China Blues (6 page)

            I don’t know what it is about youth

except for an honest desire to concentrate on textbooks

of infinitesimal calculus,

                               & at the same time a great love

of carelessness,

                 a wanton energy,

throwing their shoulders around as if ecstasy is movement

or motion is ecstasy,

                        a wantonness, a carelessness so

beautiful that like a warm summer breeze you lift

your hand up to your red hair

in amazement & open your mouth to taste the fine grains

of copper magnesium cobalt in the summer air.

           In Tobacco Heaven my friends are killed

on freeways. Smoking dope perhaps, or a fifth of cheap liquor.

They are about 17, tall & slim,

                                        usually wearing t-s

or sloppy shirts;

                   except for Carson who was short & plump

the class clown, with a flat-top haircut,

who went through a guard rail in a red Mazda

& fell 135 feet.

           A boy with the body of a

perfect high school basketball star

long torso no waist & the smile of a sardonic angel

my name is John,

                     call me Johnny Slow Hand,

driving

with a large unadulterated jumbo of Coke

Joan Crawford’s favourite drink.

It makes me nauseous, she once said,

between his long legs,

                            radio blaring Elton John

that song about how the blues will always come back

with brass in the background

                                     a lift from LA Express

caught the tail of a grey Plymouth

making a lazy turn no tail-lights onto a country side road

& was then clipped by 3 cars & a truck

                                                    & flipped

on the boulevard.

             Saturday night

the cars have to be cut open with an acetylene torch

to lift their once perfect Adidas-shod bodies

out of the wrecked car the way you would lift an egg out

of a crushed bird’s nest.

                              Mostly boys,

the girl was an exception, & under the age of 29.

Boys have the big A-stat. A for accident

& A for a sort of hyper-tense anxiety

backed up by a tumultuous review of hormones.

Boys are expressive, sure, okay,

& also aggressive drivers.

             Jerzy Kosinski

snuffed out with a plastic bag.

Surely you weren’t trying to do anything like that?

When you’re 17½ the world is a huge 6
/
5ths.

6 / 5ths of a gigantic moon.

                                    Cut throat of the sun.

Slashed wrists of the moon.

                                   You just put your foot

on the gas a little too hard with one arm out the window

& leaned back like a lazy greyhound on the comfortable

seat.

   Cut throat of the sun.

                                   Slashed wrists of

the moon.

          6 / 5ths of the dark night.

            Tobacco Heaven lays out

the coloured highway signs from Thunder Bay to New Mexico.

Life is almost always beautiful

                                       or at worst a bit of a down.

The upside on the girl is that she wasn’t decapitated,

unlike the Hispanic kid who was

driving with his feet just to prove he could do it.

Can you do it Jaime can you do it Jaime can you do it Jaime?

Si,

it is easy, I can/

                       do it.

And if you lose control

then the night road is wrong because

it has imperfect highway seals under the asphalt

some designs don’t breathe the way a highway

should breathe. Some axles lock, & some don’t.

Driving with your knees only is strictly forbidden

while eating pizza

                       turning over a tape cassette

or changing your shirt.

The Buzzcocks should never have broken up

when they were so so good. Some curves

in the highway are actually a dark blue parallel.

Some high schools have good basketball teams

with cheerleaders & some don’t. All highway signs

should be *illuminated*. Some windshields

break more easily than others.

Mrs. Matisse, I say, when I get her on the telephone, Is it ok if I take Henri out for coffee? I know this is a different time period, time has borders also, but what the état, I think we can do it. Tell him we’ll have a big plate of sweet
arrabiata
and I won’t mention Claes Oldenburg’s bright-coloured canvas hamburger sculptures even once. We’ll just talk about Henri’s
Jazz Portfolio
and questions of general focus.

He’s out, David, she says, He’s paying a bill and having some shirts made.

I wanted to talk to him about tapioca. I’ve decided that tapioca is the opposite of style. Obvious, I guess. Love is such a sweet bowl of tapioca. But it needs character. It needs wit. Something the French masters were good at, Pascin with his endless drinking, Dufy with his
crême brulées
; and it needs colour, the advertising photographs for style should be of baseball players and models.

So I go out for lunch around 2:30 – rare roast beef sandwich as usual, but with a slice of honest dark chocolate cake on the side. Dark w/ hazelnuts, I might add, and I like to lick a little salt off my hand before I eat the cake.

Well, stupid, my mother says, I didn’t tell you to eat nothing but tapioca.

             It’s amazing how easily I can turn the most

embarrassing remark around as long as I’m wearing

comfortable shoes,

                       Clark’s wide last or Nike’s court shoes,

whatever. For example, Grant walks over to me at a party

for Gord Raynor & says, Sorry to hear about your losing

your job with the Waterloo Arts Council. He has a nice

smile on his face, & he obviously thinks this is a good

bit to do.

         And I simply smile at him, very relaxed, & say,

I’m working on a new book, or I’ve just discovered a great

recipe for chicken with pistachios & red onion. And

I tweak his cheek, & give his collar a jerk,

as if to say, Why don’t you buy some new shirts, fella?

How do I know he’s being insincere? Because he’s not even

vaguely concerned about me, we’re not even real friends –

he just wants to make the commiseration & get the scoop

on how it happened. So why should I waste my time

telling him how it happened. It was nothing anyway,

it was just a wastebasket, so to speak. And I stroll

away to get a drink. I’m not a great writer,

& I don’t put very much stress

on having a perfect history of proprietry,

although yes, I do like to have a shower every morning,

clean socks, a little talcum powder in a pair

of comfortable shoes. Personal information,

I mean a bite that corresponds to a sensitivity

you may have, goes for a sentence or two, sure; but

it doesn’t redefine your good stuff. I’ve got a good

curve on the outside, that’s about all I need.

But listen closely: you should never go out for

the evening without wearing a pair of comfortable shoes.

for Ed Grogan

           Here in the sky blue heart

                                                 of Ontario

I am sitting on a battered wood&canvas lawn chair

out on the beach at Hanlan’s Point

without a Citizenship. Behind me

to the north there are the lush Muskokas

& west there are the rugged boonies & farms

that begin before Great Slave Lake.

                                              I am happy &

useless in my rumpled chinos

with a large double scotch

not reading because I would need a 5 × 8 portable

red plastic box light. After all,

this is an island in Lake Ontario.

                                           The sun

is coming up orange; there are trees,

& the great smoke of Toronto is in the distance. I have never

believed in the Iroquois that much. In my heart

I have always believed the Sioux

to have been kinder

& to have had a larger concept of glory

                                                    preferably

sitting on their horses.

                            There is a bright 86°

for today. The sun is coming up orange. I have always

believed you want

to kill me with your stupid ideas

about Canadianism, but relax, I don’t hate you for it.

I am healthy despite these attacks,

talented, & stronger than 2 average people.

                                                         I don’t

hate you for it; I just think we should bring

our horses down to swim in the Lake. It’s warm

this morning, & I regard you & the cicadas

with a bemused & moody eye.

for Kathy Melanson

We think of Time generally as being abstract, although Time is the condition in which these cultural periods happen, which is funny, don’t you think, because we say that Wittgenstein and Heisenberg are abstract, whereas they’re actually very tangible; and then we’ve got De Kooning, who is senile now (Warhol copied him, well, he tried to copy his face, he couldn’t very well copy his memories, Dutch, Amsterdam, hetero, adolescent lusts for French schoolgirls, the importance of Hans Hoffman, anti-Nazi, the
sturm
troopers in Berlin squares, where Alban Berg used to walk, trying to destroy the German people whom they said they loved, when, in reality, the reality of real time, they were nothing but a National Rifle Association in power; how could Warhol even copy his face, that gorgeous thick-browed innocence & those eyes), well, he’s senile now & there’s going to be a lot of litigation over the paintings. And of course De Kooning, being senile, doesn’t know … well, what doesn’t he know? Imagine if we could take a sortie into De Kooning’s mind, sort of like taking a dune buggy into the desert, what sort of blue & rose & grey flowers we
might
discover.

A girl sitting in the front row of an
OAC
class where I’m doing a workshop this afternoon. I ask her if she thinks Joan Baez is a great singer. She’s about 17, bright, high forehead, good eyes, attractive. She says, Joan Who? I say, Baez. Bi Ezz. She smiles, not defensively, let’s not attribute things, but with a sort of natural mechanical amusement, and shrugs, looking around, reflexively, to see if there is peer group support. There isn’t support
exactly, but a sort of curiosity. These kids, it should be pointed out, especially since we touched on events in Europe in the 1930s, listen to 1000s of groups in a given year, most of them trash, some of them outstanding. Then a boy at the back of the class, in a black motorcycle jacket, says, Yeah, she’s terrific, she’s really important. He has status. He knows a lot about The Smiths, and that Stephen Morrissey isn’t nearly as cool as he’s supposed to be. They all turn and look at Jod, that’s his nickname, and sort of nod. The attractive girl in the short-sleeved dark blue sweater sort of shrugs and slides down a bit in her seat. The class turns back to me with increased interest.

Don’t you think it would be more interesting than our average boring, Here’s a new writer from Belgium, and he’s going to read to you from his new unpublished boring Belgian novel, to have an evening at Massey Hall, or Thomson (Thomson really needs to be liberated a bit, don’t you think) with De Kooning sitting on stage, white coveralls etc. against a background of his paintings and some large blow-ups of black holes & red dwarfs, and to have Baez in the middle of the stage singing that song O when the angels come out in the morning and blow their trumpets?

           “Honey,” she says, “do you want to dance with me?”

We are in

           the dark meadow outside the Mackenzie farm,

there’s a clear yellow full moon & she’s standing

with her hands on her hips & her head back.

I’m sitting down on an empty box,

she’s being cocky,

                     here in a dark meadow

out on the Cedar Road,

under this harvest red copper hinge in a cobalt sky

not far from where we used to play as children.

           I know what she means. She means just slow

at first then fast then really slow

– like that couple in
Badlands

dancing beside the parked car on their way west

one bank after another.

           She undoes her tomato red blouse

& her breasts catch the light like flowers

5, 6 minutes from the river where we used to smoke

brown leaf golden tossed crumpled cigarettes

& talk about each other’s bodies

& why Paul wouldn’t go to the school dance

with Esther.

“No,” I say, “I don’t,”

feeling my balls turn upside down

like a picture in
Gray’s Anatomy
, Erasmus reflecting

on the history of Holland,

                                 old Haarlem,

Jan Steen’s painting
Girl Eating Oysters

my balls turn upside down in my faded jeans

& go into my throat like a chicken bone

or a big piece of crusty bread. I have some

matches in my pocket. I get up & walk toward

the Mackenzie’s blue & grey barn.

Tomorrow I want to reread
Day of the Locust.