Absence of the Hero (14 page)

We packed into the
car and made it back. There was a crowd there
when we arrived. We went in. I had stopped off
for replenishments but the crowd had brought stuff—there was tequila,
wine, bourbon, scotch, beer, and vodka. I drank from all
of them. We sat on the rug and drank and
talked. I was fairly far out of it by then,
but I noticed a well-developed girl sitting next to me.
I put my hand around her hip and kissed her.
She had this easy smile and one tooth missing, it
was very endearing. I couldn't keep away from her. She
had long black hair, very long, and was splendidly put together.

“I just write poetry so I can go to bed with girls,” I told her. “I'm 50 but I just
love
young pussy!”

She gave
me that tooth-missing smile and I kissed her again. . . .

I don't remember much else. I always blackout after I drink quite a bit.

When I awakened I was pressed against some rump and my cock was still in the vagina. (Portrait of the Artist as a Dog.) It was warm in there; it was hot in there. I pulled out.

She had long black hair and was splendidly put together.

I got out of bed and walked around. It was a fairly large house. I looked in one bedroom and there was a kid running around in a crib. Then a boy of about 3 ran up, dressed in pajamas. I patted his head, looked at the clock: 10:30. It was late morning. I walked over and saw a letter. It was addressed to a “Mrs. Kathy W.” I walked into the bedroom.

“Hey, Kathy,” I said, “do you know there are kids running around all over this place?”

“Oh, Hank, I want to sleep. Make yourself some coffee until I pull around.”

I walked out, put on some coffee. Then I sterilized a bottle and put some milk in it and gave it to the kid in the crib. He went right to it. Then I got the other kid out of his pajamas, dressed him in an orange t-shirt with black stripes, light blue pants, and orange tennis shoes. He looked like a Van Gogh ready to chase ravens. But he liked me. He stood there smiling at me. I twisted his nose, pulled his ears, and drank the coffee. Went to the bedroom. Van Gogh followed me.

“Let me use your phone, Kathy.”

“Sure.”

I phoned a Yellow Cab, went back in, and held her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back.

“Listen, I've got to leave. I'll see you later.”

“Sure, Hank.”

I took the cab back across town. . . .

I had to stay in town until Monday to get my check. For $225, it was worth the wait. I drank beer all day, then that night the phone rang. It was Steve. He was coming over with Gregory Corso.

Webb looked at me. “Man, he's a wild guy. Wait'll you see him.”

“O.K.,” I said.

“Ginsberg came by earlier this year, but you ought to meet Corso. Only thing is, he's stopped writing. You haven't.”

“Not yet,” I said.

We sat around waiting for Steve and Corso. I was a little nervous about meeting Corso. Although I was an older man, I had not begun writing until I was 35, and Corso's name had been household for some time—like Burroughs, Ginsberg, all that gang. Not that their writing overimpressed me; nobody's does. It was only that you got used to names and accepted them as part of something.

Corso and Steve showed.
Corso was dressed in tight-fitting white pants with little rivulets
running down the sides. He had an opaque hair-do, rather
fluffy; a strange-looking nose jutted out, all this mixed with
a fighting chin and eyes that looked, looked, looked and
a mouth that was busy. His accent was English crossed
with Brooklyn and he had a bottle of wine in
his hand. He was high.

We shook hands.

“I am your peer,” he said.

“I know, Greg.”

“I am your peer, I want you to remember that.”

“Yes, Gregory.”

There was something likeable about him, something quite likeable about him, and I was glad it was there. We sat and Gregory talked and we listened. He was not as wild as advertised. High, of course, but in definite control . . . that night, anyway. He liked rings and trinkets and asked why I didn't wear any. He had something dangling from a thong about his throat, which he explained to us.

“Why don't you wear anything?” he asked.

“I don't know. I just don't think about it.”

Then he got onto astrology, drawing things on pieces of paper. Then here came the tarot cards. He read Lou. Then he tried me. I pulled out the cards. As he turned them over, they all seemed to state power. Then, he said, before turning up the last card, “You see, it all leads up to this, which is the final force. . . .”

He turned up the card. It said:
THE EMPEROR
. Greg was a very likeable guy.

“But remember this, I am still your peer.”

“O.K.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't make your reading.”

“It's O.K.”

Not much happened the rest of the night. When they left, Jon said to me: “I never saw him so subdued.”

“I liked him.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah.” . . . . .

I left town 2 days later. Jon and Lou, Steve and Greg sat in a skid row bar with me across from the Albuquerque train station. It was really a low-life place. I had sat in a bar like that in Philly for 5 years. Memories: I went into the crapper and heaved. Corso was wandering around looking at people. I bought the first round. Five drinks. A tequila, a scotch, a coke for Lou, a beer, and a mixed drink of some sort. The charge was a dollar thirty-five. You could drink in there for a week for ten dollars. If you didn't get killed first. Two women who had been around awhile waited on bar. They were big and expressionless. Put together they must have weighed 600 pounds. Steve got the next round. It was getting close to train time.

“I don't care for the fond farewell scene,” I said. “Why don't you people just let me go across the street and into the train station? Let's say goodbye here.”

I shook hands with Steve. Corso came up and kissed me on the cheek. That took some guts. Then he walked out.

Jon and Lou walked into the train station with me. I paid a couple of bucks extra to get on the Chief. The El Capitan was just too damned slow. The Chief was too slow. Next haul anywhere, I was flying, like anybody else. We found the train car. Lou kissed me goodbye. I told Jon good luck with Henry Miller. Then I climbed on in. After the conductor hung my ticket up over the seat I got up and asked the porter where the bar car was.

The train was moving. The train was moving toward Los
Angeles
. I found the bar car, sat down, and had a scotch and water. The windows were nice and there weren't people climbing around in front of you.

Then I noticed a young lady in a tight yellow dress staring at me from the next table. I wonder what she wants? I thought. I looked down into my drink. When I looked up she was still staring. She smiled.

“I was at your reading,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I liked it very much. It's a long trip to Los Angeles. You mind if I come over?”

“I'd hardly mind at all.”

She brought her drink over. I didn't know what it was. I'd find out when I ordered the next one. She was a juicy young thing. I imagined myself mounting her, legs up in the air.

“My name's Susie,” she said.

“My name's. . . .”

“I know your name.”

“Oh, yeah . . . sorry. . . .”

I reached out and patted her hand. I felt one of her knees against mine.

“I liked the poem about the beautiful actress who was decapitated in the car crash.”

“Thank you, Susie.”

“Life can end so suddenly. We never make the most of our moments. It's so sad.”

I pressed harder against her knee.

“What're you drinking?” I asked her.

“I'll drink what you are.”

“I'm drinking Life,” I said, and then laughed: “That was corny, wasn't it?”

“No, it wasn't,” she said.

We leaned close together. Her lips were a quarter inch from mine.

The University of New Mexico, I thought, has been honored by an old wolf.

I had 15 hours to score. There was no way I coud miss. We kissed and I ordered two more drinks.

Talking about writing is like talking about love or love-making or love-living: too much talk about it can kill it off. Without seeking them out, I have, unfortunately, met many writers, both successful and unsuccessful—I mean at their craft. As human beings they are a bad lot, a distasteful lot, bitchy, self-centered, vicious. One thing they almost all have in common: they each believe their work great, perhaps the greatest. If they become successful they accept it as their normal due. If they fail, they feel that the editors and the publishers and the gods are against them. And, it's true that many bad writers are pushed and manipulated to the top, whatever the reason may be. It's also true that many great writers have starved to death, or almost starved to death, or killed themselves or gone mad, and so forth, and were later discovered as fine (though dead) talents. This historical fact gives heart to the writer who is truly bad. He likes to imagine that his (her) failure is caused by any number of things besides simply being a poor talent. Well, so we have all that.

Also, when I think of the writers that I know, mostly poets, I notice that they are supported by others—wives, mostly mothers carry the economic load of those that I know. And they are quite comfortable with TV sets, loaded refrigerators, and apartments or houses by the sea—mostly at Venice and Santa Monica, and they sun themselves in the day, feeling tragic, these male friends (?) of mine and then at night, perhaps a bottle of wine and a watercress sandwich, followed by a wailing letter of their penury and greatness to somebody somewhere. Anything but writing, working, getting it
done
, getting the word down. Well, I guess it beats working a punch press. The wives and the mothers will work the punch press, don't worry about that. And the poets, having not lived in the outside world in reality, they will then really have nothing to write about, which they do with great ego and much dullness.

It is almost impossible to write about writing. I remember once after giving a poetry reading I asked the students, “Any questions?” One of them asked me, “Why do you write?” And I answered, “Why do you wear that red shirt?”

Being a writer is damning and difficult. If you have a talent it can leave you forever while you are sleeping one night. What keeps you going in the game is not easy to answer. Too much success is destructive; no success at all is destructive. A little rejection is good for the soul but total rejection creates cranks and madmen, rapists, sadists, drunkards, and wife-beaters. Just as too much success does.

I too have been misled by the Romantic concept of writing. As a youth I saw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes, and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn't so. The best writers that I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with one other person, he is always busy (subconsciously)
recording
every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speechmaking or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy god-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices that can be given up, the only time that can simply be given away is the time for Love. Love gives strength; it breaks down inbred hatreds and prejudices. It makes the writing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work. A writer should do most of his reading while he is young; as he starts to form, reading becomes destructive—it takes the needle off the record.

A writer must keep performing, hitting the high mark, or he is down on skid row. And there's no way back up. For after some years of writing, the soul, the person, the creature becomes useless to operate in any other capacity. He is unemployable. He is a bird in a land of cats. I'd never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane. Then, perhaps, it's worth it.

Why does a man destroy himself or what destroys him? I would have to judge that suicide is mostly the tool of the thinking man. The right to suicide should be the same as the right to love. The former certainly has more lasting qualities, which, in a sense, gives it more nobility. One suicide, many loves. One levy, many levies. What destroyed him? I didn't know him that well. Many men are killed and still living. Only a living man can die. Most funerals are the dead burying the dead. levy buried himself. From scarce readings of his works I would have to guess that levy had yet to round out into a plausible talent. What killed him is the same thing which keeps us awake nights, is the same thing that grips our guts when we pass face after face upon the streets; what killed him is the same thing we love and hate, the same thing we eat, the same thing we fear. What killed him was life and lack of life; what killed him were cops, friends, poetry, Cleveland . . . belief and betrayal—this and that: a worm in an apple, a look in an eye . . . poetry, poetry, cops, and friends . . . maybe a woman, maybe a sonnet, maybe lack of proper diet.

A poet is simply too sharpened. The nature of his art makes survival almost impossible. levy printed some of my things in the
M. Quarterly
[
Marrahwannah Quarterly
], and his notes were always short but lively. The
M. Quarterly
was badly printed (mimeoed) and badly bound but still had the flavor of levy. Perhaps he was also badly printed and badly bound. They didn't give him much chance. Perhaps he didn't give himself much chance. Men have been killed for more and for less. levy also published a long poem of mine called
The Genius of the Crowd
, a nicely-done job using cut-up envelopes as pages. He wrote me, “You've said it here, you've said it almost all. And they'll read it and still not know.” It was not long after, it seemed, that he was dead. I must guess that Kent State is certainly aware of death. Death keeps coming and running, one hell of a Sammy. It was last night that Louise Webb phoned me that Jon Webb had died. Jon Webb, editor of
The Outsider
and publisher of 2 of my books, and a friend and a beer-drinking companion. I was bombed when Lou phoned (other troubles), and here was death again and I walked about the room with a Coleman burner on and symphony music on the radio, and I thought, no, goddamn it, I was supposed to go first, I am always talking about suicide and death, and here I am, and hardly feeling fine, and today the letter came asking me to talk about levy. I can't say anymore except that I get angry and sad when a good man dies or is killed, and that isn't reasonable because we're born to die, and maybe that helps make poetry and anger and sadness. The music plays; I smoke half a cigar stub, there's a beer. . . . levy, levy, levy, you're gone. jon, jon, jon, you're gone too. My heart heaves out the belly of itself.