Loon Lake (2 page)

At one home in Gramercy Park I made the acquaintance of a maid she had an eye for me she liked my innocent face. She was an older woman, some kind of Scandinavian wore her hair in braids. She was no great shakes but she had her own room and late one night I was admitted and led up all the flights of this mansion and brought to a small bathroom top floor at the back. She sat me in a claw-foot tub and gave me a bath, this hefty hot steaming red-faced woman. I don’t remember her name Hilda Bertha something like that, and she knows herself well before we make love she pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the noise she makes and it is really interesting to go at this great chunky energetic big-bellied soft-assed flop-titted but headless woman, teasing it with a touch, watching it quiver, hearing its muffled squeaks, composing a fuck for it, the likes of which I like to imagine she has never known.

Come with me

Compose with me

Coming she is coming is she

She was very decent really and for my love gave me little presents, castoff sweaters and shoes, food sometimes. I tried to save as much of my wages as I could. My luxuries were cigarettes and movies. I liked to go to the movies and sit there you could see two features and a newsreel for a dime. I liked comedies and musicals and pictures with high style. I always went alone. In my mind was the quiet fellow trying to see himself, hear what he sounded like. He fitted himself out in movie stars he discarded them. I was interested in the way I instantly knew who the situation called for and became him. For Graeber, who wore a straw hat and a bow tie, a stubblehead German with an accent you better not laugh at, I was the honest young fellow who wanted to make something of himself. For Hilda the maid I was the boy who thought he was lucky to
have her. When I went along after work with my tips in my pocket I was John D. Rockefeller. I came to make the distinction between the great busy glorious city of civilization on the one hand, and the meagerness or pretense of any one individual I looked at on the other. It was a matter of the distance you took, if you went to the top of the Empire State Building as I liked to do seeing it all was thrilling you had to admire the human race making its encampment like this I could hear the sound of traffic rising like some song to God and love His Genius for shining the sun on it. But down on the docks men slept in the open pulled up like babies on beds of newspapers, hands palm on palm for a pillow. Not their dereliction, that wasn’t the point, but their meagerness, for I saw this too as I stood at the piers and watched the ocean liners sail. I watched the well-dressed men and women going up the gangways, turning to wave at their friends, I saw the stevedores taking aboard their steamer trunks and wicker hatboxes, I saw the women wrapping their fur collars tighter against the chill coming up off the water, the men in sporty caps and spats looking self-consciously important, I saw their exhaustion, their pretense, their terror, and in these too, the lucky ones, I understood the meagerness of the adult world. It was an important bit of knowledge and no shock at all for a Paterson mill kid. Adults were in one way or another the ones who were done, finished, living past their hope or their purpose. Even the gulls sitting on the tops of the pilings had more class. The gulls lifting in the wind and spreading their wings over the Hudson.

I distinguished myself from whomever I looked at when I felt the need to, which was often, I felt I could get by make my way whatever the circumstances. I would sell pencils on the sidewalk in front of department stores I would be a newsboy I would steal kill use all my cunning but never would I lose the look in my eye of the living spirit, or give up till that silent secret presence grew out to the edges of me and I was the same as he, imposed upon myself in full completion, the same man with all men, the one man in all events—

I remember this roughneck boy more whole than he knew. Going down the dark stairs of the mansion on Gramercy Park one night trusted to let myself out by the drowsy spent maid, I lifted a silver platter a silver creamer and teapot and a pair of silver candlesticks from the dining room.
Even now I see the curved glass cabinet doors in the streetlight coming through the French windows. I hear my breathing. I catch sight of my own face in the salver. Loot-laden I tiptoed over the thick rug I half walked half ran through the streets clutching my lumpy lumberjacket. I had a room on the West Side in a rooming house fifty cents a night no cooking. In the morning going to work from across the wide cobblestone street the cars going past, the streetcars ringing their bells horns blowing trucks ratcheting along with chain-wheel drive I see in Graeber’s Groceries Fancy Fruits and Vegetables an officer of the law in earnest conversation with my employer.

Come with me
Compute with me
Computerized she prints out me

Commingling with me she becomes me
Coming she is coming is she
Coming she is a comrade of mine

Sometimes around those fires by the river a man would talk a war veteran usually who had a vision of things, who could say more than how he felt or what was so unfair or who he was going to get someday. And invariably he was a socialist or a communist or an anarchist and he’d call you brother or comrade this fellow and he was always contemplative and didn’t seem to mind if anyone listened to him or not. Not that he was wise or especially decent or kind or even that he was sober but even if none of these in those fitful flashes of lucidity like momentary flares of a dying fire he’d say why things were as they were. I liked that. It was a kind of music, I lingered by the edges of the city with the hobos and at night that grand and glorious civilization now had walls all around it we were on the outside looking up at this immense looming presence, a fortress now it was a kind of music to point to the walls and suggest why they would come down. And if you didn’t have a true friend, someone in the world as close to you as you were to yourself, this kind of music was interesting to hear. At night you smelled the river in daylight you didn’t, I smelled the river
scum and felt the mosquitoes and followed the shadows of the great rats who butted right through the tar-paper shacks and dove into the shitholes, and some poor tramp on Sterno would suddenly present with incredible grace an eloquent analysis of monopoly capitalism. It would go on two three minutes he’d take a swig eyes would roll up in his skull and he’d pass out falling backward into the fire and he’d roast his brains if we didn’t pull him out his hair smoking his singed burned hair. Wide awake again he’d tell us more.

But it was here I also learned about California. In California you could eat the oranges off the trees, along the seaside boulevards the avocados fell when they were ripe and you found them everywhere and peeled them and you ate them on the seaside boulevards. When you were sleepy you slept on the sand and when you were hot you went wading in the warm Pacific surf and the waves lit up at night off the shore with their own light. And off beyond the waves was a gambling ship.

I decided to go to California.

Armed only with his unpronounceable last name, he went down to the freight yards to begin his journey. He confuses this now in his mind with the West Side slaughtering plant such atomized extract of organic essence, such a perfumery of disembowelment, that in the fetid blood spumed viscera mist above the yards helplessly flew flights of gulls schools of pigeons moths bats insect plagues all swirling round and round in a great squawking endlessly ejaculative anguish.

I found a door that slid open, got it wide enough to slip through, climbed in, pulled the door almost shut behind me stood in the darkness breathing triumph. The car lurches again, almost stops, begins to roll, I was thrown into something that moved. I look around my private car my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness, soot and pungent cinder begins to flow through the boards, that railroad tang, my eyes see all around the perimeter of my private car a cargo of youths. We are the shipped manufacture of this nation there must have been thirty or forty of us in that car gradually my eyes made out fifty sixty sitting on the floor by the dawn in eastern Pennsylvania at a siding in the chill frosted morning a hundred of us jumped and ran when the bulls came shouting
ahead from the engine. Later alone in the tall weeds of another crossing a toot and leisurely around the bend bell-clanging another stately red ball my chance I make for it all around me from the weeds a thousand like me leap I thought I was alone.

I let it go. All my gaunt brothers in my own rags carrying my roped valise hopped the freight. I watched it go. I put up my collar pulled my cap down on my head stuck my hands in my pockets and headed north up the road.

Come with me
Compute with me
Computerized she prints out me

Commingling with me she becomes me
Coming she is coming is she
Coming she is a comrade of mine
Comrades come all over comrades
Communists come upon communists
Hi. Hi.

We are here to complete our fusion
We are here to create confusion
Do you confuse coming with confession?
Do you fuel for nuclear compression?
I’m for funicular ascension.

Decline all word temptation
Define all worldly tension
Deride all prayerful intervention
Computer nukes come pray with me
Before the war, the war, after the war
Before the war the war after the war the war before the war
Disestablishes human character.

Computer data composes World War One poet
Warren Penfield born Indianapolis Indiana
City of Indians in the Plains Wars after the peace
City of Indians going about their business
Indian poets in headbands walking on grid streets
Secure in their city of Indian architecture of cool concrete
Bernard Cornfield Investors Overseas Securities

Data linkage escape this is not emergency
Before the war before the last war
A boy stood on the dirt street in Ludlow Colorado.
The wind of the plain blew the coal dust under his eyelids
The wind blew the black dust down the canyons of the Sangre de
Cristo. The clothesline stretching across the plain
The miner’s cotton swung its arms and legs wildly in the wind.
A miner’s wife stepped from a tent with an infant girl
suspended from her hands. She held the child beyond
the edge of the wood sidewalk over the dirt the dust blowing
back along the ground like hordes of microscopiccreatures running.
The infant’s girl’s dress raised under her arms
she hung from her knees and underarms
so as to have her hairless child’s fruit expressed
for the purpose indicated by the mother’s sibilant sound effects
punctuated with foreign words of encouragement.
The boy standing there happening to be there remained to watch
shamelessly and the beautiful little girl turned upon him a face
of such outrage that he immediately recognized her
willing white neck companion of the old monk it’s you
and with then saintly inability to withstand life she closed
her eyes and allowed the thin stream of golden water to cascade
into the dust where instantly formed minuscule tulips
he beheld the fruition of a small fertile universe.

W
hen the nights were bad, when the uncanny sounds in the woods kept him awake, when the crack of a twig in the pine forest was inexplicable or some distant whimpering creature sounded in his mind like a child being fucked he swore it was still better than going with the red ball. Whowhoo. Better to take alone whatever came. Soft web of night threads across the face. Something watching breathing in the dark a few feet away. He had heard of people having a foot cut off for the dollar in their shoe. It was still better. It was still better to take alone whatever came. Better to die in the open. Whowhoo. Lying in a city mission flop in the great stink of mankind was worse. Arraigned in the ranks of the self-deluding in their bunkbeds was worse.

It was the bums of the commonest conversation who angered him the most, the casuists of misfortune who bragged about the labels inside their torn filthy coats, or swore there was some brand of alcohol they wouldn’t be so low as to drink. Or the ones who claimed to be only temporarily down on their luck, en route to some glorious destination not where they
had a job waiting or a family, but where they were
known
, where what they were did not have to be proved.

I didn’t want these mockeries to my own kingship of consciousness, with all the conquests of my life still to come. How could I hope or scheme however idly in a flophouse with a hundred others, a thousand others, a hundred thousand others where the dreams rise on the breath and dissolve one another in a precipitate element not your own—and you are trapped in it, a dark underwater kingdom fed by springs of alcoholic piss and sweat, in which there live and swim the vilest phantoms of God.

And strangely enough each morning I woke up still alive. In the lake villages and the small towns of old mills, I was moved along by the constable but a shade more gently. I didn’t feel like a tramp when I asked for work. I even had a certain distinction. We were like birds or insects, pestilential, when we buzzed or flocked in great numbers, but one sole specimen could be tolerated with a certain scientific interest. Sometimes I washed dishes for a meal. Sometimes I stole my food. Sometimes I found a day’s work at some farm.

Then in one town, walking down the main street in a manner that suggested I had someplace to go, I saw coming out of the drugstore three midgets and a heavyset dwarf who huddled over them like their father. They took their quick little steps down the street, all talking at the same time, the muscular torso of the dwarf jolting from side to side with each step. I followed them. Even when they noticed me following them I followed them. They led me to the edge of town. In a grass lot between two stands of trees was the Hearn Bros. carnival, a traveling show of tattered brown tents, old trucks, kiddy rides and paint-peeled wagons. I heard the growl of a big cat.

Ah, what I felt standing there in the sun! A broken-down carnival—a few acts, a few rides and a contingent of freaks. But the sight of it made me a boy again. I was going backward. Those ridiculous bickering midgets had called up my love for tiny things, my great unslaked child’s thirst for tiny things, as if I had never held enough toys that were small to my small hand. Holy shit a carnival! I knew it was for me as sure as I knew my own face in the mirror.