Desolation Angels (48 page)

As I walked down Baker Street one night I actually looked for Sherlock Holmes' address forgetting completely he'd been just a fiction in Conan Doyle's mind!

I got my money in the agency office on the Strand and bought a ticket to New York on the Dutch ship S.S.
Nieuw Amsterdam
sailing from Southampton that night.

P
ART
F
OUR

P
ASSING
T
HROUGH
A
MERICA
A
GAIN

62

So I'd made that big trip to Europe at just the wrong time in my life, just when I became disgusted with any new experience of any kind, so I'd rushed through and here I was already going back, May 1957, shamefaced, dull-hearted, scowling, ragged and nuts.

And as the
Nieuw Amsterdam
pulls out to sea from the Southampton dock that night I waltz into the thirdclass dining-room hungry for my supper but here are two hundred and fifty fastidiously dressed tourists sitting at glittering cutleries and white tablecloths being served by anxious tuxedo'd waiters under grand chandeliers. The waiters do a doubletake when they see me in my jeans (my only pants) and open collared flannel shirt. I walk across their gantlet line to my assigned table which is right in the middle of the diningroom and has four table partners in impeccable suits and gowns, ow. A German laughing girl in a party dress: a German in a suit, severe and neat: and two Dutch young businessmen headed for Luchow's in Export New York. But I have to sit there. And strangely enough the German is polite to me, even seeming to like me (Germans always like me for some reason), so that when the ratty waiter gets impatient with me when I scan the incredibly luxurious menu with mixed up thoughts (“Wow will it be almondine salmon with wine sauce or roast beef au jus with petites pommes de terres de printemps or omelette speciale with avocado salad or filet mignon smothered in mushrooms,
mon doux,
what'll I do?”) and he says nastily tapping his wrist: “Well make up your mind!” the German youth stares at him indignantly. And when the waiter's gone to bring me roasted brains and asperge hollandaise he says, “I voud not take dat from a vaiter if I vere you!” He snaps this out at me like a Nazi, actually like a well bred German or continental gentleman in any case, but with sympathy for me, but I say:—

“I dont care.”

He points out that somebody's got to care or “Dis peoples vill get atrocious und forgetting deir place!” I cant explain to him that I dont care because I'm a French Canadian Iroquois American aristocrat Breton Cornish democrat or even a beat hipster but when the waiter comes back the German makes sure to make the waiter run back for extras. Meanwhile the German girl is gaily enjoying herself foreseeing her voyage of six days with three handsome young Europeans and even looking at me with a straight human smile. (I'd already run into official European snobbery when strolling Saville Row or Threadneedle Street or even Downing Street being stared at by government fops in wescots, who'd have done better with lorgnettes, as brief as that.) But next morning I was unceremoniously moved to a corner table where I wouldnt be so conspicuous. As far as I was concerned I would have preferred to eat in the galley with my elbows on the table anyway. But now I was trapped with three elderly Hollander schoolteachers, a girl of 8, and an American girl of 22 with dark rings of dissipation under her eyes which didnt bother me except that she traded her German sleeping pills for my Moroccan ones (soneryls) but her sleeping pills were actually pep pills of some terrifying variety that kept you awake.

So three times a day I sneaked to my corner in the dining-room and faced these women with a bleak smile. Roaring gay laughter came from my original German table.

My stateroom had one other old man in it, a fine old Hollander who smoked a pipe, but the horrible thing was that his old wife came in constantly to hold his hand and talk, so that I was reluctant to even wash at the sink. I had the upper bunk where I read day and night. I noticed that the old Dutch lady had that same almost breakable delicate white forehead skin with pale blue veins in it you sometimes see in a Rembrandt portrait.… Meanwhile, our third class quarters being in the stern of the ship, we rolled and pitched sickeningly all the way to Nantucket Lightship. The original crowd in the diningroom diminished every day as everybody got sea sick. On the first night at a nearby table a whole clan of Dutchmen had started out laughing and eating, all brothers and sisters and in-laws going to live or visit in America, but by the time we were two days out of Southampton only one gaunt brother remained eating grimly everything that was brought to him, like myself afraid to waste all that good food that went with his fare ($225), even ordering extras and grimly eating that. I myself had my new young waiter rushing around for extra desserts. I wasnt going to miss one whipcream, nauseous or not.

At night the gay stewards always arranged dances with fun hats but that was when I'd put on my zippered windbreaker and scarf up and pace the decks, sometimes sneaking up to the first class deck and walking swiftly around and around the empty wind howling promenade, nobody there. I missed my old lonesome quiet Yugo freighter, though, because in the day time you saw all these sick people bundled up in deck chairs staring at nothing.

For breakfast I always had cold roast beef with Dutch sugar powdered raisin bread followed by the usual bacon and eggs and pot of coffee.

At one point the American girl and her blond English girlfriend insisted I visit the gymnasium with them, which was always empty, it was only later I realized they probably wanted to sex. They kept eyeing the handsome sailors wistfully, I guess they'd read novels about “shipboard love affairs” and were trying desperately to get it done before New York. Some help
I
was dreaming of my veal and ham baked in foil. One morning in the fog the waters were calm and glassy and there was the Nantucket Lightship followed a few hours later by floating garbage from New York including one empty carton reading C
AMPBELL
'
S
P
ORK AND
B
EANS
making me almost cry with joy remembering America and all the pork n beans from Boston to Seattle … and maybe those pine trees in a homestead window in the morning.

63

So I raced out of New York and down South to get my mother, loaded with another publisher's installment ($100)—Just stopping long enough to spend two days with Alyce who was now soft and pretty in a Springtime dress and glad to see me—A few beers, a few lovings, a few whispered words in ear, and off I was to my “new life” promising I'd see her soon.

My mother and I packed all the pitiful junks of life and called the movers giving them the only California address I knew, Ben Fagan's cottage in Berkeley—I figured we'd go there by bus, all three thousand awful miles of it, rent an apartment in Berkeley and have plenty of time to re-route the movers to our new home which I promised myself would be my final glad sanctuary (hoping for pine trees).

Our “junk” consisted of old clothes I never would wear again, cartons of old manuscripts of mine some from 1939 with the paper already yellowed, pitiful heat lamps and
overshoes
of all things (overshoes of old New England), bottles of shaving lotion and holy water, even lightbulbs saved from years ago, old smoking pipes of mine, a basketball, a baseball glove, my God even a bat, old curtains that had never been put up for lack of a home, rolled-up useless rag rugs, books weighing a ton (even old editions of Rabelais with no covers) and all kinds of inconceivable pots and pans and sad shifts that people somehow need to keep to go on—Because I still remember the America when men traveled with nothing but a paperbag for luggage, always tied with string—I still remember the America of people waiting in line for coffee and donuts—The America of 1932 when people foraged in riverside dumps looking for junk to sell—When my father sold neckties or dug ditches for the W.P.A.—When old men with burlap bags at night fished thru garbage cans or collected rare horse dung in the streets—When yams were something to joy about. But here it was 1957 prosperous America and people laughing at all our junk in the center of which nevertheless my mother'd hidden her essential sewing basket, her essential crucifix, and her essential family photo album—Not to mention her essential salt shaker, pepper shaker, sugar shaker (all full) and her essential bar of soap already half used, all wrapped in the essential sheets and blankets of beds not yet seen.

64

Here now I'm telling about the most important person in this whole story and the best. I've noticed how most of my fellow writers all seem to “hate” their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that, in fact using it as the straight theme of their fantasies, or at least saying as much—I often wonder if they've ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle—And not with martyred pose of resentment, either, but actually seriously bemused over
mending,
the mending of torture and folly and all loss, mending the very days of your life with almost glad purposeful gravity—And when it's cold she puts on that shawl, and mends on, and on the stove potatoes are burbling forever—Making some neurotics go mad to see such sanity in a room—Making
me
mad sometimes because I'd been so foolish tearing shirts and losing shoes and losing and tearing hope to tatters in that silly thing called
wild
—“You've got to have an escape valve!” Julien'd often yelled at me, “let out that steam or go mad!” tearing my shirt, only to have Memère two days later sitting in her chair mending that very shirt just because it was a shirt and it was mine, her son's—Not to make me feel guilty but to fix the shirt—Though it always made me feel guilty to hear her say: “It was such a nice shirt, I paid $3.25 for it in Woolworth's, why do you let those nuts tear at your shirt like that.
Ça pas d'bon sens
.” And if the shirt was beyond repair she'd always wash it and put it away “for patching” or to make a rag rug with. In one of her rag rugs I recognized three decades of tortured life not only by myself but herself, my father, my sister. She'd have sewn up the grave and used it if possible. As for food, nothing went wasted: an odd potato half eaten ends up delightfully tidbit fried by a piece of later meat, or a quarter of an onion finds its way into a jar of home-pickled onions, or old corners of roastbeef into a delicious homey burbling fricassee. Even a torn old handkerchief is washed and mended and better to blow your nose in than ten thousand crinkly new Brooks Brothers Handkerchiefs with idle monogram. Any stray toy I bought for her “doodad” shelf (little Mexican burros in plastic, or piggy banks or vaselets) remained on that shelf for years and years, duly dusted and arranged according to her taste esthetically. A minor cigarette hole in old jeans is suddenly patched with pieces of 1940 jean. Her sewing basket contains a wooden darner (like a small bowling duckpin) older than I am. Her needles some of them come from Nashua 1910. As the years go by her family write her increasingly loving letters realizing what they lost when they took her orphan money and spent it. At the TV which I bought her with my pitiful 1950 money she stares believingly, only a battered old 1949 Motorola set. She watches the commercials where the women primp or the men boast and doesnt even know I'm in the room. It's all a show for her eyes. I have nightmares of her and I finding pastrami slabs in old junkyards of New Jersey on a Saturday morning, or of the top drawer of her dresser open in the road of America showing silk bloomers, rosaries, tin cans full of buttons, rolls of ribbon, needle hassocks, powder pouffes, old berets and boxes of cotton saved from old medicine bottles. Who could put down a woman like that? Whenever I need something she has it somewhere:—an aspirin, an ice bag, a bandage, a can of cheap spaghetti in the cupboard (cheap but good). Even a candle when the big civilized power blows out.

For the bathtub, the toilet and the sink she has big cans of deterring powder and disinfectants. She has a dry mop and twice a week is reaching under my bed for gobs of dust which are rapped out the window sill, “
Tiens!
Your room is clean!” Wrapped somewhere in the moving carton is a big basket of clothespins to hang out the wash wherever she goes—I see her with basket of wet wash going out with clothespin in mouth, and when we have no yard,
right in the kitchen!
Duck under the wash and get your beer in the icebox. Like the mother of Hui Neng, I'd bet, enough to enlighten anybody with the actual true “Zen” of how to live in any time and just right.

Tao say, in more words than one, that a woman who takes care of her home has equalized Heaven and Earth.

Then on Saturday nights she's ironing on the battered ironing board bought by her a lifetime ago, the cloth all brown with burns, the creaky wooden legs, but all the wash comes out ironed and white and to be folded away in perfect paper-lined cupboards for use.

At night when she sleeps I bow my head in shame. And I know that in the morning when I wake up (maybe noon) she'll already have walked to the store on her strong “peasant” legs and brought back all the food towering in bags with the lettuce at the top, my cigarettes at the top, the hotdogs and hamburgs and tomatos and grocery slips to “show me,” the pitiful nylon stockings on the bottom apologetically admitted to my sight—Ah me, and all the girls I'd known in America who dabbled at blue cheese and let it harden on the sill! Who'd spent hours before the mirror with blue eye shade! Who'd wanted taxis for their milk! Who'd groaned on Sunday without roasts! Who'd left me because I complained!

The trend nowadays is to say that mothers stand in the way of your sex life, as tho my sex life in the apartments of girls in New York or San Francisco had anything to do with my quiet Sunday nights reading or writing in the privacy of my clean homey bed room, when breezes riffle the curtain and cars shirsh by—When the cat meows at the icebox and already there's a can of Nine Lives for my baby, bought by Ma on Saturday morning (writing her lists)—As tho sex was the be-all of my love for the woman.