Americana (43 page)

“And what will you and I drink to, David?”

“My health, of course.”

I climbed into the back of the camper. Pike and Brand were
playing gin rummy. Pike was talking about the dingo dogs of Australia and he did not look up when I came in. I stood behind him, put my hands on his shoulders and squeezed very hard. Finally he had to stop talking.

“The lady wants you.”

“What for?” he said.

“Room 211. You’d better haul ass, colonel.”

He got up slowly and left and I took his folding chair, turning it around first so that my crossed arms rested on its back as I faced Brand across the small table. He was wearing a khaki fatigue jacket. I was wearing rugged corduroy trousers and a blue workshirt.

“She told me,” I said.

“Who told you what?”

“Sully told me that you two have been playing doctor and nursey.”

“So what.”

“That took balls when you consider that we’re old friends, you and I, and she was with me if not in name then certainly by implication.”

“Balls help,” he said.

“I’ve known her for years. You can’t just move in like that.”

“You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.”

“Let me tell you something. Latch on to this. Are you listening? She let you into her pants only because you’re afraid to be a writer. Did you get that? My advice to you is re-up in the goddamn Air Force. Our weapons system isn’t complete without you.”

“At least I flew, buddy. You were some kind of grunt or file clerk.”

“I wasn’t even in.”

“That figures.”

“That figures, does it?”

“Damn straight,” he said.

“Let’s get out to where we’ll have some room to move around in.”

“Talk is cheap.”

“That’s a very original comment,” I said.

We walked through a narrow driveway into the parking lot behind the hotel. Three cars were back there, front bumpers nudging a long squared-off log. Brand took off his jacket and threw it to the ground. I reached for the tattooed dogs on his forearm and began to pinch. He looked surprised and then yelled. Then he pinched the side of my neck. We held on to each other that way, pinching and trying not to grimace or yell. I was in great pain. I knew I could not take it for very long and I let go of him and kicked him in the shins. He pulled my hair. Then we stood facing each other.

“Why are we fighting over that ugly bitch?” I said.

“She’s not ugly.”

“Homely then.”

“She’s not even homely and you know it.”

“She’s homely.”

“She is not,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to take off your glasses?”

We started to wrestle and he bit me on the shoulder. I got him in a headlock and then spun him to the ground over my hip. I didn’t kick him in the ribs although it would have been the easiest thing in the world. Then, on the ground, he looked up at me fiercely and clutched his groin. It was a strange thing to do and I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.

I helped him up and we went out front. We shook hands and I told him he could have my car or sell it and keep the money; either way it was his. Then I went to the back of the camper and stole Sullivan’s radio. I left it with the desk clerk and went upstairs. I told them Brand was waiting and we wished each other luck. Pike and I shook hands. Sullivan kissed me on the chin. When they were gone I packed my things in two suitcases, including the camera, which weighed only about seven-and-a-half pounds, and all the reels of tape
and film. I decided to leave behind the tripod and tape recorder as well as a suit, a sportcoat and two pairs of shoes. I called the desk clerk upstairs and told him that everything was his and that it was more than enough to pay for repainting the room. He went away confused. Then I masturbated into the clean sheets, feeling an odd and emptying joy, the cool uncaring pleasure of those times when nothing is foreseen and all that is left behind seems so much dead weight for the ministrations of the minor clergy. I went downstairs and stuffed the radio into one of the suitcases. Then I took off on the first stage of the second journey, the great seeking leap into the depths of America, wilderness dream of all poets and scoutmasters, westward to our manifest destiny, to sovereign red timber and painted sands, to the gold-transfigured hills, westward to match the shadows of my image and my self.

I am falling silently through myself. The spirit contracts at the termination of every passion, whether the season belongs to pain or love, and as I prepare the final pages I feel I am drifting downward into coma, a sleep of no special terror and yet quite narrow and bottomless. Little of myself seems to be left.

1) Intense solitude becomes unbearable only when there’s nothing one wishes to say to another.

2) Saints talk to birds but only lunatics get an answer.

I have reached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness. Surely this account falls short of either. Too much has been disfigured in the name of symmetry. Our lives were the shortest distance between two points, birth and chaos, but what appears on these pages represents, in its orderly proportions, almost a delivery from chaos. Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. There is no mention of the scar on my right index finger, the white medicine I took as a child, the ether visions of my tonsillectomy. In my mind the resonance of these distant things is sheer thunder, outlasting immortal
books, long and short wars, journeys to other planets. In short I have not been cunning enough. I have taken the middle path, neither heaven nor hell, and no amount of self-serving research can persuade me that cunning does not grow its sharpest claws at the very extremes of consciousness. Not that this work has been engineered to no purpose. It is a fond object. I like to look at it, pages neatly stacked, hundreds of them, their differences hidden from the eye. Every so often I move the manuscript to another room in order to be surprised by it as I enter that room. It never fails to be a touching thing, my book on a pinewood table, poetic in its loneliness, totally still, Cézannesque in the timeless light it emits, a simple object, the box-shaped equivalent of the reels which sit in my small air-conditioned storage vault.

I’ve been studying the footage of late, hour after hour. There is a crippled beauty in some of it—Sullivan on the swing, all shadow and menace, a long dark heron wading through one’s empty sleep. The Fort Curtis episodes are only a small part of what eventually became a film in silence and darkness. The whole thing runs nearly a week, the uncut work of several years. Viewed in the sequence in which it was filmed, the movie becomes darker and more silent as it progresses. There are the Fort Curtis segments. There are demonstrations, speeches, parades, riots. There is a vacation I took in Vermont, and people entering my apartment, and selected parts of a love affair. Then there are long unedited scenes in which friends and strangers declaim their madness to the camera. At this point I dispensed with sound. There are houses, all kinds of houses, everywhere I went. There are newspaper stands, store windows, bus terminals and waiting rooms. There are nuns, hundreds of them, so very black and white, perfect subjects in their long procession, soundless as beads passing through a hand. I returned to individuals briefly—women and boys in hospital corridors, deaf-mutes playing chess, people in tunnels. The true play could not be found in theaters. The true play was ourselves and we needed shadows
on which to chalk our light, speed to conquer sequence, infinitesimal holes in which to plant our consciousness. I began to underexpose then, to become ever more crude, destroying shape and light, attempting to solve the darkness by entering it fully. There are museums toward the end of the movie, overcast scenes shot in marble halls, all empty, submarine in appearance, being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the screen, limestone kings barely visible, pleasant Flemish ladies in square frames, and then, finally, for a long time, there is nothing. I myself appear briefly at the very end, reflected in a mirror as I hold the camera during the first of the Fort Curtis scenes. These twenty seconds of film also serve as a beginning.

The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning. I like to touch the film. I like to watch it move through the projector. This is my success. Sullivan and Brand, in their surgical candor, taught me to fear and envy the artist. (Brand, of course, as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That’s how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent—but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.) I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth. I was most successful. I ended in silence and darkness, sitting still, a maker of objects that imitate my predilection.

From this window I can see the ocean, far out, rocking in that blank angry sheen which foul weather sets upon all waters. Later I’ll walk on the beach for an hour or so. If the weather has cleared by then I’ll be able to see the coast of Africa, the great brown curve of that equatorial loin. But right now it is a pleasure to anticipate slipping once again (a paragraph hence) into a much more filmworthy period of my life.

There will be no fireworks when the century turns. There will be no agonies in the garden. Now that night beckons, the first lamp to be lit will belong to that man who leaps from a
cliff and learns how to fly, who soars to the tropics of the sun and uncurls his hand from his breast to spoon out fire. The sound of the ocean seems lost in its own exploding passion. I am wearing white flannel trousers.

* * *

Clevenger’s paleolithic lavender Cadillac was equipped with air conditioning, deep-pile carpeting, padded instrument panel, stereo tape system and a burglar alarm. Behind the wheel he seemed a veteran jockey not at all awed by the magnificence of his own colors. He was about fifty, a small man with a neck of Playa clay traversed by wide deep ridges. Clevenger was a Texan. He had picked me up somewhere in Missouri where he had been visiting his sister and her family. When I told him I was heading nowhere special he had grinned and told me to get in. He kept grinning through most of Kansas and I could only guess that his own youth held some dry secret of thumbing days and freight cars and nights spent with songless men in the crouched light of fires. We stayed at the most expensive motels and Clevenger ate steak and home-fries for breakfast. He was superintendent-in-chief of a test track for automobile and truck tires just outside a town in West Texas called Rooster. This was the last week of his vacation and he was seeing to some private business interests which were apparently fairly lucrative and certainly well spread out. After Kansas we tore off a corner-piece of southeastern Colorado and went charging across New Mexico. The journey was very boring. We kept moving toward the seam of earth and sky but never got there, and nothing was undiscovered, and time was confused. Jet trainers skimmed over the mountains and desert. The past returned in plastic. Ecological balances were slipping and things seemed not quite the sum of their parts. Troopers bulged with sidearms. There were neat reversals of the currents of history and geography; the menu in a frontier-style restaurant included a brief note pointing out that the main dining hall was a replica of the main dining hall at the famous Cattleman on Forty-fifth Street in New York City.
People fished, hunted, took their sons to visit the inevitable new military installation and talked about places like Phoenix and Vegas as if remembering some telescopically distant moment, some misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth. All those days in fact were not far from one’s idea of life on a lunar colony; everywhere we went Indians ranged across the landscape like workers thirsty for oxygen, men sent to move stones in a place which is nothing but stone. Kenneth Wattling Wild (of Chicago, River Forest, the U.S. Marine Corps, Leighton Cage College, Chicago, Insomnia and, no doubt, River Forest again) had once written:

This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I
can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger’s sunbaked eyes.