Desolation Angels (39 page)

31

But nature has made women so maddeningly desirable for men, the unbelievable, the impossible-to-actually-believe wheel of birth and dying turns on and turns on, as tho some Devil was turning the Wheel himself hard and sweaty for suffering human horror to try to make an imprint somehow in the void of the sky—As tho anything, even a Pepsi Cola ad with jetplanes, could be printed up there, unless the Apocalypse—But Devilish nature has so worked it that men desire women and women scheme for men's babies—Something we were proud of when we were Lairds but which today makes us sick to think of it, whole supermarket electronic doors opening by themselves to admit pregnant women so they can buy food to feed death further—Bluepencil me that, U.P.I.—

But a man is invested with all this trembling tissue, the Hindus call it “Lila” (Flower), and there's nothing he can do with his tissue save get him to a monastery where however horrible male perverts sometimes wait for him anyway—So why not loll in the love of belly wheat? But I knew the end was coming.

Irwin was absolutely right about visiting the publishers and arranging for publication and money—They advanced me $1000 payable at $100 a month installments and the editors (without my knowledge) bent their wrenny heads over my faultless prose and prepared the book for publication with a million
faux pas
of human ogreishness (Oy?)—So I actually felt like marrying Ruth Heaper and moving to a country home in Connecticut.

Her skin rash, according to soulmate Erickson, was caused by my arrival and lovemaking.

32

Ruth Erickson and I had daylong talks during which she confided her love for Julien in me—(what?)—Julien my best friend, perhaps, with whom I'd been living in a loft on 23rd Street when first met Ruth Erickson—He was madly in love with her at the time but she did not reciprocate (as I knew she'd do, at the time)—But now that he was married to that most charming of earth's women, Vanessa von Salzburg, my witty buddy and confidante, O
now
she wanted Julien! He'd even telephoned her long distance in the Middle West but to no avail at the time—Missouri River in her hair indeed, Styx, or Mytilene more likely.

There's old Julien now, home from work at the office where he's a successful young executive in a necktie with a mustache tho in his early days he'd sat in puddles of rain with me pouring ink over our hair yelling Mexican Borracho Yahoos (or Missourian,
one
)—The moment he comes home from work he plumps into the splendid leather easy chair his Laird's wife's bought him first thing off, before cribs, and sits there before a crackling fire tweaking his mustache—“Nothing to do but raise kids and tweak your mustache,” said Julien who told me he was the new Buddha
interested
in rebirth!—The new Buddha
dedicated
to Suffering!—

I'd often visited him in the office and watched him work, his office style (“Hey you fucker come 'ere!”) and his speech clack (“Whatsamatter with you, any lil old West Virginia suicide is worth ten tons of coal or John L. Lewis!”)—He saw to it that the most (to him) important and saddy-dolly stories got over the A.P. wire—He was the favorite of the very frigging President of the whole wire service, Two-Fisted So-and-So Joe—His apartment where I hung out in the afternoons except those afternoons when I kaffee-klatched with Erickson was the most beautiful apartment in Manhattan in its own Julien-like way, with small balcony overlooking all the neons and trees and traffics of Sheridan Square, and a kitchen refrigerator full of ice cubes and Cokes to go with ye old Partners Choice Whiskeyboo—I'd spend the day talking to Wife Nessa and the kids, who told us to shush when Mickey Mouse came on TV, then in'd walk Julien in his suit, open collar, tie, saying “Shit—imagine comin home from a hard day's work and finding this McCarthyite Duluoz here” and sometimes he'd be followed by one of his assistant editors like Joe Scribner or Tim Fawcett—Tim Fawcett who was deaf, had a hearing aid, was a suffering Catholic, and still loved suffering Julien—Plup, Julien falls in his leather easy chair before a Nessa-prepared fire, and tweaks his mustache—It was the theory of Irwin and Hubbard too that Julien grew that mustache to look older and uglier than he wasnt at all—“Anything to eat?” he says, and Nessa comes out with half a broiled chicken at which he picks desultorily, has a coffee, and wonders if I'll go down and get another pint of Partners Choice—

“I'll pay half.”

“Ah you Kanooks are always payin half” so we go down together with Potchki the black spaniel on the leash, and before the liquor store we hit a bar and have a few rye and Cokes watching TV with all the other sadder New Yorkers.

“Bad blood, Duluoz, bad blood.”

“Whattaya mean?”

He suddenly grabs me by the shirt and pulls it yanking two buttons off.

“Why are you always tearing my shirt?”

“Ah your mother aint here to sew em, hey?” and he pulls further, tearing my poor shirt, and looks at me sadly, Julien's sad look is a look that says:—

“Ah shit man, all
your
and
my
little tight ass schemes to make 24 hours a day run discipline the clock—when we all go to heaven we wont even know what the sighin was all about or what we looked like.” Once I'd met a girl and told him: “A girl that's beautiful, sad” and he'd said “Ah everybody's beautiful and sad.”

“Why?”

“You wouldnt know, you bad blooded Kanook—”

“Why do you keep sayin I've bad blood?”

“Cause you grow tails in your family.”

He's the only man in the world who can insult my family, really, because he's insulting the family of earth.

“What about
your
family?”

He doesnt even hear to answer:—“If you had a crown on your head they'd have to hang you even sooner.” Back upstairs at the apartment he starts exciting the female dog by stimulating her: “Oh what a black dribbling bottom …”

There's a December blizzard going on. Ruth Erickson comes over, as arranged, and she and Nessa talk and talk while me and Julien sneak out to his bedroom and go down the fire escape in the snow to hit the bar for some more rye and soda. I see him jump nimbly beneath me so I do the same nimble jump. But he's done it before. It's a ten-foot drop from that swinging fire escape to the sidewalk and as I fall I realize it but not soon enough, and turn over in my fall and fall right on my head. Crack! Julien lifts me up with a bleeding head. “All that for just running out on the women? Duluoz you look better when you're bleeding.”

“All that bad blood going out,” he adds in the bar, but there's nothing cruel about Julien, just
just
. “They used to bleed nuts like you in old England” and when he begins to see the pained expression on my face he becomes commiserative.

“Ah poor Jack” (head against mine, like Irwin, for the same and yet not the same reasons), “you should have stayed wherever you were before you came here—” He calls the bartender for mercurochrome to fix my wound. “Old Jack,” there are times too when he becomes absolutely humble in my presence and wants to know what I really think, or
he
really thinks. “Your opinions are now
valuable.
” The first time I'd met him in 1944 I thought he was a mischievous young shit, and the only time I got high on pot in his presence I divined he was against me, but since we were always drunk … and yet. Julien with his slitted green eyes and Tyrone Power slender wiry masculinity punching me. “Let's go see your girl.” We take a cab to Ruth Heaper's in the snow and as soon as we walk in and she sees me drunk she grabs a handful of my hair, pulls it, pulls several hairs out of my important combing spot and starts punching fists into my face. Julien sits there calling her “Slugger.” So we leave again.

“Slugger dont like you, man,” Julien says cheerfully in the cab. We go back to his wife and Erickson who are still talking. Gad, the greatest writer who ever lived will have to be a woman.

33

Then it's time for the late show on tv so me and Nessa make more ryes and Cokes in the kitchen, bring them out tinkly by the fire, and we all draw our chairs before the TV screen to watch Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in a picture about rubber plantations in the 1930's, the parrot cage, Jean Harlow is cleaning it out, says to the Parrot: “What
you
ben eatin,
cement?
” and we all roar with laughter.

“Boy they dont make pictures like
that
anymore” says Julien sipping his drink, tweaking his mustache.

On comes a Late Late film about Scotland Yard. Julien and I are very quiet watching our old histories while Nessa laughs. All she had to deal with in
her
previous lifetime were baby carriages and daguerrotypes. We watch the Lloyds of London Werewolf crap out the door with a slanting leer:—

“That sonofabitch wouldnt a given you two cents for your own mother!” yells Julien.

“Even with a bedstead,” adds I.

“'Avin 'is 'anging in Turkish Baths!” yells Julien.

“Or in Innisfree.”

“Throw another log on the fire, Muzz,” says Julien, “Dazz” to the kids, to Muzz Momma, which she does with great pleasure. Our movie reveries are interrupted by visitors from his office: Tim Fawcett yelling because he's deaf:—

“C a—
rist!
That U.P.I. dispatch told all about some mother who was a whore who had to do with all the little bastard's horror!”

“Well the little bastard's dead.”

“Dead? He blew his head clean off in a hotel room in Harrisburg!”

Then we all get drunk and I end up sleeping in Julien's bedroom while he and Nessa sleep on the open-out couch, I open the window to the fresh air of the blizzard and fall asleep beneath the old oil portrait of Julien's grandfather Gareth Love who is buried next to Stonewall Jackson in Lexington Virginia—In the morning I wake up to two feet of snowdrifts over the floor and part of the bed. Julien is sitting in the livingroom pale and sick. He wont even touch a beer, he has to go to work. He has one softboiled egg and that's it. He puts on his necktie and shudders with horror to the office. I go downstairs, buy more beer, and spend the whole day with Nessa and the kids talking and playing their piggy back games—Come dark in comes Julien again, two hiballs stronger, and falls to drinking again. Nessa brings our asparagus, chops and wine. That night the whole gang (Irwin, Simon, Laz, Erickson and some writers from the Village some of them Italian) come in to watch TV with us. We see Perry Como and Guy Lombardo hugging each other on a Spectacular. “Shit,” says Julien, drink in hand in the leather chair, not even tweaking his mustache, “them Dagos'll all go home and eat ravioli and die of puking.”

I'm the only one who laughs (except Nessa secretly) because Julien is the only guy in New York who'll speak his mind whatever his mind is at the time it happens, no matter what, which is why I love him:—a Laird, sirs (Dagos excuse us).

34

I had once seen a photo of Julien when he was 14, in his mother's house, and was amazed that any person could be so beautiful—Blond, with an actual halo of light around his hair, strong hard features, those Oriental eyes—I'd thought “Shit would
I
have liked Julien when he was 14 looking like that?” but no sooner I tell his sister what a great picture it was she hid it, so the next time (a year later) when we again accidentally visit her apartment on Park Avenue “Where's that great picture of Julien?” it's gone, she's hid it or destroyed it—Poor Julien, over whose blond head I see the stare of America's Parking Lots and Bleakest Glare—the Glare of “Who-are-you, Ass?”—A sad little boy finally, whom I understood, because I'd known many sad little boys in Oy French Canada as I'm sure Irwin had known in Oy New York Jews—The little boy too beautiful for the world but finally saved by a wife, good old Nessa, who said to me one time: “While you were passed out on the couch I noticed your pants were shining!”

Once I'd said to Julien “Nessa, I'm gonna call her ‘Legs' because she has nice legs” and he answered:—

“If I catch you making any pass at Nessa I'll kill you” and he meant it.

His sons were Peter, Gareth and one was on the way who would be known as
Ezra.

35

Julien was mad at me because I'd made love to one of his old girlfriends, not Ruth Erickson—But meanwhile while we were having a party at the Ruths some rotten eggs were thrown up at Erickson's window and I went downstairs with Simon later to investigate. Only a week before Simon and Irwin had been stopped by a gang of juvenile delinquents with broken bottles at their throats, only because Simon had looked at the gang in front of the variety (variety indeed) store—Now I saw the kids and said “Who threw those rotten eggs?”

“Where's that dog?” said the kid stepping up with a sixfoot teenager.

“He wont harm you. Did you throw the eggs?”

“
What
eggs?”

As I stood there talking to them I noticed they wanted to pull out knives and stab me, I was scared. But they turned away and I saw the name “Power” on the back of the jacket of the younger kid, I said:—“Okay Johnny Power dont throw no more eggs.” He turned around and looked at me. “That's a great name,” I said, “Johnny Power.” That was more or less the end of that.

But meanwhile Irwin and Simon had arranged an interview with Salvador Dali. But before that I have to tell you about my coat, but first Lazarus' brother Tony.

Simon and Lazarus had two brothers in the madhouse, as I say, one of them a hopeless catatonic who refused attention and probably looked at his attendants with the thought: “I hope those guys dont teach me to touch them, I'm full of hopeless electric snakes” but another brother who was only a schizoid (advanced) personality hoping to still make it in the world and consequently and no lie was helped to escape from the hospital in Long Island by Simon himself in some well worked scheme like the schemes of Rififi French Thieves—So now Tony was out and working (of all things, as I'd done as a kid) as a pinboy in a bowling alley, in the Bowery however, where we went to see him and where I saw him in the pit bending to set up the tenpins fast—Then later, the next night, while I was hanging around Phillip Vaughan's apartment reading Mallarmé and Proust and Courbière in French, Irwin rang the bell and I answered the door to see the three of them, Irwin, Simon and little short blond pimply Tony between them—“Tony, meet Jack.” And as soon as Tony saw my face, or eyes, or body, or whatever it was, he turned abruptly and walked away from everybody and I never saw him again.