Queenie (18 page)

All you ever have to do is pick carefully—and
keep claiming the wrong yen.
A yen is always respected by youth, Dr. Werner. Especially a sudden one. And so, hand over hand, tight corner to tighter, a girl can still spend a quiet unsuccessful evening almost anywhere.

It could even happen to a boy.

And, Doctor, it helps too that these events take place in a fog. Incense, joints or cigarettes, all according to neighborhood. Or political affiliation. If it’s tea party though, watch out, the hop haze has to be gotten rid of at intervals, maybe air-conditioner if it’s that kind of middle-brow pad, or punkah fans if it’s psychedelic style, or just a lot of White Owl cigars being passed.

Because the fuzz is always expected. And a party’s made if they turn up. Doesn’t have to be real ones. Sometimes only a mad rumor will scatter the pack. Or else a couple of very butch fags I meet once, masseurs on the side, who will hire out for the night.

Otherwise, it’s very politically free, Dr. Werner. Just you on your own in the fog, with everybody else.

So I am not too surprised when that Riverside Drive address turns out to be on Central Park West. But lobby to lobby, grief travels fast, and soon we all pile out of cabs at the correct apartment house. From all those columns, it’s one of the great ones, once. But now whatever can’t be nailed down is gone, including some of the marble—and suddenly I recognize it. I can remember my five-year-old Mary Janes walking across sixty feet of Oriental rug. Nila’s old place! Nosey was born in it. It’s not a slum yet; there’s still one of those foot-long Tenants’ Committee notices telling you what to do if you are stabbed in the elevator. But still I lose my cool and say, “My God, I used to know people who lived here!”

We are crammed in that elevator by now, which is a slow one, and the griever kneeing me from behind says over my head, “You still do.”

So I am covered with gaucherie.

Beside me Oomph says, “My friend here likes to hark back.” She’s not ratting; she has to constantly help me with my hang-ups.

Like I know the past is a property has been condemned.

She’s from L.A. though; for her it’s easier.

But still I blush my way up ten floors. The pack in the car don’t have knives in me but I’d almost rather. Queenie, my one hot cheek tells the other, can’t you remember?
Never hark back in a group
. In a group, you can only hark forward.

And when we get to that apartment door, on it are all the reasons why.

There must be thirty-forty people in the line ahead of Oomph and me, waiting to study what’s posted on it, and to add their own comments. So I have more time than usual to rally myself. Parking my poncho—they have racks, this place is organized!—I see the usual leotards, but a lot of the dress is more meaningful. I myself have a little paste-on jewelry here and there and between my bikini, but nothing that says anything.

Oomph and I think that putting a critique of our lousy civilization on your tit is a critique on it. So she has nothing there.

But there is always at least one exhibitionist. The girl ahead of us has nothing there either, but below, she is wearing a cache-nombril, which I already know is a sort of locket on a belt, to frame your navel in. Every time she turns, it tweakles. Which engages the attention of some committeemen. Wiretaps.

“Hell no,” we hear her say, “I’m a chansoneer. This is a mike.” She says a PR man she knows asked her to meet him here. He has kind of a crunch on her. “He says this place is a showcase for repertoire.”

But all that blood and ink on the door up there, what looks like photos of people in dirty positions—she don’t go for it.

“Oh, war dead. That’s different. Listen, you must be college kids.”

Well, she wants us to know about herself. “I’m as broad-minded as anybody. But I never vote, see? I never vote on
anything
.”

Dr. Werner, to say you never do anything, do you have to be a member of the proletariat?

Right next to me is Oomph, a girl who can’t even recall losing her virginity. “It’s like learning to swim,” she says once. “In all that splashing, when was when?” She has taken to group culture just like to the water. And assumes my backwardness is intellectual. Which it is of course.

She’s still attracted by my background. But she’s not sympathizing anymore, she’s analyzing. She says it gave me no room to rebel. One humble way never occurs to her. She takes a look at me now and says, “Trouble with you, you confuse these trips with being a professional.”

“Coupling in
couples
,” I say in a whisper. “I just can’t get it off my mind.”

She says, “Queenie, if you’ll only just analogize.”

I say, “I’m not as bright at it as you.”

She says exhaustedly, “Who is?”

So considering all, I’m lucky she’s the assuming type.

Because, though privately I’m still in a very romantic state—which as every girl knows means hot pants you know for what, you just don’t know for who—I have made another rock-bottom discovery about myself.

I am not only frigid in grottoes; I am frigid in groups!

O boy, am I in intellectual trouble! In the halls of Venus, any
public
hall, and no matter how many corners it has—a man’s hand on me turns straight into philosophy. And a woman’s too, if you should ask me.

It all goes straight to my head.

Dr. Werner, are you familiar with referred dental pain? Like when your upper tooth hurts, though it’s the lower one has the cavity? My whole bod is like that. Just let more than one kind, loving person slide a little philosophy up my kneecap, and my brain kicks them off!

What do you
do
, if your virginity goes all the way to the top?

And in public?

By now, I can see through the crush that the door is really a huge piece of plywood, on which people are scrambling to tack petitions, or significant streamers, or to draw with paint and pen provided; there is a ladder to help. And a collection box beside it.

Which if you are me and stuck in the past, you think is maybe for the joints or the drinks, or to reimburse the owner of the apartment with a uniformed maid afterward. No eats, I already know; there never are. With some kinds of political action peanuts are ridiculous. And you have to keep your hands free.

But a big beard who Oomph is now talking to tells us the fund is for silk-screening the door to make like wallpaper. And a whole line of promotions they expect places like America House to be avid for. After which the door itself will be sent on a nationwide museum tour, under the title of our theme for this evening. We are to be a Collage for Grief.

Oomph looks at me meaningfully and says, “That’s all right with us, we’ve been grieving for a friend all week.”

I say, “Even with my astigmatism I can see that door is beautiful.”

He says, “Oh but grief is groovier now, it isn’t private anymore.”

Oomph nods thoughtfully and looks down at herself and sighs, “If it ever was!”…

If she had a hat and gloves on, instead of being à la Gauguin over harem pants, she’d be a ringer for my aunt’s friends at the funeral parlor wake for Lalla, the first one who ever died on them.

And the beard—even in a purple singlet with the arms hacked off instead of a double-breasted, he reminds me of the dashing heir of the deceased…

They are baring their beautiful teeth at each other in the same grieving way—and so in decency I move back to let them go on ahead of me. They are ready for politics.

Besides, on my left, a beardless boy, with a pigtail though, seems to be indicating that he is ready for me. Also two on my right and one in front—is that a tribute! I am getting the prom rush, and I haven’t even peeled yet.

So I link arms in the middle of them; it’s always better to enter a party on somebody’s arm, all the better if there are five of us. Even if two of them are polymorphous perverse.

So now, considering our goals, all I have to do is wipe off my smile.

Harder than you think, for somebody whose mouth corners turn up, even if it is only inherited. Plus my inscape. Which Dr. Ffolliott, after my paper for him, says is the most frivolous ever to come to his attention in his ten years of American Studies. Plus two years at the Sorbonne.

I tell him I don’t mind; in only twelve weeks to find your inscape is kind of wonderful. “I knew I had it,” I say, “I just didn’t know what it was.”

Meanwhile, me and my phalanx, we’re the last of the queue.

And, in a minute and a half, I’m about to have the spiritual revelation of my life! Now that I’m at last in the proper surroundings for it.

And, Dr. Werner,
you
aren’t there. That’s always the teacher-student situation, isn’t it? The faculty of the world!—against the undergraduates! After all our conferences, you don’t get to see it because you’re up ahead of me. You’re already inside.

Oh Dr. Werner, that door!—it had all world-grief on it, didn’t it? You probably passed it by without blinking; it’s your department after all; you’re used to it.

How can I extrapolate the parasociological effect on an inscape like mine?

Dr. Werner, we never had much world welfare in our family. The most was the donkey ads in the London
Times
my uncle subscribed to for other business—“Thousands of donkeys are being mistreated in Algiers!”—to which Gran always sent a check for Christmas. With “Albion” her terrier’s name on it.

Plus my aunt’s friends being particularly partial to those orphan ads that say, “Kim never knew who her father is.”

My aunt and uncle read the papers, of course. And we had the human condition in church. But both the church and the
Daily News
put loving your neighbor strictly ahead of the public news—like knowing who’s murdered in your street is what counts. Or else the palatial details of that tomato-sauce tycoon’s divorce your spaghetti will be paying for…

Oh, we loved the moon walk! But like ours is still a village mentality to a citizen of the world like you, Dr. Werner. My uncle and aunt know the moon is our neighbor now. But they still go to Palm Beach.

“Not that they’re dumb,” I say to my roommates, when we first rap. “My uncle knows the world is changing, and is keeping it from my aunt. She’s keeping it from him. And I’m keeping it from them. I come from very personal people, that’s all. Some people are personal about everything.”

Oomph says, “Three generations of women in my mother’s family have been helping the world impersonally. And where has it got to?”

Sherry says, “Old Lyme is clean. But it knows very well the rest of the world is dirty.”

Cutch says to them, “Catch that white racist complexion on the girl, ladies. Bet it’s never suffered one international pain.”

I say, “No, it hasn’t. But meeting you three has been wonderful.”

But a mass meeting is best. Even though all the others have gone ahead into action, and I am now alone with my two morphs.

One of them starts reading off from that door.

Oh, Doctor—I don’t have to tell you! Grief maps, grief distribution curves—everything wrong with the world your whole course could think of is there!—plus a canful of bullets that have been in somebody, and a neat tube of blood marked “Not for TV.”

Though maybe—did you catch that poem on a red typewriter ribbon that begins, “Down here in youth, our abattoir——”? Even in the voice of a morph that sounds very fine.

“Hoist me up,” I say to the other morph. “I forgot my contacts.”

With a joint tickle, they oblige me. They’re two who don’t care which gender they’re with as long as they’re together with it.

After a minute one pipes, “Let’s go, dear. She’s queer for art.” The other answers, “But is Art queer for her?”

I don’t care. For the first time in my life I am alone with all the grief that can be posted on a door and read from a ladder, and I am making the most of it! Of everything from which a happy childhood was deprived.

And when I finally turn around, Dr. Werner, I’m right up there with the rest of you. They could exhibit me in every museum of the country if they want to. My tears have collaged.

“Oh, why did nobody tell me?” I cry. “That the human condition is
current events
.”

Because nobody’s there, of course. They’re all inside already, doing like you say to. Externalizing it.

It’s only me has my time lag. Which this time, what it does is to keep me sitting on that ladder for quite a spell thinking how wonderful you are. Or were three weeks ago when you left us for your world lecture tour. Like when you speak of suffering
for
all the suffering. Like when you remind us all these causes will go right down the drain of history, unless we quick connect with them.

On that door is proper action for it. Petitions for every pulse, mass meetings as arranged!

But I am feeling more personal.

That’s the way women feel when they get universally excited, Doctor.

God
is
for us, but there’s a catch in it.

Because what I am thinking is—why just settle for an orgasm-in-the-round for the sake of humanity? Why not go all out and have a baby for it!

I find I am actually willing to do that, to declare myself at one with the world.

In fact, there seems no other way to say fuck the world and still put your bod on the line for it.

And personally, I’m thinking that if a man like you cared to put out a little philosophy for me—I’d let it stay.

Which is a good time to have a friend like Oomph.

Because just then, the pigtail slips out of the meeting and shouts up at me, “Your friend’s in trouble.”

I scramble down at once, and in there.

Boy, is she! As the sparks fly upward. She has tangled with the camera crew, which has been shooting a few promotional highlights. And has busted the lens of the mini that her pick-up, the crew chief, had stashed away for spontaneity’s sake. In his beard.

“Who she think she is——” he’s saying to his friends, who are dabbing the blood on his chin where she tore some of him off along with the tape. “A movie star?”

Oomph is standing there, harem legs planted, burning right back at him. “Peeper! Whyn’t you put your whole life on film and coexist with it, then you wouldn’t need to worry. You would always be there!”