The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (15 page)

Dear Miss Garbo:

I hope you noticed me in the newsreel of the recent Detroit Riot in which my head was broken. I never worked for Ford but a friend of mine told me about the strike and as I had nothing to do that day I went over with him to the scene of the riot and we were standing around in small groups chewing the rag about this and that and there was a lot of radical talk, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.

I didn’t think anything was going to happen but when I saw the newsreel automobiles drive up, I figured, well, here’s a chance for me to get into the movies like I always wanted to, so I stuck around waiting
for my chance. I always knew I had the sort of face that would film well and look good on the screen and I was greatly pleased with my performance, although the little accident kept me in the hospital a week.

Just as soon as I got out, though, I went around to a little theatre in my neighborhood where I found out they were showing the newsreel in which I played a part, and I went into the theatre to see myself on the screen. It sure looked great, and if you noticed the newsreel carefully you couldn’t have missed me because I am the young man in the blue-serge suit whose hat fell off when the running began. Remember? I turned around on purpose three or four times to have my face filmed and I guess you saw me smile. I wanted to see how my smile looked in the moving pictures and even if I do say so I think it looked pretty good.

My name is Felix Otria and I come from Italian people. I am a high school graduate and speak the language like a native as well as Italian. I look a little like Rudolph Valentino and Ronald Colman, and I sure would like to hear that Cecil B. De Mille or one of those other big shots noticed me and saw what good material I am for the movies.

The part of the riot that I missed because they knocked me out I saw in the newsreel and I mean to say it must have got to be a regular affair, what with the water hoses and the tear-gas bombs, and the rest of it. But I saw the newsreel eleven times in three days, and I can safely say no other man, civilian or police, stood out from the crowd the way I did, and
I wonder if you will take this matter up with the company you work for and see if they won’t send for me and give me a trial. I know I’ll make good and I’ll thank you to my dying day, Miss Garbo. I have a strong voice, and I can play the part of a lover very nicely, so I hope you will do me a little favor. Who knows, maybe some day in the near future I will be playing the hero in a picture with you.

Yours very truly,      
Felix Otria.

He looked, if he liked, like a sinful version of Jesus Christ, and he looked like a man who had lived a holy life so long that it had driven him insane and he had suddenly decided to destroy the holiness very swiftly. He would say: It is all the same; I do not care; and it would be very difficult to understand what he could mean. Every now and then he would be clean and inwardly calm; his face would be closely shaven and his thick reddish moustache would begin to seem something biblical; he would smile sadly, looking over the form chart, saying the names of the various horses,
Miss Universe
,
St. Jensund, Merry Chatter
, and so on.

I think he was Russian, though it was none of my business and I never bothered to ask him a personal question. He was always broke and always in need of a cigarette and I generally had ready-made cigarettes or the makings. He would never ask another man for a cigarette, and as a matter of fact he never actually asked me for one. I merely handed him a package or a sack of makings, and in this way we became friends. He looked deeply sad, generally, like some of the pictures of Christ, and it would be when he had shaved himself. Then suddenly he would stop shaving himself and he would be this way, with a beard growing on his face, for a whole week, sometimes two.

His poverty distressed me and I hoped somehow to be able to help him. We went now and then to a cheap restaurant on Third Street below Howard where a full meal with a steak for entrée could be had for only twenty cents, pie included. And I played the horses he liked so that if they won I would be able to give him part of the money without offending him. They seldom won, though, and it nearly drove him mad, making him mutter in his own language, Russian or Slovenian, and walk up and down the back room at Number One Opera Alley where we made our bets.

He was fifty but youthful, rather tall, rather lithe, and in his way rather distinguished. He was greatly down, but somehow his manner implied that it was all accidental and a mistake and that actually he himself was a man to command respect and admiration. I knew when he hadn’t had a bed in which to sleep,
and if the horses ran badly, I would sneak out of the bookie joint and run across the street to a rummy parlor and get into a game. At cards I used to be a little luckier than with the horses, and if I won, I would hurry back and put a half dollar in his hand so that no one would see it, and he would say nothing and I would say nothing. It was rather strange that he knew it was not for gambling and the next day I could see that he had had a bed and had slept.

Every day for several months I saw him and we talked of the horses. I knew dozens of other men like him and it was all a secretive sort of friendship, no man knowing the name of another and no man asking the name of another. I thought of him as the tall Russian, and I let it go at that.

Things went from bad to worse. All the men at Number One Opera Alley had a long stretch of rotten luck and I had my share of it too. I remember the day I went to the bookie joint with my last half dollar and listened to the tall Russian discussing the horses he thought might win. I made a bet on a horse named
Dark Sea
and sat down with the Russian to wait, smoking Bull Durham. I played the horse to win and it ran second, losing by a nose, and I believe this is the only time in my life that I ever became really excited. It was almost as bad with me as it was with the Russian, and each of us jumped up and began walking up and down, swearing to ourselves, looking at one another and swearing. That horse, he said, think of it, running so nicely all the way and then losing by a nose. And he began to swear in Russian. After a while I calmed down and said maybe it would
be different tomorrow, the old gag among the horse players. The bright day was always tomorrow. That night I stayed in the rummy joint across the street, hungry, until two in the morning. After two I walked through the city and returned at nine in the morning to Number One Opera Alley. I was the first man to arrive, and I was feeling very cold, needing a cup of coffee very badly.

At ten the Russian came down. I had planned to keep my condition unknown if possible, but I couldn’t manage it apparently and I knew that the Russian understood how it was with me; he came through the swinging doors and just as he came through I was walking toward the doors just to be keeping in motion, to waken myself, and he saw me and made the most painful face I have ever seen, as if it was his fault, not mine, but his, as if my having spent a sleepless night was his sin, and as if I was hungry because of him.

He said nothing, however, and began to look at Mannie’s to see how the races looked. He was aching to smoke a cigarette but I had no cigarettes and no makings, and I couldn’t think of anything to do. He finally went away without saying a word and returned in a half hour, smoking a rolled cigarette. He handed me the sack and I rolled one and began to smoke. The smoke wakened me and killed my hunger for a moment. I suppose he went out and begged, a thing which must have been disgustingly painful for him to do, but which he believed he
had
to do, and I began to be very angry with myself.

All day we talked about the horses, each of us knowing
that the other had no money, and when there were no more races we went away. I don’t know where the Russian went, but I returned to the rummy parlor and sat down. Late at night a young fellow I had once helped a little saw me and he sat at the table with me, telling me he had had a little luck. Before he left he handed me half a package of cigarettes and a quarter, not speaking of the matter, and I was able to buy a good meal and to smoke. Sitting in the rummy parlor, in the very bright electric light, I was able with my eyes open to sort of sleep, or halfsleep, and at two in the morning I did not feel greatly tired.

I walked the streets again until nine in the morning when I returned to the bookie joint. The Russian was already there, waiting to see how it was with me. He hadn’t slept either and a four day beard was on his face. He looked angry and miserable and disgusted with himself. I handed him the package of cigarettes and we smoked.

Around ten in the morning he went away without saying a word, and when he returned a half hour later I knew that something was troubling him. He wanted to get us out of the mess we were in and he had an idea, no doubt, but it was troubling him. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of trying to steal, but I could tell that the idea, whatever it was, was not a pleasant one. At last he called me to him, and I knew for the first time since we had known each other that he was a man who had once been greatly respected, a man of dignity. I could tell this from the polite manner in which he requested my company alone, out of the bookie joint. We stepped into Opera Alley,
and he removed an envelope from his inside coat pocket. On the envelope was a French stamp. He looked distressed, disgusted and ill.

I want to speak to you, he said with an accent. I do not know what to do, and this is the only thing I have. It is up to you. I will do my best, then maybe we can have a little money.

He said this without looking into my face, and I began to feel unclean. This is all I have, he said. These are dirty pictures, he said. Rotten dirty French pictures. If you want, I will try to sell them ten cents each. I have two dozen of them.

I was disgusted with myself and sorry for the tall Russian. We walked down Opera Alley to Mission Street. I could not think of anything to say. It was really amazing, and I wanted to say something that would show I wanted him above all things to preserve his dignity; I wanted him to do nothing he himself did not wish to do, anything he certainly would not even be thinking of doing except for the fact that he knew I was broke and hungry and homeless. We stood at the curb on Mission Street. I could not speak, but I must have looked miserable, and at last he said, Thank you, I am grateful to you. There was a garbage can near the corner, and I saw him turn from me smiling like Christ himself is sometimes pictured as smiling and he walked away. When he reached the garbage can, he lifted the lid and I saw him drop the envelope into the can. Then he began to walk swiftly, thinking to himself, I thought, Well, at least, I offered to try to help him, even this way, and now I am free, and I saw him hurrying away, moving among the ragged men, still himself, still not wholly disgraced.

Monday or Tuesday morning each week the postman brings me the
Herald Tribune Books
, from New York, and it is about writing of all kinds, and all kinds of writers. Many are being printed, many more are not, and I would like to know of a single city block where there is not at least one writer, and if there is a small village of fifty people somewhere in which a writer does not live I would like to know of this village. I would like to go to such a village and try to find out why one of the fifty people is not trying to tell the story of man on earth. I would like to walk into the village some morning and go quietly down
the main street and all around it, looking at the houses and studying the movements of the inhabitants, because fifty people are many people and the moments of their lives are many. I would like to know of such a village, but I am sure there isn’t such a place, not even in Greenland, and if you think I am joking, all you have to do is go down to the public library and look up the literature of Greenland, and you will find that the country is full of poets and writers of prose, and very good ones too. It is Greenland, though, and this is what I am coming to. The poetry is Greenland, and the prose is Greenland. Our country, America, is large dimensionally, and we have many writers, mostly unprinted, and my own writing is San Francisco, and it is not all of San Francisco; it is the western part, from Carl Street to the Pacific Ocean. It is Greenland, and not some clever young man, and you can praise God that this is so; not cleverness but the place, not art exactly but inevitability, the only thing, Greenland.

I am of Frisco, the fog, the foghorns, the ocean, the hills, the sand dunes, the melancholy of the place, my beloved city, the place where I have moved across the earth, before daybreak and late at night, the city of my going and coming, and the place where I have my room and my books and my phonograph. Well, I love this city, and its ugliness is lovely to me. And the truth is that I am not at all a writer and it is the truth that I do not want to be a writer. I never try to say anything. I do not have to try. I say only what I cannot help saying, and I never use a dictionary, I never make things up. All the prose in the
world is still outside of books and largely outside of language, and all I do is walk around in my city and keep my eyes open.

Each Monday or Tuesday I turn the pages of this paper that is brought to me from New York and I look at the pictures in the paper and now and then I read a few words here and there, the names of new books and the names of writers. I want to know what is being written by the men who are being printed, because when I know what is being printed I can understand what is not being printed, and I think the greatest prose of America is the prose that is secret, and everybody knows that for every book printed there are twenty or thirty or forty that are not printed: America, as it was Greenland, the same.

Myself, I am a very poor writer. It is because I have never read the works of great writers, or because I have never been to college, and it is because the place is more important to me than the person: it is more solid, and it does not talk, and printed writers talk very much, and it is largely nonsense. I would like to know this: Is there anything to talk about, as a writer? I know there is much to be silent about, as a writer. I know there is much to talk about,
not
as a writer, the weather especially, ah, lovely, lovely, the sun so lovely this morning, and so on, but of course in different words, meaning the same. And this is so: today is the fourth day of sunny loveliness, and it is the first day that I have stayed in my room. It has been too good and I have been too happy, and now I must stay in my room in spite of the clear and
warm air. I must stay here and try to speak quietly of this city, and not as a writer.

What it amounts to is this: I would like to try to say what all the unprinted writers would be apt to try to say if they were here, if they had lived during these three days of fine weather. And I am certainly not trying to write a story. The story is here of course. It is impossible to omit the story. It is always present, even if you write about the manufacture of clocks or electric washing machines—always present. It is my city, San Francisco, and it is the sun, very bright, the place, and it is the air, very clear, and it is myself, alive, and it is the earth, Greenland, not cleverness, America, not talk. This is the first story, and if you do not like the style you can stop reading, because this is it, the whole thing, the place and the climate of the place, and what we think is less important than what we feel, and when the weather is this way we feel that we are alive, and this feeling is great prose and it is very important, being first the place and then ourselves, and it is everything, Greenland, America, my city, San Francisco, yourself and myself, breathing, knowing that we are alive, drinking water and wine, eating food, walking, seeing one another, and it is all the unnamed and unknown writers everywhere, and they are saying what I am saying: that all of us are alive and that we are breathing, so if the style is unpleasant to you you can read the evening newspaper instead, and to hell with you.

Vladimir Horowitz was here a number of days ago, and one evening at the San Francisco Opera House he played the piano, and rich ladies applauded, and it made conversation. They are still talking of Vladimir’s hands, and much of the talk is nonsense, and apparently it is impossible to get away from talking nonsense.

Vladimir came to this city and on Tuesday evening, February 27, 1934, he played the piano, and all the fat and thin ladies of wealth applauded him, and he took his money and went away, to Los Angeles, I think, and the ladies are still talking of him, breathlessly, though of course unsexually, art being of the spirit and not of the flesh. Well, it is laughable, and I myself heard several of the ladies talking of Vladimir’s hands, and the talk was not of the spirit, not by a long shot; but of course this is not the point, and everybody has heard rich ladies talking. It is pleasant in a way, and it may be just as well that the talk was not of the spirit, and even the rich are basically only alive, breathing. If they go to concerts in order to have something to talk about, something other than the climate, it is because they
are
rich and because it is considered, in the best circles, shameful to talk about the weather. And the ladies must talk about
something
, and they cannot go on talking about Russia forever. But the point is this: myself again. I must explain that nothing I ever say is purely autobiographical, and the fact is that I am always speaking and thinking of the place and of the time of the place,
and that I myself am included in the thought because it is inevitable. It is not a question of pride, but a question of accuracy and truth. I do so objectively: myself, of this place, of this time.

The evening Vladimir played the piano for the rich ladies I sat alone in my room, listening to him. The concert began at 8:30 o’clock, and I was in my room an hour earlier. I have seen the outside of the San Francisco Opera House many times, and I once sneaked in and saw the inside, at night, so I could see the place, sitting in my room. Around eight o’clock I began to see the big automobiles coming up to the Opera House, and I began to see the rich ladies alighting from the automobiles, and every lady was dressed in the most stylish mode. After a while the automobiles began to arrive in great numbers and special police began to blow whistles, getting the situation under hand.

Vladimir walked onto the stage and the ladies began to applaud; he played and bowed and played and bowed and the ladies applauded; then he took his money and went on to Los Angeles, and I sat in my room, smiling about it. What I hope is this: that Vladimir got a lot of money: this is the important thing.

From where I was in the city I could not hear the concert well, and as a matter of fact I could not hear it at all: I could only imagine Vladimir playing. Well, finally, at eleven o’clock at night I decided to listen to a concert of my own, and I walked swiftly to the beach, by the ocean: the beach is the place where hot dogs are sold and where you can ride the chutes and
other things, and there is a merry-go-round at the beach: I went to the merry-go-round and listened to its music: this is the second story and it is probably a little more difficult than the first, and the whole point is this: that Vladimir did not play the merry-go-round music and the music of the merry-go-round happened mechanically and it was very bad but very splendid, being the music little children hear when they ride the merry-go-round horses and goats and lions and camels and it was the music of remembrance, so very bad, and so difficult to talk about, and still, it was very splendid and I sat alone listening to the concert and at midnight the music stopped and I applauded loudly and I said
bravo
, the second story, Vladimir and myself and the rich ladies.

The third story I will not write, because it is not a story that can be written: this morning from my window I saw the old woman who is bent half way to the earth and she was out in the sunlight, walking and breathing, and she was in black as she always is, locomotor ataxia, scientifically, and she was walking through the sunlight and I knew it was a story I could not write, and I said, I will say only this: that the old woman was in the light this morning, she herself, still alive, breathing, the little old woman bent half way to the earth, breathing this place and this time, the place, not cleverness, Greenland and America, the moment of our breathing, our greatest literature, not writing,
being
, not talking. Vladimir
himself, not conversation, and his playing, and the machine music of the merry-go-round, and no children there at midnight, only the ghosts of all children, and finally the latest moment, the moment of the walking and breathing of the old old woman in the sunlight, and myself at the window, myself finally, Vladimir and the rich ladies and the Opera House and the ocean and the writers here and there in the sun and the warmth of the sun and clear air and the old woman, myself writing great prose in the only language, the language of being, Greenland and America, the young Russian at the piano, the unturning merry-go-round, and forever the Pacific Ocean, my beloved city, San Francisco.