Last Notes from Home (3 page)

Sorry that I couldn’t get John Ray to reveal to me whether he planned to petition the court again (he was much too cautious for that), we shook hands and said goodbye. John Ray told me to give his affection to my friend and his lovely charming wife, and I dreamily, somnambulantly from the Serax and the booze, made my way across the parking lot to the Airport Inn. As I did so I was thinking how much the airport bar resembled every other airport bar in the world, with great picture windows opening onto macadam-and-concrete runways so we all could apparently go into orgies of ecstasy watching 747s land and depart. And I was thinking further that damnation might ultimately reside in having one’s past catch up with him in the bars of distant terminals, say, Timbuktu, Perth, or Addis Ababa.

At the room the old lady, having taken her own pills, was asleep in her bed, her mouth open, her aging face wrinkled and drawn about the mouth and eyes. In vivid living color on the tube Matt Dillon and Festus in the persons of Jim Arness—also grown old with the times! Oh, no, not you, Matt!—and the shamelessly hammy Ken Curtis were in Mart’s spartan weather-beaten wood-paneled marshal’s office slurping black coffee from their tin cups. Festus had his spurs up on his desk and, prefacing his every high-pitched yap with “gol dangs” and “golly gees”—this in a frontier town where the American’s love of the four-letter word was, if possible, even more pronounced than it is today!—was issuing his surprisingly acute and pertinent observations on the nature of life, while the ever-stoic and laconic Matt—all six feet seven of him from out of the Swede country of northern Minnesota—remained as wordless, stealthy, and scraggly as an old grizzly. To Festus’s every remark Big Jim shook his head with a solemn, ponderous, and rueful petulance which seemed to suggest that if God did in fact lay a burden on each of us—to make one pay his dues, as it were—then assuredly Festus was the marshal’s cross to bear.

That the old lady had fallen asleep spoke more eloquently of her grief than anything else could have done.
Gunsmoke
had been her and my stepfather Wally’s—dead now six years himself—favorite TV show, one they had viewed religiously. To say the old lady “watched” is not precise. Although she has TV sets all over her house—it is she to whom the suave phrasemakers direct their nonsensical spiels and render the Ultimate Consumer—she presently (left to her own devices, her widowhood) has taken to falling asleep during a show, as well as we all should. The old lady had, however, taken great pleasure from Wally’s pleasure.

Many years ago, before Henry Ford the elder rendered the horse obsolete with his assembly line and turned America into the most clockwork and wheel-spinning joke of a civilization that ever desecrated the green earth and forced Wally into the automobile spring business, Wally, like his father before him, had been a blacksmith. As an apprentice to his father he had traveled all over upstate New York shoeing horses. To this day the old-timers remember him as the blacksmith and not as the owner of the Watertown Spring Service. One of the antiquarians gave it to me as indisputable fact that once when trying to shoe a particularly churlish dobbin, Wally became so incensed that he doubled his fist, slugged the horse, and knocked it down. So it is that when I now watch the lead-in to ABC’s
Monday Night Football,
and whether or not the old man’s tale was fantasy, and see the cowboy-betogged ex-Detroit Lion tackle Alex Karras saunter up to a horse, punch it, and flatten it—assuredly a case of art imitating life—whereas “I’m invariably watching this scene with fishing guide friends in the Bay and at this precise moment always feel crushed and walled in by peals of raucous laughter, I on the other hand am overwhelmed with nostalgic memories of Wally.

Although I’d had three or four double vodkas and was still going dreamily down from the Serax capsules, I couldn’t resist—doubtless attempting to take my mind from the grave nature of the pilgrimage which lay ahead—watching the rest of the show. Removing my clothes except for my jockey shorts, and though it is ordinarily my wont to drop shirts and trousers in the middle of the floor where I stand, I now scrupulously folded them on hangers and hung them in the closet so that for the old lady I might look as spiffy as possible on the grueling flight ahead. Then I got into bed and snapped off the nightstand lamp, leaving the vivid multicolored TV image as the only light in the room. As was also my wont, I then started, sotto voce now because of the old lady’s being asleep, yapping at the screen.

Yeah, old pardner, the extent of your consternation and grief at the obscene spectacle America has become I can only guess at—Big Jim Amess from Swedish immigrant stock up yonder there in Minnesota, from Ms. Edna Farcer’s
So Big
country! Did you, too, have to read
So Big
in high school? Coming from your neck of the woods, you must have! My high school class loved the book. We laughed, we wept furtively, we were in thrall, we were fucking ennobled, old pardner, fucking ennobled! Of course Ms. Ferber’s farmers weren’t precisely Swedish or from Minnesota. Ms. Ferber’s farmers were Dutch and did their truck gardening in Illinois. Do you remember Selina DeJong? By our teacher she was foisted off on us as one sensitive broad. She said things like “Cabbages are beautiful!” and into Ms. Ferber’s prose there came a lot of “felicitous” phrases like “fresh green things peeping out of the earth.”

Cabbages, Big Jim? Then there was Selina’s son, Dirk DeJong—”So Big” himself! To his great misfortune the haughty Dirk didn’t find cabbages in the least pulchritudi-nous. Dirk went on to make a lot of bread in Chicago, rode to the foxes with that snooty North Shore crowd, and, alas, ended up with a Jap (as Ms. Ferber called him) houseman and valet named Saki (I shit you not pardner!) and lying facedown on his bed among his proper Peel evening clothes. It is a pitiable, pathetic vision—Ms. Ferber’s profound notion of the price one pays for scorning cabbages. And what can one say, save that these thirty years have rendered Ms. Edna Ferber and all her works as obsolete as the American Dream. Well, no, not entirely; one might take
So
Big
and a box of maple sugar leaves to a terminal case at Roswell Memorial.

We were lucky up yonder there in Watertown, though, marshal (as I pray you were too), for along with Ms. Ferber our teachers took Willie the Shake’s
Caesar
and
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
and shoved them up our asses. And do you know the only thing I consciously retain from high school English—I mean, I was a fucking jock, Matt—after, lo, these nigh onto three decades? The prettiest girl in our class was also the brightest. She was tanned and blonde and rich and wore lemon cashmere sweaters. She owned the cold silent hauteur of her brilliance, could play the cello to break your heart—for fact, Big Jim—and when she strolled by between classes, great dark blue eyes so aloofly and coldly forward, her mountain of textbooks and notebooks clutched lovingly against and erasing the outline of her tender young breasts, she had the entire football team (me included, pardner!) stepping fiercely on each other’s toes, self-consciously pummeling one another with our hands, ferociously butting heads, emitting great raucous belches, trying to score obscene “funnies” off one another, farting, spitting (yes, expelling flatus and expectorating right in the oily and hallowed halls of the old high school on Sterling Street!). We did anything that we might get her attention, anything that might crumple her stunning poise. Only once we wanted her to turn to us, if only in distaste, if only once we might get those great dark blue eyes to wince in nothing but dismay at our bestiality.

We never of course got any reaction whatever. And was it not astonishing, Mistuh Dillon? With all her distaff classmates mooning nightly by their phones for a call from one jock or another, she had at seventeen already put the thug and hooligan footballer behind her. Yes, great dark blue eyes forward and walking ever unwaveringly, that distressing pile of texts crushing her anatomy where even then a man’s loving mouth should have been placing its wet caresses, she marched and marched and marched to some grander, nobler, more significant and dignified destiny.

It must have been our senior year, marshal, for we were into
Hamlet
and I was one day struck nearly speechless to see her raise a beckoning arm—nearly dumb, old pardner, because this sweety pants (as we cornily called them) did not just have smartness, the kind of smartness-smartaleckyness which like some monstrous sci-fi fungus thrives on letting itself be heard, which indeed cannot live without letting itself be heard. Au contraire, this golden maiden had brilliance and was awesomely and smugly comfortable with it and had no need whatever to assure herself or us, by the sound of her own voice, of that brilliance. Indeed, since junior high I doubt I’d heard her voice but twice.

As astonished as the rest of us, I think, the teacher deferentially acknowledged the questioning hand and whispering arm, sheathed in its lemon cashmere like a tulip peduncle in summer breeze, and my sweet cellist, to the incredulity of the entire class, and in very measured, articulate, and grave tones, expounded at no little length on the difficulty she’d had in absorbing Shakespeare since as sophomores we’d got into his heavier tragedies beginning with
Caesar.
Oh, as a freshman she’d liked
Romeo and Juliet
well enough, despite the unhappiness of its ending (that horny play was no play for freshmen, old pardner, but we were too dumb to know it, as was the New York State Board of Regents, never known for its wisdom), but since that first year it had been all madness, delusion, murder, vengeance, lies, assassinations, betrayal, mindless killing, fury, hatred, deceit, lust for power, incest—I didn’t even know the meaning of the latter; I mean, I was a fucking jock, I’ve told you that flat out, marshal—ad infinitum. Yes, to the speechlessness of the entire class, this pristine golden cellist’s litany was endless and almost stupefying in that she seemed to omit nothing that wasn’t supposedly held most disgusting and abhorrent by man.

“It seems to me that Shakespeare,” she concluded, and I remember her precise words, old pardner, “wants nothing less than to rub our faces in the muck of life.”

But do you see what I’m driving at, Big Jim? Not only was that lovely brilliant young lady’s uncharacteristic spiel the only thing I consciously took from high school English, but that catalogue of deplorable nauseous vices has turned out to be an apt description of our history of the three decades since that long-ago day. And I often wonder what my demure cellist does now. She’s probably married to the chairman of the English Department at Northwestern, lives in twelve rooms in Winnetka, and at seven on Sunday evenings plays in a professional string quartet. Or, has she not made her adjustment to the hard facts of history, perhaps she huddles in a corner of a madhouse and weeps great scalding tears from out those dark blue eyes. Whatever, I wish I had a tape recording of her modulated, precise, and abrasive diatribe to send to Winnetka. No, no, Mistuh Dillon, no I don’t. In retrospect that would be such a cheap malicious shot. For didn’t we all, at seventeen, believe Willie the Shake rubbed our faces in the muck of life? It’s now become so clear. Let’s say good-bye, old pardner, to Ms. Edna Ferber and in apology tip our hats to Mr. Shakespeare. He may not have saved our reason, but were it not for him we wouldn’t feel as comfortable with the stench we cast.

But peace, marshal. The Serax takes me down and down and at the moment I have neither the wit, cunning, nor arrogance of poise to sustain my ramblings. In any event, I forgive you your lardass, the crow’s-feet about and the melancholy in your blue eyes. More than that, Big Jim, I’m sure I’d like you as a man. What little I’ve read about you indicates that, save for the millions which have obviously accrued to your fame, you carry your worldwide notoriety lightly and ironically. You have become somewhat hermetic and made yourself inaccessible to snooping moronic Hollywood reporters. You do not don the ludicrous red cummerbund and tuxedo of the popinjay and appear at “award-winning” ceremonies and kiss people you despise on the mouth. You refuse to let Johnny Carson get off his corny one-liners at your expense.

Ah, yes, good for you, marshal, beautiful! It is true I read someplace you were divorced. But who among us in the new America has not been divorced—I myself twice, Big Jim! Still, when we both look back, old pardner, and as Calvinistic and preposterous as it may seem coming from the likes of me, when all our one-night jejune honeymoons are over, I’m uneasily certain that wisdom will dictate that it would have taken infinitely more of what people used to call character to have hung in there with the same woman than to have walked away. I mean, look at the great Mr. Hemingway’s first posthumously published book,
A Moveable Feast.
Above and beyond everything else, it was a valentine, a veritable valentine, to his first wife Hadley and suggested that all the women after Hadley were mere pilot fish. How that must have rankled Miss Mary! But why bother hanging in? Right? In our new affluent and mobile society it only takes about twenty minutes to pack one’s bags and go out the door. I tell you this, Mistuh Dillon, because as I jabber away it occurs to me that had I wanted to I could have made it with either of my wives.

Too, and I hesitate to bring this up, Big Jim, but I read recently that your young daughter, like Papa Hemingway, died by her own hand. What can I say, old pardner, that hasn’t been said throughout the ages? For her immortal soul I offer a prayer—I offer it at this very moment!—and for your grief and agony I extend my heartfelt sympathies. That said, I shall not grieve for her. What was it tie wise Mr. Vonnegut, Jr., said? That in the world we live in “paranoia is an act of faith”? And that is the way I feel about suicide, marshal—that it too is an act of faith, negative faith though it be. For what thinking person among us has not looked about himself and seen the fascists, apes, and thugs who have inherited the earth and not at one time or another contemplated suicide? So that ultimately suicide becomes merely one’s eloquent and dramatic way of announcing one will not live in a world controlled by goons.