Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (80 page)

I don’t understand, but I’m really unhappy suddenly, so I call out to amuse and interest myself and to be a sport and to get back in touch with reality while I sweat and pump in the crisscross pattern upward: “Hey, Juh (breath)
IMMY.
”

My mood is uncured, and maybe worsened. This isn’t felt as a smooth thing but lurchingly, among breaths and gasps. Anyway, the enlarged trees and shrubs of the lawns seem out of place in the Middle Western light, which is, after all, illumination for a prairie, for a vegetable sea, rising week by week in the summer, all summer long, a rippling broth of weeds and high grass and tall flowers, elbowing each other and leaning and bowing, culminating in sunflowers, farfetched and gargantuan, giraffelike, maybe, August steeples, giant disks, solar, coarse, and yellow, nature’s pragmatic and almost farcical climax before the collapse in autumn in a brown rush of cold.

The hill was once a burial mound. Now it’s got these houses. The burial mound was once filthy, stinking—savages are no better than we are. Savages and everyone and everything else—each thing in the universe, with or without consciousness, has intent; a limitless will is a bloody tyrant-emperor: I mean, each thing tries to run everything, to have its way. Everything is imperial—without exception. Everything drags at you. This is a universe of trash tyrants. You have to sacrifice your life to prove goodness exists.
Do you think doing your duty sweetens things?
I sort of asked Jimmy in my head. Here’s a secret: we are not entirely subject to laws. Everything can be cheated on for a while; you can put “an alternate irrevocability” into the system; you can
quickly
give something away, for instance, against your self-interest.

“Hey-ay, jUH-immy—
YOU THINK GOODNESS
egg-zisss
(T
)s?”

“Hunh?”

“
YOU THUH-INK WE’RE IMPROOVING THE GAL-AX-EE?
”

“
WHA(T) DYOU WUHNNN(T) TO KNOW FORR?
”

“
I DON’T KNOW, I FORGOT, I’M OUT OF BREATH.
”

This is what I shouted, with various long pauses, or holes in the sound. But I wasn’t exactly talking to him, and I wasn’t quite talking to myself: it was an early-adolescent version of weeping and sweating and being red-faced.

“
WE’RE ALL TIE-RUNTTS
—” I know he won’t get that: no one understands, no one listens through the technical haze of problems that inhere in speech.

As I pump, I feel an immoderate extent of will. I also get an erection, as I often do when I am in despair: this is a source of further despair. I go mad with sensual
restlessness
—a mode of despair; but even if I am to be a bad person in my life, I want to be it clearly and as
a disappointed good man,
do you know what I mean? When I feel the bike pedal scrape the macadam on one of my wobbly turns, I dismount. Good or bad, I am a free man.

I don’t
want
to prove this in words, I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to argue anything; I want to
be
free. Now the neat lawns, the cretinous,
nice
houses (frightened, ill-educated), both decent and for sale—like new and still partly unconvinced whores—watch us. So does a weird-eyed nine-year-old girl, who stares from the seat of a hydrocephalic plastic tricycle; the tricycle is bloated beyond my comprehension, a plastic machine.

“Hey, Woohiilee—wha(t) suh—(y) udu wing?”

He switched syntax in midstream from something on the order of
What’s the matter
to
What are you doing,
so there are a lot of alternate tones and possible sentences in his shout. I can read his noises, the bright, bent, burning wire hangers of syllabic shape: they’re important noises, in a way.

The honest rejoinder that I make, almost absently, is “Duhwhuh?-wuh(t) arR-(y)uuuw uhn-(eh)ee(ng)?” I indicate the last word because I want to say
simultaneously
(which shows interest and affection), “want,” “doing,” “saying,” “shouting,” et cetera.

I’m in cut-off Levi’s, and I am shirtless. The road has a tar and tire and outdoor stink of a kind. My T-shirt is wrapped around the bar below the bicycle seat. Obviously, I ought not to unwrap it and wear it for what I think I am going to do. My eyes blink. I am half miserable. I don’t
understand
what I am doing any more than I can
understand
at this point in my life why the houses along this road seem so decent and yearning to me at one minute and then bogeyed with ghosts and weird-ness the next, and then itchy to my mind with a whisper of the wishes of the people who live there, their hopes about themselves, the long-extended efforts of their lives, some lives
good
within this framework of streets and houses, and then the houses seem sly or communion-attending, love-armed and just about fully whorish the next. The same houses. Nuttily touching, then furtive, then merely things for sale.

“I’m a bondffi-i-er—” I shout: you can’t shout
bonfire
and expect to be understood: it’s too unlikely, unless you’ve been shouting about fires.

“Whun—di—(y)u???uh?”

He’s, oh, thirty yards away, uphill, half erased in glare.

We are so suburban, he and I, that we would not really shout even for a murder without blushing and other forms of embarrassment. We have been bribed (and browbeaten) into the low-voiced, self-important, figged-over, spear-pointing phalanx: we consider this the highest form of human manners and probably always will.

He is talking to me at a level almost of side-yard conversation, across the air, down the road, in this light, and with embarrassment because of the pretensions of the houses along this road, and because of the women in them, mothers, watching us, maybe, judging us, judging our
manners.

I say, “I’m waiting to see what I want to do.…”

What I said had a friendly charm, local but real; by local, I mean the way it was said, the way it was pronounced:
to a friend.
I assume he
hears
charm
—male charm, likability. He’ll hear me the way he hears his brother, say; his brother is a well-known lecher in the local metropolitan suburban area. Jimmy’s drawn to that stuff; so am I. He feels that such
“charm”
—if it works, of course—is power: you can always mock and try to blunt it or twist it away; or oppose to it your own
charm,
of whatever kind.

I sit down—lowering my bicycle as I go—and then I lie down, pretty much in the center of the road.

Now it is partly
charm
; like someone in a movie or a popular song demonstrating his
freedom,
and partly it is the gloomy act of God it was in my head to start with: prone—and in despair—and palpitating with nerves and a kind of anguished belief in a number of things, and willing to accept meaninglessness-and-accident as final terms, sort of, out of an abundance of youthful kinds of strength, but still despairing, or, at any rate, with a dark, even blackish hollowness inside me, a sense of palpitant emptiness, which is what I think other people mean when they say they are in despair.

So, then, here I am, with some carefully printed loose sheets in my head about what I think I’m doing and why, with a basilica’s nave of clarity of memory of me saying
I am waiting to see what I am going to do, I am waiting to see what I want to do,
and wanting turned out to be both a bleak and a nervously crowded thing and it all ended up here. Maybe it will turn into a joke, me lying in the suburban road, holding my bicycle in one hand by the handlebars, male in a so far spindly way.

I did not want to lie in the road. It’s corny, it’s dirty. I am fastidious and have intellectual pretensions (Middle Western, middle class).

I reach over and unfasten my T-shirt from the bar.

Jimmy is a horrible person in a lot of ways—
a lot
of ways. Notice that he doesn’t come rushing to see if I’m O.K.; he suspects a trap. He is buried in his own life; he has a lot of rebellious self-love. He sees me lying down and having a death stroke or recovering or having a nervous breakdown; but he waits to see if it’s safe to feel concern or even curiosity: will he be a fool if he offers to help, if he shows solicitude—am I ribbing him?

I mind that, because it interrupts the nobility of my effort to enact freedom and heartfeltness or something. Also,
worship
of something—goodness, probably. Part of my purpose was that, and also to belong to the devil rather than to hypocritical pieties on this suburban road, et cetera. I think about Jimmy in a spasm of irritation and sadness: Why
are middle-class kids so
canny?
The road stink rises around me; the tar gulpingly pushes against my knobby back. He doesn’t trust me—my moods, my ideas and logics, arguments and beliefs. He lives with safe statements. He has only so many acceptable signals of peace and aid in his active intelligence. He is about as much a romantic adventurer in thoughts and words about love and help as your average Boy Scout troopmaster.

I loathe lying in the road. I loathe most of the would-be
important
acts and big-time gestures I make. I loathe being imprisoned in things I start. So I sit up and put on my shirt and I fold my legs in a lotus posture: then I unfold them and sit like that on the tarry surface.

The nine-year-old girl and her shrewd- and good-looking, slim-titted and cretinously sweet and suspicious mother are holding each other’s hands and watching
me.

Maybe they’re worried about me, both ways, as a possible menace and as someone who is to be worried about because he has to be helped soon if you want to be a
nice
person about it.

Jimmy coasts crossways across the road and down a bluff.

My mood is an encampment of an army. He’s a mere Carthaginian—no: Gaul.

“Jimmy, where are we headed?” I say. “What does my life mean?” He ignores that, or I say it too blurredly and he can’t figure it out; it’s too unfocused.

He is nearer but still cautiously yards away. He glides on his bike, mostly backward, brakes with his feet, looks at me, looks at the sky, hesitates. How does someone who is not a truth-teller recognize a truth? He never knows why I’m irritable. He thinks I’m strange.

My sense of action, me being a man(ettino) of action, that fades, and my mind resumes its privacy because Jimmy is so suspicious of me. My images are resummoned; they return mostly as fumes of will, they never stay the same for long, but outdoors that changeability is worse, is even foul—although beautiful. To claim otherwise is to lie. To be an invalid and kept indoors is intellectually more honorable. For example, the reasons and mood I had are gone, and I don’t any longer know why I’m sitting on this macadam in humid, smoggy sunlight, in my shorts and T-shirt. I am now martyred by carrying on an act of will that once had a war-bonneted ferocity (and freshness) to it; I have compromised it a dozen times by now; the whole thing is dull and stinking; it’s time to give up, stand up, but that idea (of standing up) becomes sad, an infliction.
The macadam stinks and sticks; pebbles gnaw into my thin-muscled butt and the skimpy calves of my legs; the idea of freedom has turned into an outline, penciled and geometrical, that may be colored in, or painted and then seen as containing
life
—that’s a symbol. Mostly. My existence plunges and filters and buzzes along
meanwhile;
but I am a prisoner of the drawing, and my life is, too. I mean, I believe in freedom even if it’s only the posture one takes for the fall.

He’s looking at me: I have the sense, maybe wrong, that he’s
amused. Charmed,
in a way. That’s not O.K. It’s distracting. The landscape, the slope, the wall and tree, the staring women, James, my companion, up to a point, everything is sun-caped above abysses of the hardly seen
truth
of a gesture, let alone of my works and days. This matches, or simulates, the visual truth, which is that what I see flimmers over or at the rim of abysses: the
hardly seen by me
—literally,
half
seen. I see in fits and starts, with emphasis here and there—near abysses of shadows and subsidiary glimmers.
The periphery.
The at-the-moment Minor Stuff—in which truth might be found. It is the case that I see one thing—Jimmy’s mouth, let’s say—and I hope the rest is there.

I now rise and am half on one knee, undecided about everything; one hand is on the tarmac.

My mouth feels like a salmon, muscular, tugged; Jimmy’s mouth, now seen in this light and at a distance when he turns his head to me, I see as a large dot, or maybe big dash, on his face, but it is remembered, imagined as a mouth, with shapes and colors seen in another light and at different angles; it is as free as a particle in the wind, it seems.

I lay my bike on the macadam: it had no kickstand, and I still held its handlebars. I ganglingly collapse backward, because freedom also means not caring if I break my back or my neck, sort of. I lie panting. Jimmy is now nearer, near enough that I am released from the Roman camp of a kind of solitude; I am unlocked from my head and am aware, or even oppressed, by him, his presence; I can see that he glimpses me and disbelieves: that is, he only partly believes I am doing what I am doing. He now coasts backward some more, on the diagonal, back down the slope, toward me, to the body of glimmer and shadows and odd behavior that is me. Who is me. Whatever. He halts, his legs spread, the bike heroically between his thighs. On my shirted back, the tar is a bed of cupping, sucking, semimelted octopus tentacles, fatally attached.

I am in a sort of rage of thwarted gesture and I want him to “love” and admire me. To love and to admire are so overlapping, they are just
about the same emotion in me, separated by one or two seconds of mental time, seconds in which I blink and compete and do my best with the pain of admiration and try to fit in. I am heartsick but stubborn inside my lying here, and I am lonely because this thing I’m doing seems like metaphysical brattishness pretty much—not entirely—but I want him somehow to help this stuff along until it’s O.K. It occurs to me that one has to devote almost a lifetime to this kind of act (and thought) to make it grown up and really good (valid). I ought to go limp now and be married to this and really suffer. Only pain can validate this, can validate me, and this is hell to know, to guess at, I mean, and to live out. It is bratty, therefore, even if it’s honest of me, to want Jimmy to help—but I insist on being
happy sometimes.
And Jimmy can make me happy(er). But it is facile and glib not to suffer in one’s truths; they are real acts, and strain the shit out of you in your real moments, and it’s dumb not to recognize that they are true. But it’s facile and glib to suffer all the time; things can turn good without warning, without any warning at all.