Erasure (47 page)

I called Bill, but Bill was not home. Bill was never home, never at his office, never anywhere. He never called back, never left a message, never wrote. I wondered if Bill was dead. I wondered if it mattered.

One Tuesday, Mother seemed herself for a couple of minutes near the end of my visit. She gazed up at me from her darkness and said, “Monksie, we are all such vain creatures. The hard part is seeing myself, what I’ve become. I see for a couple of seconds and then I don’t know where I am. I wish I could tell you I’m in here looking out. Thursday I plan to have a good day. Be sure to be here on Thursday.” The nurse told me as I was leaving that a couple of Mother’s old friends had come by to see her.

“They stood at the foot of her bed, but she just stared past them out the window,” the woman reported. “Then they left. One of them had been by before. Same thing happened.”

“Does my mother know who you are?”

The nurse nodded her head. “Much of the time. That’s not unusual though. I don’t mean anything to her. I’m just furniture.”

On Thursday, just as she predicted, she smiled to me with a smile that was indeed hers, asked me to put on some music. “Something nice,” she said. “Some Ravel.” She floated her hands in the air. “Ravel is so dancey.” I put the music on and she closed her eyes. “At times, I believe your father was bored with me. I think I annoyed him. But he never said anything, never let it show on his face or in his tone, but I believe I saw it. In the way he moved, the way he would turn a page. I know he loved me, because why would he have hidden his feelings so. Oh, we had good times, Monksie. Your father and I got along beautifully, but still there were those moments, moments when I felt so small.” She sighed, but kept her eyes shut. “Once I mentioned to him that I thought he was wearied, but he shook his head and smiled and wondered where I got such an idea.” She breathed in a deep breath and smiled sadly. “I always promised myself I wouldn’t become old and smell of mentholated spirits. But I do, don’t I, Monksie.”

“I can’t smell it, Mother.”

“You’re sweet. Like your father.”

“We promise ourselves all sorts of things during our lives,” I said.

“What have you promised yourself?”

I looked at her quiet face. “I promised myself once that I would not compromise my art.”

Mother’s eyes opened and she said, “What a fine promise. Are you sure I don’t smell of mentholated spirits?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Mother’s eyes closed again.

I tried Bill again. Left a message. No response.

So, I had managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work, two bodies, no boundaries yet walls everywhere. I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away. Somehow I had whacked off my own

willy

stick

dick

doink

rod

pecker

poker

member

prick

putz

schmuck

tallywhacker

johnson

thing

little friend

and now had to pay the price. I had to rescue myself, find myself and that meant, it was ever so clear for a very brief moment, losing myself.

Another list of keywords (phrases):

echoes

dead

clock

thunder

obstupefactus

poached eyes

arabesque

nightmaze

et tu Bruno?

species

nocturnal

cad

C
₅
H
₁₄
N
₂

moral cement

London Bridge’s Fallin’ Down

Maybe it’s the heat

dancing doll

lynch

Hahal shalal hashbaz

I had the strangest of thoughts. I reasoned, for lack of a better word, but perhaps no word is better, that if I were to go out into the streets of Washington, say around 14th Street and T, I might find an individual who by all measure was Stagg Leigh and then I could kill him, perhaps bring him home first for a meal, but kill him after all. But there was no such person and yet there was and he was me. I had not only made him, but I had made him well enough that he created a work of so-called art. I felt like god considering Hitler or any number of terrorists or Congressmen. I resolved that I could not let the committee select
Fuck
as the winner of the most prestigious book award in the nation. I had to defeat myself to save my self, my own identity. I had to toss a spear through the mouth of my own creation, silence him forever, kill him, press him down a dark hole and have the world admit that he never existed.

Christmas and New Year’s passed the way I had always wanted them to, without note. In the middle of January
Fuck
was number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list, had been picked up by two more book clubs.

I sat up all night for several nights, pretending to look over my notes for a
real
novel.

When I was near delirium, I recalled the Icarus myth and pointed out to myself that whereas Icarus did plummet to earth, Daedalus in fact flew. I decided that Zeno was too slow getting to his point and that Thales’ theory didn’t hold water. I also determined that there is no alternative to madness, that if you take all the blue out of purple, you aren’t really left with red; it just looks that way.

New York Times
17 January

Fuck

by Stagg R. Leigh

Random House. 110 pp. $23.95

by Wayne Waxen

There is so much excitement over this new novel by unknown Leigh that it is difficult to write a review which approaches objectivity. But that is the point. This novel is so honest, so raw, so down-and-dirty-gritty, so real, that talk of objectivity is out of place. To address the book on that level would be the same as comparing the medicine beliefs of Amazon Indians to our advanced biomedical science. This novel must be taken on its own terms;
it’s a black thang.

The life of Van Go Jenkins is one of sheer animal existence, one that we can all recognize. Our young protagonist has no father, is ghetto tough and resists education and reason like the plague. It is natural, right for him to do so. He is hard, cruel, lost and we are afraid of him; that much is clear. But he is so real that we must offer him pity. He is the hood whom Dirty Harry blows away and we say, “Good, you got him,” then feel the loss, at least of our own innocence.

Van Go has
fo
babies by four different mothers. He pays no child support, has no job, and no ambition except that he is on the verge of becoming a criminal. His mother, whom he stabs in the novel’s opening dream sequence, arranges employment for him. He goes to work for a wealthy black family with a beautiful daughter who soon becomes the target of Van Go’s burgeoning criminality.

The characters are so well drawn that often one forgets that
Fuck
is a novel. It is more like the evening news. The ghetto comes to life in these pages and for this glimpse of hood existence we owe the author a tremendous debt. The writing is dazzling, the dialogue as true as dialogue gets and it is simply honest.
Fuck
is a must read for every sensitive person who has ever seen these people on the street and asked,
“What’s up with him?”