The Subterraneans (5 page)

A.M
. All Morn Sun wind flapped their tragic topcoats to the side, the boy bawling, their shadows on the street like shadows of gulls the color of handmade Italian cigars of deep brown stores at Columbus and Pacific, now the passage of a fishtail Cadillac in second gear headed for hilltop houses bay-viewing and some scented visit of relatives bringing the funny papers, news of old aunts, candy to some unhappy little boy waiting for Sunday to end, for the sun to cease pouring thru the French blinds and paling the potted plants but rather rain and Monday again and the joy of the woodfence alley where only last night poor Mar-dou’d almost lost.)—“What’d the colored guy do?”—“He zipped up again, he wouldn’t look at me, he turned away, it was strange he got ashamed and sat down—it reminded me too when I was a little girl in Oakland and this man would send us to the store and give us dimes then he’d open his bathrobe and show us himself.”—“Negro?”—“Yea, in my neighborhood where I lived—I remember I used to never stay there but my girlfriend did and I think she even did something with him one time.”—“What’d you do about the guy in the swivel chair?”—“Well, like I wandered out of there and it was a beautiful day, Easter, man.”—“Gad, Easter where was I?”—“The soft sun, the flowers and here I was going down the street and thinking ‘Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much, and thinking like angry social deals,—like angry—kicks—like hasseling over social problems and my race problem, it meant so little and I could
feel that great confidence and gold of the morning would slip away eventually and had already started—I could have made my whole life like that morning just on the strength of pure understanding and willingness to live and go along, God it was all the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in its own way—but it was all sinister.”—Ended when she got home to her sisters’ house in Oakland and they were furious at her anyway but she told them off and did strange things; she noticed for instance the complicated wiring her eldest sister had done to connect the TV and the radio to the kitchen plug in the ramshackle wood upstairs of their cottage near Seventh and Pine the railroad sooty wood and gargoyle porches like tinder in the sham scrapple slums, the yard nothing but a lot with broken rocks and black wood showing where hoboes Tokay’d last night before moving off across the meatpacking yard to the Mainline rail Tracy-bound thru vast endless impossible Brooklyn-Oakland full of telephone poles and crap and on Saturday nights the wild Negro bars full of whores and the Mexicans Ya-Yaaing in their own saloons and the cop car cruising the long sad avenue riddled with drinkers and the glitter of broken bottles (now in the wood house where she was raised in terror Mardou is squatting against the wall looking at the wires in the half dark and she hears herself speak and doesn’t understand why she’s saying it except that it must be said, come out, because that day earlier when in her wandering she finally got to wild Third Street among the lines of slugging winos and the bloody drunken Indians with bandages rolling out of alleys and the 10¢ movie house with three features and little children of skid row hotels running on the sidewalk and the pawnshops and the Negro chickenshack jukeboxes and she stood in drowsy sun suddenly listening to bop as if for the first time as it poured out, the intention of the musicians and of the horns and instruments suddenly a mystical unity expressing itself in waves like sinister and again electricity but screaming with palpable aliveness the direct
word
from the vibration,
the interchanges of statement, the levels of waving intimation, the smile in sound, the same living insinuation in the way her sister’d arranged those wires wriggled entangled and fraught with intention, innocent looking but actually behind the mask of casual life completely by agreement the mawkish mouth almost sneering snakes of electricity purposely placed she’d been seeing all day and hearing in the music and saw now in the wires), “What are you trying to do actually electrocute me?” so the sisters could see something was really wrong, worse than the youngest of the Fox sisters who was alcoholic and made the wild street and got arrested regularly by the vice squad, some nameless horrible yawning
wrong,
“She smokes dope, she hangs out with all those queer guys with beards in the City.”—They called the police and Mardou was taken to the hospital—realizing now, “God, I saw how awful what was really happening and about to happen to me and man I pulled out of it fast, and talked sanely with everyone possible and did everything right, they let me out in 48 hours—the other women were with me, we’d look out the windows and the things they said, they made me see the preciousness of really being
out
of those damn bathrobes and
out
of there and out on the street, the sun, we could see ships, out and FREE man to roam around, how great it really is and how we never appreciate it all glum inside our worries and skins, like
fools
really, or blind spoiled detestable children pouting because … they can’t get … all … the … candy … they want, so I talked to the doctors and told them—.” “And you had no place to stay, where was your clothes?”—“Scattered all over—all over the Beach—I had to do something—they let me have this place, some friends of mine, for the summer, I’ll have to get out in October.”—“In the Lane?”—“Yah.”—“Honey let’s you and me—would you go to Mexico with me?”—“Yes!”—“If I go to Mexico? that is, if I get the money? altho I do have a hunnerd eighty now and we really actually could go tomorrow and make it—like Indians—I mean
cheap and living in the country or in the slums.”—“Yes—it would be so nice to get away now.”—“But we could or should really wait till I get—I’m supposed to get five hundred see—and—” (and that was when I would have whisked her off into the bosom of my own life)—she saying “I really don’t want anything more to do with the Beach or any of that gang, man, that’s why—I guess I spoke or agreed too soon, you don’t seem so sure now” (laughing to see me ponder).—“But I’m only pondering practical problems.”—“Nevertheless if I’d have said ‘maybe’ I bet—oooo that awright,” kissing me—the gray day, the red bulblight, I had never heard such a story from such a soul except from the great men I had known in my youth, great heroes of America I’d been buddies with, with whom I’d adventured and gone to jail and known in raggedy dawns, the boys beat on curbstones seeing symbols in the saturated gutter, the Rimbauds and Verlaines of America on Times Square, kids—no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I’d roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity, the hugeness of her face now like the sudden vast Tiger head on a poster on the back of a woodfence in the smoky dumpyards Saturday no-school mornings, direct, beautiful, insane, in the rain.—We hugged, we held close—it was like love now, I was amazed—we made it in the livingroom, gladly, in chairs, on the bed, slept entwined, satisfied—I would show her more sexuality—

We woke up late, she’d not gone to her psychoanalyst, she’d “wasted” her day and when Adam came home and saw us in the chair again still talking and with the house belittered (coffee cups, crumbs of cakes I’d bought down on tragic Broadway in the gray Italianness which was so much like the lost Indianness of
Mardou, tragic America-Frisco with its gray fences, gloomy sidewalks, doorways of dank, I from the small town and more recently from sunny Florida East Coast found so frightening).—“Mardou, you wasted your visit to a therapist, really Leo you should be ashamed and feel a little responsible, after all—” “You mean I’m making her lay off her duties … I used to do it with all my girls … ah it’ll be good for her to miss” (not knowing her need).—Adam almost joking but also most serious, “Mardou you must write a letter or call—why don’t you call him now?”—“It’s a she doctor, up at City & County.”—“Well call now, here’s a dime.”—“But I can do it tomorrow, but it’s too late.”—“How do you know it’s too late—no really, you really goofed today, and you too Leo you’re awfully responsible you rat.” And then a gay supper, two girls coming from outside (gray crazy outside) to join us, one of them fresh from an overland drive from New York with Buddy Pond, the doll an L.A. hip type with short haircut who immediately pitched into the dirty kitchen and cooked everybody a delicious supper of black bean soup (all out of cans) with a few groceries while the other girl, Adam’s, goofed on the phone and Mardou and I sat around guiltily, darkly in the kitchen drinking stale beer and wondering if Adam wasn’t perhaps really right about what should be done, how one should pull oneself together, but our stories told, our love solidified, and something sad come into both our eyes—the evening proceeding with the gay supper, five of us, the girl with the short haircut saying later that I was so beautiful she couldn’t look (which later turned out to be an East Coast saying of hers and Buddy Pond’s), “beautiful” so amazing to me, unbelievable, but must have impressed Mardou, who was anyway during the supper jealous of the girl’s attentions to me and later said so—my position so airy, secure—and we all went driving in her foreign convertible car, through now clearing Frisco streets not gray but opening soft hot reds in the sky between the homes Mardou and I lying back in the open backseat digging them,
the soft shades, commenting, holding hands—they up front like gay young international Paris sets driving through town, the short hair girl driving solemnly, Adam pointing out—going to visit some guy on Russian Hill packing for a New York train and France-bound ship where a few beers, small talk, later troopings on foot with Buddy Pond to some literary friend of Adam’s Aylward So-and-So famous for the dialogs in
Current Review,
possessor of a magnificent library, then around the corner to (as I told Aylward) America’s greatest wit, Charles Bernard, who had gin, and an old gray queer, and others, and sundry suchlike parties, ending late at night as I made my first foolish mistake in my life and love with Mardou, refusing to go home with all the others at 3
A.M
., insisting, tho at Charles’ invite, to stay till dawn studying his pornographic (homo male sexual) pictures and listening to Marlene Dietrich records, with Aylward—the others leaving, Mardou tired and too much to drink looking at me meekly and not protesting and seeing how I was, a drunk really, always staying late, freeloading, shouting, foolish—but now loving me so not complaining and on her little bare thonged brown feet padding around the kitchen after me as we mix drinks and even when Bernard claims a pornographic picture has been stolen by her (as she’s in the bathroom and he’s telling me confidentially, “My dear, I saw her slip it into her pocket, her waist I mean her breast pocket”) so that when she comes out of bathroom she senses some of this, the queers around her, the strange drunkard she’s with, she complains not—the first of so many indignities piled on her, not on her capacity for suffering but gratuitously on her little female dignities.—Ah I shouldn’t have done it, goofed, the long list of parties and drinkings and downcrashings and times I ran out on her, the final shocker being when in a cab together she’s insisting I take her home (to sleep) and I can go see Sam alone (in bar) but I jump out of cab, madly (“I never saw anything so maniacal”), and run into another cab and zoom off, leaving her in the
night—so when Yuri bangs on her door the following night, and I’m not around, and he’s drunk and insists, and jumps on her as he’d been doing, she gave in, she gave in—she gave up—jumping ahead of my story, naming my enemy at once—the pain, why should “the sweet ram of their lunge in love” which has really nothing to do with me in time or space, be like a dagger in my throat?

Waking up, then, from the partying, in Heavenly Lane, again I have the beer nightmare (now a little gin too) and with remorse and again almost and now for no reason revulsion the little white woolly particles from the pillow stuffing in her black almost wiry hair, and her puffed cheeks and little puffed lips, the gloom and dank of Heavenly Lane, and once more “I gotta go home, straighten out”—as tho never I was straight with her, but crooked—never away from my chimerical work room and comfort home, in the alien gray of the world city, in a state of WELL-BEING—. “But why do you always want to rush off so soon?”—“I guess a feeling of well-being at home, that I need, to be straight—like—.” “I know baby—but I’m, I miss you in a way I’m jealous that you have a home and a mother who irons your clothes and all that and I haven’t—.” “When shall I come back, Friday night?”—“But baby it’s up to you—to say when.”—“But tell me what YOU want.”—“But I’m not supposed to.”—“But what do you mean s’posed?”—“It’s like what they say—about—oh, I dunno” (sighing, turning over in the bed, hiding, burrowing little grape body around, so I go, turn her over, flop on bed, kiss the straight line that runs from her breastbone, a depression there, straight, clear down to her belly-button where it becomes an infinitesimal line and proceeds like as if ruled with pencil on down and then continues just as straight underneath, and need a man get well-being from history and thought as she herself said when he has that, the essence, but still).—The weight of my need to go home, my neurotic fears, hangovers, horrors—“I shouldna—we shouldn’t
a gone to Bernard’s at all last night—at least we shoulda come home at three with the others.”—“That’s what I say baby—but God” (laughing the shnuffle and making little funny imitation voice of slurring) “you never do what I ash you t’do.”—“Aw I’m sorry—I love you—do you love me?”—“Man,” laughing, “what do you mean”—looking at me warily—“I mean do you feel affection for me?” even as she’s putting brown arm around my tense big neck.—“Naturally baby.”—“But what is the—?” I want to ask everything, can’t, don’t know how, what is the mystery of what I want from you, what is man or woman, love, what do I mean by love or why do I have to insist and ask and why do I go and leave you because in your poor wretched little quarters—“It’s the place depresses me—at home I sit in the yard, under trees, feed my cat.”—“Oh man I know it’s stuffy in here—shall I open the blind?”—“No everybody’ll see you—I’ll be so glad when the summer’s over—when I get that dough and we go to Mexico.”—“Well man, let’s like you say go now on your money that you have now, you say we can really make it.”—“Okay! Okay!” an idea which gains power in my brain as I take a few swigs of stale beer and consider a dobe hut say outside Texcoco at five dollars a month and we go to the market in the early dewy morning she in her sweet brown feet on sandals padding wifelike Ruthlike to follow me, we come, buy oranges, load up on bread, even wine, local wine, we go home and cook it up cleanly on our little cooker, we sit together over coffee writing down our dreams, analyzing them, we make love on our little bed.—Now Mardou and I are sitting there talking all this over, daydreaming, a big phantasy—“Well man,” with little teeth outlaughing, “WHEN do we do this—like it’s been a minor flip our whole relationship, all this indecisive clouds and planning—God.”—“Maybe we should wait till I get that royalty dough—yep! really! it’ll be better, cause like that we can get a typewriter and a three-speed machine and Gerry Mulligan records and clothes for you and everything we need, like the way it
is now we can’t do anything.”—“Yeah—I dunno” (brooding) “Man you know I don’t have any eyes for that hysterical poverty deal”—(statements of such sudden pith and hip I get mad and go home and brood about it for days). “When will you be back?”—“Well okay, then we’ll make it Thursday.”—“But if you really want to make it Friday—don’t let me interfere with your work, baby—maybe you’d like it better to be away longer times.”—“After what you—O I love you—you—.” I undress and stay another three hours, and leave guiltily because the well-being, the sense of doing what I should has been sacrificed, but tho sacrificed to healthy love, something is sick in me, lost, fears—I realize too I have not given Mardou a dime, a loaf of bread literally, but talk, hugs, kisses, I leave the house and her unemployment check hasn’t come and she has nothing to eat—“What will you eat?”—“O there’s some cans—or I can go to Adam’s maybe—but I don’t wanta go there too often—I feel he resents me now, your friendship has been, I’ve come between that certain something you had sort of—.” “No you didn’t.”—“But it’s something else—I don’t want to go out, I want to stay in, see no one”—“Not even me?”—“Not even you, sometimes God I feel that.”—“Ah Mardou, I’m all mixed up—I can’t make up my mind—we ought to do something together—I know what, I’ll get a job on the railroad and we’ll live together—” this is the great new idea.