Moise and the World of Reason (14 page)

“The corner of Cherry and Peach Street.”

As I mentioned this location of home, someone in the front seat broke into laughter which all of the four occupants of the limousine echoed a bit. It was a private joke among them, it would seem, the street-names of the corner I lived on.

“How old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen.”

“Aren't you scared to be in a car with four men you don't know?”

I began to shiver at this question, especially since it was accompanied by a hand of the dark man and a hand of the blond each falling rather tightly onto my knees as if I were being taken a prisoner between them.

But I answered,

“No, why should I be?”

“A pretty young boy like you?”

“I don't understand what you mean but I'd like to get out now.”

In response the limousine picked up speed and not in the direction of my home but out into dark open country. “You're not driving toward Peach and Cherry.”

Again the chorus of laughter. The blond laughed softest and said, “Have a little fresh country air with us first.”

“No, no, I want to get out.”

By this time I was scared crazy, for the limousine and the mysterious four were out into dark moonless country and the hands of each beside me had advanced from my knees to my upper thighs and were rhythmically squeezing as women shoppers do melons to see if they're ripe.

And now the blond's had closed gently over my groin and he inquired, “Doesn't this feel good?”

Whether it did or didn't, I was too frightened to answer.

Then abruptly the limousine stopped and the dark one seized my hand and placed it in his lap and held it there tightly and I felt his large erection, and then it was he that spoke.

“Get his pants off him, undress him, let's give him instruction.”

“Such as what?” asked the blond in a suddenly harsh, reproving voice.

“How to suck and.”

“Listen, bitch,” said the blond, “this boy is only a child and we're driving him straight home to Peach and Cherry. Come here, boy. Sit in my lap. Don't let that bastard touch you.”

He lifted me onto his knees and opened them wider and held me tight between them.

Apparently he had the power among them, for the limousine started again and turned about toward the town.

The blond also had an erection but made no suggestions to me, just held me protectively between his tight thighs.

The limousine lurched to a stop at Peach and Cherry. There was a moment of stillness. The blond had inserted his hand inside my white shirt.

“His heart's beating like a wild bird.”

“Get him out,” said the dark one.

The door on the blond's side opened, his thighs released me, and as I got up to get out, I felt his hand on my ass, not squeezing but caressing, and he said to the dark one, “It would have been lovely if you hadn't fucked it up.”

“Nobody's fucked nothing.”

“Not yet,” said the blond, “but you're going to sit on my cock all the way back to Mobile and I hope the road is bumpy.”

I didn't step out of the limousine but fell out.

The blond leaned out the window.

“Are you okay, baby?”

I got to my feet. The blond was still leaning his beautiful head out the window.

It was I that kissed him, a soft, lingering kiss.

“Take care, take care,” he whispered, and the limousine drove away.

Thinking back upon that adventure, now sixteen years past, I have a feeling that those four strangers have gone further than Mobile through a night much deeper. There was about them an atmosphere of death on the invisible road map of existence not far along it despite the fact that the driver of the limousine, whose dark head never turned toward me, drove with an exceptional skill and ease as if he were a part of the machine, a controlling extension of it, one that owned a commanding block of units in the stock of a corporation, the limousine, although I am sure it was actually the property of the blond one. But death. It did seem to have been written in disappearing ink on each of their individual road maps of existence at separate little distances, four deaths like a cluster of darkly luminous dials which I glimpsed on the dashboard, and I believe that this feeling belongs in the realm of the parapsychological in which I've grown to have total faith.

When there is one of a thing there is likely to be another or even two more and I have discovered a second laundry cardboard a bit further under the bed than was the first, whose writing surfaces are now covered. I reduce the size of my penciling to a point at which it will be legible only to myself so that this barricade of words against loneliness can be longer maintained.

Of the four young men who drove away to Mobile and my intuition of their lives being completed not long after they left Thelma, I have only one more thing to confess in my relation to them and it is that I would like to have held the blond one in my arms, over my lap, at the time of his passing. This is an erotic feeling, needless to tell you. I would like to have felt the spasmodic motions of his prone body as it surrendered its warmth of being and to have placed one hand on his forehead and the other over his groin to comfort him at the two places where he lived most intensely and would have most resisted ravishment by the non-living, by the mineral kingdom.

Certainly not all nor most of my adventures in Thelma, Alabama, were of the sort that seem inclined to surface on the currents of my unconscious tonight. What I am doing tonight is what I have done all nights that I've spent alone in this space flimsily partitioned from a much, much larger and darker space that inevitably reminds me of the unmentionable which I keep mentioning which is the vastness of the nothing, the nowhere, out of which emerges the momentary light-flicker of being alive and drops back into it so precipitately, even in lingering cases, with the miraculous swoop of an aerialist at the top of a circus tent, swinging between a pair of trapezes with no net beneath him. It is the act, the moment of brilliance: and then the failure to fly, the plummeting out of light to the heart of the black, with no great public gasp of terror and dismay that is comparable to that which occurs in his heart as he finds that he has miscalculated his leap at the cost of his being.

Oh, God, what am I doing with this affectation of a style like Pierre Loti's at the century's turn?

I was saying that I'm doing tonight what I have done every night when alone since entering the “broken world of love” except that I am not naked in bed and turned upon my stomach to press the warmth of my half-tumescent prick against the space deserted by Lance on tour.

“Baby, you want to write but you got no education,” he said to me once, annoyed that I remained seated at
BON AMI
with Blue Jay, pencil scribbling, instead of coming to bed.

“You mean formal education, no adequate schooling, you mean.”

“Baby, you got less than I got.”

“How do you know?”

“Shit, the truant officer was hot on your heels when I met you.”

“Only according to Mama, a mythologist of the first order. Actually in Thelma, Alabama, I got about as much schooling as the poet Arthur Rimbaud got in Charleville when he grabbed the school prize and quit.”

“What cat is that?”

“If you don't know, you better not brag about your education.”

“Shit, when I met you, you were certainly listed by the Bureau of Missing Persons.”

“Yes, and I still am.”

“Baby, ain't you well-fucked? The answer to that is yes, not no, and so if you're missing, you are not missing much.”

“I would like to be something more permanent than a receptacle for sperm which is sometimes infected with germ cells by anonymous donors you encounter at midnight on tour with an ice show.”

“Don't sit there talking to me like a little library queen.”

“Don't lie there talking to me like a hustler that gives it away for residence in this godforsaken pad.”

“If you don't like my life-style”

“Do
you?”

“A man's life-style should fit his future more than his present, and in my future I won't be the star of the ice show, I will not be the living nigger on ice forever, baby, but I will be a junkie and this pad here will be appropriate to my condition then.”

“I don't contest the point since I know your habits, but how about me, should I adjust my life to the future of a”

“Nigger junkie?”

“You said it, man, not me.”

“The red-neck is coming out in you, and lemme warn you, it brings out the hellcat in me.”

“You've got hazel-speckled green eyes like a fire-cat, Lance, you burned your way into my life and you'll burn yourself out and I will be left burned-out behind you like a village of thatch-roof huts that you've set fire to and sacked and ravaged and
don't!”

He was trying to haul me off the box onto the bed and I knew it would be not for love but for revenge.

“This could be our last communion,” he warned me, and his hand slackened its hold.

“Yes, without any sacrament to it.”

“Okay, let's lighten it up. Tell me more about your self-education in Thelma, baby.”

I drew a long breath before resuming our talk, which turned out to be our last one, and then I said evenly as I could with his fire-cat eyes burning holes through my bare back, “In Thelma I went every evening to the public library which was endowed by a wealthy old widow and contained all the classics translated from the Greeks to the young poet Rimaud whom I resemble.”

“How do I know what he looked like, you or not?”

“Because,” and I snatched out a page removed from a Thelma, Alabama, library book which was the famous portrait of Rimbaud when he'd first come to Paris and was seated among the Paris literati of that day in the picture
Au Coin de la Table
.

“Is this you, baby?”

“See, it almost could be, but it's the poet Rimbaud and I tore it out of a Thelma, Alabama, library book about him. I had to do it secretly so I went into the stacks which I had permission to enter and I coughed very loud to cover up the sound of tearing it out.”

“So you were a little library queen in Thelma who ripped off pictures from books and that makes you educated enough to be a New Yawk writer, is that the pitch?”

“That is the truth, not a pitch. Oh, I never got into trigonometry or Plato's discourses in Greek, but as a writer, I am not handicapped by illiteracy as you think.”

His large hot hand caught roughly hold of my shoulder and he jerked me off
BON AMI
onto the bed.

“You are turning me off with this literary shit.”

He leaned very tall from the bed to blow out the kerosene lamp by which I wrote on
BON AMI
and by which I'm still writing on it.

“I wish you'd pursue your literary career when I'm pursuing mine on ice which is not literary.”

In this I return to the confession that few of my adventures or experiences in Thelma were of a precociously erotic kind.