Panama

6

THIS YEAR the visitors from New York are a bit more homogenous than I had recalled. They wear their hair short and have clipped, British-military mustaches. They look orderly and reliable. Of an evening, they bump their bottoms frenetically to the music of sleepy or angry colored people; one song I hear all the way from Duval Street goes “Don’t do me no damn favor, I don’t know karate but I know the razor!” promising a bloodbath to the bottom bumpers on the patio, with timed James Brown grunts and “Hep me now” and “Good God!” coming out of the quadraphonics to five hundred screaming clones in dripping batik, coiffed like leftenants out of Goodbye to All That.

* * *

Thinking of moving again. Problems. Have to learn a new zip code. Still, I’m listless, too tired to work on my tan. And I’m wondering if I’m getting herpes simplex again. This morning I stared at my cock through a stamp collector’s glass, looking for the little blisters on the pink distortion. I started to drift off as I stared through the glass. The little craters made me think I was on the moon. I reflected upon our country’s space program. For some reason, scarcely anything seems to bespeak my era so much as herpes simplex. Oddly, it appears as — what? — a teensy blister. Then a sore, not much, goes away, a little irritant. It’s infectious. When your girl gets it, from you, it is not at all the same thing. For instance, she screams when she pisses. She won’t put out. She demands to know, “Where did you get this one?” The answer is: From the age.

I don’t want to move any more; and maybe failure will bring some humanity to this situation. They no longer have my house on the tour; though Tennessee Williams’s still is. The garden club brochure said the furniture was Cuban Victorian and Miz Somebody Or Other said See it! It idn’t gonna be on the tooah next yeah! Cousin Donald Singer at the Greyhound freight office said Cuban Victorian was anything the termites wouldn’t eat.

Also, I like being in a place where many of the people speak a language I don’t understand. Then you begin to enrich your life by imagining what people are saying. Years of touring has given me this predilection. For instance, I perceived in the Russian tongue the history of the manufacture of galoshes. In the Spanish language I perceived the history of a lack of rain. I perceived in the French tongue the history of no underpants and an excess of utensils, both shaving and cooking. Who knows what’s in American; farting, whistling Dixie, I don’t know.

I went out for what seemed like a last-minute meal, a restaurant on the boulevard. Last minute before what I don’t know. A heavy wind, screaming in palms that were stretched out over the highway. Inside I was alone except for two yachting couples dining together. Since they ruined my appetite, I will record their conversation:

“Can I have the buffet?” One of the women. She saw me and winked.

“Honey—” The husband caught the wink.

“Can I go to the buffet?” She studiously did not look at me.

“Honey—”

“G’outa my way. I’m gna buffay.” She arises for me.

“Take it easy.” He snatches her into her chair.

“I’m gonna have a roll and butter.”

“Wait till they bring the baron of beef for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, you—”

“Okay, honey.” The husband glared at me in challenge. He looked like a very stupid elk in Yellowstone National Park.

“I’m gona the bar, you.”

“Stay where you are.”

“I’m gna the bar.”

“Like hell you are.”

“You…”

The waitress came. I tipped her but refused to order.

“I’m a woman.”

“Right, honey,” said the husband, rolling his eyes only very slightly.

“I’m a lady and you’ll never get another one.”

“Sure—” He bounces his fork tines very precisely against the table.

“And we’re having a great time.”

“This we know.” He rolls his eyes for me. Now we are in cahoots. We agree his wife is a drunken slob.

“And I’m a wom—auhbrappp—woman.”

“Exactly.”

“So lay off.”

“Okay.” A sigh.

“And I love the sea…”

I went ahead and ordered a drink, big belt of Beam’s Choice, and listened. The first thing I heard the woman say was “Nnnnnrrughp!”

“Oh boy.”

Then a long silence while they waited for someone to bag their dinners.

“Gawd, I love us!”

“You better believe it!” One of the men.

“I honestly really love all of us.”

“Right…”

“I’m a woman and I love the sea. Which is good.”

“Thin … slices of beef … English style. In a bag. It doesn’t seem right.”

“The main thing about me NNNGRUUGPH!” Everyone but the wife jumped away from the table, holding napkins at the ready. “Miss … oh … miss, uh I’ve made a mess. God I’m so sorry. Jese what a pig I am.”

I left. Shitsuckers.

* * *

There is something to be said for lining up a few cheap thrills ahead of time. As I grow older the cheapness is easier to come by; but the thrill is always the same twitching of half-shot nerves. My father is dead and he wasn’t any help to me anyway; but he was the only one I had and so at night I walk around and think I’m talking to him because he came from some place and was born in a certain year and he was my old man and he died in a certain year, as always, while there were still things to be said. And really, all I wanted to say was, So long, Pappy, I know it’s a lot of shit too. And whatever I might say about you as a father, you’re the only one I got. Still, you didn’t treat me like you should have.

But what I line up ahead of time is an imaginary stroll with him through some unsuspecting neighborhood, the old man’s face suspiciously Indian, blunted with vodka, turning to every detail in the street, nothing missed, no gaiety lost for knowing that it all ended badly.

Sometimes the stroll is down in the Casa Marina with the plywood gothic facades and the terrible sigh of air conditioning in the jasmine. Yet at the end of a street, the ocean will roll toward you hauling its thousand miles with a phosphorescent pull. I note an odd detail here and there, but my old man would be the one to spot the banker’s wife staring in an upstairs mirror, waiting for the scream to start in the shag carpet. Nevertheless, it was all acceptable to him; he would shrug. Drunk enough, he would turn his head between his upraised shoulders and look for the next instance of the disease, something crooked, the smell of a child’s run-over puppy hidden in the garbage, beginning to turn in the heat. Or simply the suddenly unkempt lawn of a young couple learning to watch the dream vanish. As my life quiets down, menaces begin to appear, and whether I’m inventing them or they are real doesn’t matter to me.

I stand for those who have made themselves up.

I am directly related to Jesse James. That is true. We were out of Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and hid him in our barn more than once. I have played in that barn, and in fact, it is within the gloomy space beyond the hay mow where Jesse James is supposed to have hung upside down, with his percussion Colts in his trousers. Cole Younger didn’t have his black impracticality, and while Jesse disappeared mysteriously with his beard in the nineteenth century, Cole Younger shaved every day and timed quarter horses on the brush tracks of Missouri when nobody knew what a quarter horse was. Everybody in my family lived on the edges of the Civil War, Key West, and the bloody borders; we couldn’t live on the main line. But we fought shit-suckers whenever we found them. My maternal connection, on the Jesse James side, owned an interest in a foundation horse still talked about, White Lightning, stolen out of Reconstruction Tennessee and taken to Missouri. If any of this is not true, I will say so. Two men came out of Tennessee to reclaim White Lightning and were not heard from again. There was a cloud on the title forever. All of this horse’s progeny were running fools, sorrels and chestnuts. My grand-uncle said that when they would come into the barn out of the rain to shake themselves dry, it sounded like thunder. And that was how you knew they could run. He said that if Jesse James had had colts out of White Lightning instead of just grade horses and plugs, he would have been governor of the state of Missouri. I personally think he was someone who could not live on the main line any more than me or my fairie uncle. And I’d like for nobody to find that out the hard way. White Lightning’s get came to one hundred thirty-six live foals; and the prettiest one, a chestnut with a blaze face, kicked him to death in a Missouri corral.

They could all run.

* * *

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged as to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every other child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God’s Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody’s refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert.

* * *

There was a writer on Elizabeth Street who had had some success and broke down or burned out. We drank together once in a while in a bar whose owner had nothing more to say for himself than that he had thrown Margaret Truman out for disorderly conduct. He enjoyed needling the writer on crowded nights when the writer liked to stand up to watch the band playing.

“Down in front!” The owner.

“I can’t see sitting.” The writer.

“I said, Down in front!”

“Get fucked!” The writer.

“Line up!” The owner.

The writer fired a beer bottle at him and the owner put the bouncers on him and unloaded him on the sidewalk. The writer and I walked toward Captain Tony’s in the meringue night amid the social terrors of our epoch. The writer said, “I’m not going through with it, this work of mine. No one believes in it, least of all me. You’re a mess too.” I told him it was the age.

“Well,” he said, “the age is breaking my balls. I’m going home.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“I had a friend, he took the scissors to his face. My sister’s a dead zombie in her twenties because of your fucking age.”

“If you picked me to stand up for the Republic, you got the wrong Joe.” I thought this was hideous, railed at as though I wanted any of this frightful shit-heel madhouse.

“I been thinking about you,” says the writer. “You and your trashy friends laying waste to our mythology. You’re gonna choke on it, you smut-mongers.”

“Keep it up, I’ll tear out your windpipe.”

“Let me buy you a drink.”

The Whistle Bar: the bartender is talking into mid-air. He’s an old friend and won’t let people bother me. Also, he keeps pushers off me on a specific basis. He won’t let them give me coke; whereas a Percodan or Eskatrol guy can get through. The next week, the diet changes. “I’m glad the college girls have gone back,” raves the bartender, “I don’t want any more pussy. I don’t want it, I don’t like it. I’m fuck-foundered. I’m to where if I was with Miss World, I’d lose my hard-on over a barking dog. I’d rather dynamite shellcrackers on the Caloosahatchee.”

The hotel across from the post office burned down that night and we watched the inferno from the balcony drinking straight Lemon Hart on ice. I filled my mouth with one-fifty-one and hung out over the tourists and blew a flame into the night, a flame from my mouth to encourage the burning hotel to leap the street.

The writer said, “I’m a goner, see. So, I’m willing to help a new guy.”

“I’m not a new guy,” I said. “I’m Swiss cheese.”

“Shut up you mouth. You might write someday. Your memoirs. The overnight sensation. You may turn to immortality to keep from looking down the street. The immortality of an artist, you should know, consists in the lag between his death and the time his collected works are flushed down the loo. I got the title for your memoirs, chum, and I been carrying it like a hot potato till I could run into you. I want you to call it Eleven Ways to Nigger-Rig Your Life.”

He had a piña colada in his bony surgical hands and he held it up like a chalice attempting to watch the burning hotel through the milky glass. I went home and wrote a letter to my brother Jim on the Olivetti. Then it seemed that I couldn’t read what I had written. And hours passed. I don’t know, you just drift away. Then you can’t wake up. It’s the middle of the night, no-man’s-land. They’re all laughing at your handwriting. It seems like a small thing but you suspect that it will kill you. One thing leads to another; daytime arrives on an evil wind. You can’t get your hand off the doorknob, your teeth out of the girl’s teeth. Increasingly, you can’t remember anything and you are suspicious that perhaps you shouldn’t. In the end, your only shot is to tell everyone, to blow the whistle on the nightmare. It will work for a while; no one knows how long. The worse the dream, the more demonstrative you must become.

I took to the stage.