himself mashing buttered mashed potatoes thru a strainer, for supper at midnight. It was delicious. He showed me some infinitesimal ivory elephant figurines (about as big as a piece of dust) (from India) and explained to me how delicate they were and how some joker had blown them out of his hand in a bar last New Year's Eve. He also produced a bottle of Benedictine Liqueur which we drank all night. He wanted to be introduced to the Ruths. I knew it wouldnt work. He is an oldfashioned French
raconteur
and
bon vivant
who needs a French wife, and shouldnt be hanging around the Village trying to make those cold lonesome chicks. But as always he held me by the arm and told me all his latest stories, which he repeated the night I invited him to drinks at Julien's and Nessa's. For this occasion he sent a telegram to his favorite not-interested girl saying that we would have cocktails at the home of “
le grand journaliste,
Julien Love” but she never showed up. But after he told all his jokes Nessa got going on her own jokes and Deni laughed so hard he sheed in his pants, went to the bathroom (he'll kill me for this), washed out his shorts, hung them up, came back laughing, absentmindedly forgot them, and when Nessa and I and Julien woke up next morning bleary eyed and sad, we laughed to see the huge world wide shorts hanging from their bathroom shower—“Who could ever be so big to wash those?”

But Deni was no slob.

36

Wearing Deni's huge vicuña coat with the ski cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dali.

He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the café table. He had a little wax mustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said “One grapefruit …
peenk!
” and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real
oro
Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Ucello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didnt even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the “insurgent” “beats” and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, “He is more beautiful than M. Brando.”

I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldnt stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we cant stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful. He said: “As a politician I'm a Royalist—I would like to see the Throne of Spain reborn, Franco and the others out—Last night I finished my latest painting using a pubic hair for the last final touch.”

“Really?”

His wife paid absolutely no attention to this information like it was all natural, which it certainly is. When you're married to Dali with the pubic cane, ah Quoi? In fact I got very friendly with his wife while Dali himself spoke broken French-English-Spanish with crazy Garden who pretended to (and indeed did) understand his speech.

“
Pero, qu'est ce que vous penser de Franco?
”

“
C'est nes pas'd mon affaire, mon homme, entiendes?
”

Meanwhile, the next day, old Deni, no Dali himself but just as good, invites me to earn $4 lifting a gas stove six flights up—We bend our fingers, sinew our wrists, raise the stove and go up six flights to an apartment of queers, one of whom, seeing my wrist's bleeding, puts kindly mercurochrome upon it.

37

Christmas coming up, and Ruth Heaper bored by her grand-father's sending her a whole portable TV, I head south to see my mother again—Ruth kisses me and loves me goodbye. On the way down I plan to see Raphael at the home of Varnum Random the poetry consultant of the Library of Congress—What a mess! But how funny! Even Varnum must remember it with horrified glee. A cab from the railroad station takes me out to the suburbs of Washington D.C.

I see the swell house with dim night lights and ring the doorbell. It's Raphael answers saying “You shouldnt be here but I'm the one told you I was here so here you are.”

“Well does Random mind?”

“No of course not—but he's asleep with his wife now.”

“Is there any booze?”

“He has two beautiful grown daughters you'll see tomorrow—It's a real ball, it's not for you. We'll go to the Zoo in his Mercedes Benz—”

“You got pot?”

“Still got some from Mexico.”

So we turn on in the big empty piano livingroom and Raphael sleeps on the livingroom couch so I can go down in the basement and sleep in the little draped-cubicle couch the Randoms have arranged for him.

Once down there high on pot, I see tubes of oil paint, and paper watercolor books, and paint me two pictures before I sleep … “The Angel” and “The Cat”.…

And in the morning I see the real horror of it all, in fact I added to the horror by my really importunate presence (but I wanted to see Raphael). All I remember is that the incredible Raphael and incredible me were really imposing on this gentle and quiet family the head of which, Varnum, a bearded Kindly Jesuit I guess, bore everything with a manly aristocratic grace, as I was to do later? But Varnum really knew that Raphael was a great poet and drove him off that afternoon to a cocktail party in Cleopatra's Needle while I wheedled in the livingroom writing poems and talking to the youngest daughter, 14, and the oldest, 18, and wondering where the Jack Daniels bourbon of the house was hidden—which I got to later—

There's Varnum Random the great American poet watching the Mud Bowl on TV over his
London Literary Supplement,
Jesuits always seem to be interested in football—He shows me his poems which are as beautiful as Merton's and as technical as Lowell's—Schools of writing limit men, even me. If there were anything somber about holy airplanes during the war I would add the last dark touch. If everybody in the world, when they dream of roosters, died, as Hsieh An said, everybody would be dead at sunrise in Mexico, Burma and the World.… (and Indiana). But no such thing happens in the real world not even in Montmartre when Apollinaire climbs the hill by the pile of bricks to get to his drunken room, as winds of February blow. Bless the ride.

38

And there's insane Raphael with a huge nail and a huge hammer actually banging into the smartly decorated wall so he can hang his oil-on-wood painting of Michelangelo's David—I see the housewife wince—Raphael apparently thinks that painting will be held and revered there on the wall forever right by the Baldwin grand piano and the T'ang Tapestry—Furthermore, he then asks for breakfast—I figure I'd better get going. But Varnum Random actually asks me to stay one more day so I spend the whole afternoon writing poems high on benny in the parlor and I call them the
Washington D.C. Blues
—Random and Urso argue with me about my theory of absolute spontaneity—In the kitchen Random takes out the Jack Daniels and says “How can you get any refined or well gestated thoughts into a spontaneous flow as you call it? It can all end up gibberish.” And that was no Harvard lie. But I said:

“If it's gibberish, it's gibberish. There's a certain amount of control going on like a man telling a story in a bar without interruptions or even one pause.”

“Well it'll probably become a popular gimmick but I prefer to look upon my poetry as a craft.”

“Craft
is
craft.”

“Yes? Meaning?”

“Meaning crafty. How can you confess your crafty soul in craft?”

Raphael took Random's side and yelled:—

“Shelley didnt care about theories about how he was to write ‘The Skylark.' Duluoz you're full of theories like an old college perfesser, you think you know everything.” (“You think you're the only one,” he added to himself.) Triumphantly he swept off with Random in the Mercedes Benz to meet Carl Sandburg or somebody. This was the great “making it” scene Irwin had crowed about. I yelled after them:

“If I had a Poetry University you know what would be written over the entrance arch?”

“No, what?”

“Here Learn That Learning Is Ignorance! Gentlemen dont burn my ears! Poetry is lamb dust! I prophesy it! I'll lead schools in exile! I dont Care!” They werent bringing me to meet Carl Sandburg whom I'd known anyway seven years ago at several parties where he stood before the fireplace in a tuxedo and talked about freight trains in Illinois 1910. And actually threw his arms around me going “Ha ha ha! You're just like me!”

Why am I saying all this? I felt forlorn and lost, even when Raphael and I and Random's wife went to the Zoo and I saw a female monkey giving the male monkey some skull (or as we call it in the Lower East Side, Poontang) and I said “Did you see them practicing fellatio?” The woman blushed and Raphael said “Dont talk like that!”—where'd
they
ever hear the word
fellatio!

But we had one fine dinner downtown, Washingtonians stared to see the bearded man wearing my huge vicuña coat (which I gave Random in exchange for an Air Force fur collared leather coat), to see the two pretty daughters with him, the elegant wife, the tousled bedraggled black haired Raphael carrying a Boito album and a Gabrielli album, and me (in jeans), all coming in to sit at a back table for beer and chicken. In fact all miraculously piling out of one tiny Mercedes Benz.

39

I foresaw a new dreariness in all this literary success. That night I called a cab to take me to the bus station and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniels while waiting, sitting on a kitchen stool sketching the pretty older daughter who was on her way to Sarah Lawrence college to learn all about Erich Fromm in the pots and pans. I gave her the sketch, rather accurate, thinking she'd keep it forever like Raphael's Michelangelo. But when we were both back in New York a month later a big package came containing all our paintings and sketches and stray T-shirts, with no explanation, meaning “Thank God you've gone.” And I dont blame them, I still feel ashamed about that uninvited visit and havent done such a thing since and never will.

I got down to the bus station with my rucksack and foolishly (high on Jack Daniels) began talking to some sailors who then got a guy with a car to drive out to the back streets of Washington in search of an afterhours bottle. A Negro connection was dickering with us when up walked a Negro cop who wanted to search us all, but was outnumbered. I simply walked away with my rucksack on my back, to the station, got on the bus and fell asleep with the pack by the driver's well. When I woke up in Roanoke Rapids at dawn it was gone. Somebody had taken it off at Richmond. I let my head fall on the seat in that harsh glare nowhere worse in the world than in America with a stupid guilty hangover. A whole new novel (
Angels of Desolation
), a whole book of poetry, and the finishing chapters of another novel (about Tristessa), together with all the paintings not to mention the only gear I had in the world (sleepingbag, poncho, sweater of holy favor, perfect simple equipments the result of years' thinking), gone, all gone. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever. Soldiers waited for the bus smoking. Fat old North Carolinians watched hands aback clasped. Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobile day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it to go on believing without hope. Gay college students in the back of the bus making me even sicker to think of their purple plans all in time to end blind in an automobile cemetery insurance office for nothing. Where's yonder old mule buried in those piny barrens or did the buzzard just eat? Caca, all the world caca. I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother's house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting in my father's death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, too sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That's what my father told me the night before he died, “Life is too long.”