Dhalgren (105 page)

We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away- to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room-curious if she's ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

I can't smell it.

This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored sacks) and her friend Risa (who I wish looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys' jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

Jack the Ripper: "Little girl, you must have been fucking on a God-damn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!" at which Denny, perched on the table's edge, laughs the shrillest.

Gladis, under Spider's arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

The Ripper's laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinderblock yesterday).

Gladis leers and says, "Fuck you—" She's fifteen? Sixteen—?—"you big cocksucker!" with the inappropriateness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use "nigger" other than in rage.

Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: "You don't get no belly like that sucking a cock!"

"Well, Jesus Christ," Spider shouted, "well, Jesus Christ, if I'd 'a known that—" making much to get his fly open and his free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her, feet and lurched away.

I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of
Orchids,
leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn't look at me.

Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. "You like that?" I asked Risa.

When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.

"Uh-oh," from the Ripper. "What your girl friend gonna say when she come around?"

"Fuck her," I said.

"What's his boy friend gonna say?" Dollar asked from somewhere else.

I said: "Fuck him too."

Denny leaned across the table to pull the other jug over.

Gladis, turning and turning in her loose green (they regard her as their personal catastrophe, an awesome delight; she looks as if she will foal
now;
claims, however, it's months away), settled, giggling, again, beside Spider.

Then Spitt came in with Glass (some argument about where a building was) and we broke up from our backyard loafing and reconvened on the front steps. Standing beside Copperhead, I looked down the street: Thirteen was coming up:

"Hey!" called with the desperate good will of the seriously bored. "Any of you guys want to come on over? Hey, Kid, you ain't even seen my new place. You want to come over and meet some of the guy's. there?" In this city, where nothing happens, it is worth your sanity to refuse anything new.

Somehow, with the wrangling and wine and lethargy, me, the national guard (Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass), and Denny went with him.

Up a lot of dark stairs with Glass saying, "Man, I didn't know you were this close. You're just around the God-damn corner," and Thirteen saying: "I
told
you I was just around the God-damn corner; why ain't you guys never come over to see us?" and I looked up:

Smokey stood at the head; when we broke around her, she turned with Thirteen, to follow (at his shoulder) breathing as though she'd held her breath since he'd left.

Sitting on one of the beds at the end of the loft was a scrawny, shirtless guy in jeans—holes both knees—knuckling his eyes. He'd probably just sat up when he heard us on the stairs.

Two other guys stood at the window. Thirteen started bobbing around, very excited: "Hey! Hey, you guys, this is the Kid. Hey!" He motioned me over.

"Hi." A black guy in workman's greys got up off the window sill and held out his hand.

His friend, a stocky blond (short-hair) in denim and construction boots, had his hand ready for seconds. "Hear you got a thing going here."

The black guy locked thumbs with me in a biker shake.

I figured the other guy would do the same. But he just started, then he laughed, and his hand joggled awkwardly.

It isn't that the "heroic" incidents about me cullable from the Times are untrue (well… some of them), nor the "villainous" ones on the gossip round that distorted (well… ditto). But the six minutes here, the twenty seconds there, the forty-five minutes how-many-weeks later—the real time it takes to commit the "heroic" or "villainous" act—are such a microscopic presentage of my life. Even what can be synopsized from this journal—snatches gun from looter's hands; helps save children from flaming death; lead victorious attack (Ha! They were scared crazy!) on armed citadel; hobbles, half-shod, shrieking in the street; rescues Old Faust from collapsing ruin (and once tried to write poems—) are things that have happened to me, not that I have done. What you look like you're doing and what you feel like you're doing are disparate enough to mute any mouth that might attempt description!

So I caught it up for him and smiled. He was "Tom," from Thirteen, "and this is Mak. You guys rode in here, you say?"

"In a pickup," Tom explained. "We were up in Montana, running down this way… till we run out of gas." A cowboy truck driver, he wanted to be friendly.

"And that's Red," from Tom.

So I locked thumbs with Red (hair like rusted Brillo), who blinked sleepy, ice-grey eyes in a face dark as mocha—another mustard-skinned spade, and this one, for all his hunched shoulders, good-looking as the devil.

From the corner someone said: "Hello, Kid," and Tak, arms folded, stood up from the plank wall where he was leaning. He pushed his cap up and came forward, face visible from the pink crease on his forehead where his cap had been, down to bis gold chin. "I'm making my rounds again. I brought these guys here over to the commune and they felt about like you did. So I thought we'd drop in on Thirteen and say hello."

"A good excuse to smoke some dope," Thirteen said. "Now ain't that a good excuse?"

"Sure," Tom said. "Any excuse is a good excuse as far as I'm concerned." ,

Smokey, who I hadn't seen go, came back with the jar.

Thirteen took it, raised it in his tattooed hand. "Now you'd think," he said, "with a water pipe like this, I'd at least put some kind of water in it, huh?"

"Or creme de menthe," Smokey said. "That's what you're always talking about."

"Yeah. You ever smoke hash through a water pipe filled with creme de menthe?" Thirteen asked. "That's really something."

Mak, still at the window, gestured toward the bed. "You got a bottle of… what's that? Mountain Red?"

"Naw," Thirteen said. "That ain't the same thing."

Thirteen's cheeks hollowed; the jar filled with smoke.

"You got any speed?" Tom asked.

"Oh, man—" Thirteen coughed and handed Red the jar. "You can't keep anything like that around here more'n five minutes. We don't get much anyway. Once somebody brought in a whole pillow case full, man! A whole pillow case with a plastic lining full of all
sorts
of speed. This Mexican guy."

"Was he Mexican?" Smokey asked. "He was thick-set, blond…"

"He talked like a Mexican," Thirteen said. "I mean that was a Mexican accent he was speaking. It wasn't no Spanish-from-Spain accent. Or Puerto Rican. They sound different."

I nodded.

"Anyway," Thirteen said, "it was gone like
that!"
He grinned back across his shoulder;
"She
was maybe five pounds lighter. But that's the only way you'd of known it was here. How we went through
all
that shit so fast—man!"

"You must have every
kind
of—Oh, thanks." Mak took the pipe from Red, sucked, and said: "It's out."

"Here, just a minute." Thirteen struck another match.

"You must have every kind of junkie in this city," Mak said.

Smokey, with the jar now, was handing it to Copperhead, who said: "I don't think I've ever seen a skaghead in Bellona, you know?"

"I have," I said.

Glass laughed.

Tak said: "We don't have much dope here. No money, no dope. To speak of, I mean."

"I think—" Thirteen said. "Wouldn't you say, Kid? I mean, you could say this about most of your guys, huh? Most people here have
taken
a lot of dope. But we don't got too many people here who
need
it If you know what I mean."

"That sounds pretty good," Mak said.

"I mean if you
need
it," Thirteen said, "there just ain't no place to get it. I've put everything in my arm, or up my nose, or down my belly I could, just about, one time or another. Liked all of it, too. But I don't
need
anything, you know? Of course—" he reached over and took the jar from me—"I do enjoy my toke."

Everybody laughed.

Me too.

And all the smoke loosed out my nose and stung.

"Now did you ever think what a specialized city Bellona is?" Tak was saying. He had come in front of the bed, fists in his scuffed pockets, holding the leather off his hairy stomach. The red quilt lining was torn in two places. "I mean Bellona's got a lot of some things and none of a lot of others. I used to know a guy who could
not
go to sleep unless he had a radio playing. He can't live in Bellona. There are people who
have
to have movies to go to; or they get twitchy. They can't live in Bellona. Some people must have chewing gum to survive. I've found stale candy bars, Life-Savers, Tums; but all the chewing gum is gone from all the candy-stores' racks. Gum chewers can't live in Bellona. Not to mention cigarettes, cigars, pipes: the tobacco in the vending machines went stale a couple of weeks after we got cut off and I guess the cartons and packaged shag was the first thing the scavengers cleared out. You never see a smoker in Bellona."

"Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days—" I said.

"They can't live in Bellona," Tak went on. "In Helmsford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car. They can't live in Bellona. Oh, we have a pretty complicated social structure: aristocrats, beggars—"

"Bourgeoisie," I said.

"—and Bohemians. But we have no economy. The illusion of an ordered social matrix is complete, but it's spitted through on all these cross-cultural attelets. It is a vulnerable city. It
is
a saprophytic city—It's about the pleasantest place I've ever lived." He grinned around at Tom, Red, Mak. "I'm curious to see whether you guys will like it enough to settle down, make it your home, become part of the community."

The jar circled Tak for the third time; he swayed at the center.

"Here." Tom, still leaning on the sill, held it out. "You didn't get any."

"Never touch the stuff." Tak waved the sides of his jacket. "No, I'm a poor, anti-social juice-head. Not a man of my times at all. Gets me in trouble, too."

Somebody suggested we go back to the nest. Tak, his three discoveries pretty well parked at Thirteen's curb, decided to drift-after Thirteen, in a flurry of patriarchal politesse, broke out his jug (same as ours; he must be rifling the same busted plate glass window on the street sometimes marked Lafayette, sometimes marked Jessie). The late afternoon got lost in the day's momentum.

"Why don't we go back to the nest," somebody suggested
again.
Which, again, everybody thought was a good idea.

Where Lady of Spain, with Raven, I guess it was, had gotten a big fire going in the yard and all sorts of canned shit, scalloped tops bent back, bubbling on the cinder-blocks, their labels blacked and bronzed by the flames. The tree trunks glimmered; and the fence; and the triangle of glass in the second floor window of the house beyond.

We stood around, listening to the fire. Red, still bare foot and shirtless, squatted, staring at the coals, the back of his jeans tugged way the hell down his ass. Circling his hips three times—he wore it down below the waist of his jeans so you couldn't see it normally—was the optic chain.

Just then he glanced back at me over his shoulder, surprised; maybe he thought I was staring at his crack.

"God damn, I burned fuckin'
hell
out of myself—!" Jack the Ripper shook his hand furiously on the other side of the fire, hopped and whirled. Fire glistened in his mud and sputum eyes.

I looked down at the beads across my chest, my stomach, around my arm; could feel them around my leg. I looked up and saw Red was looking too; then his eyes went down to the place below bis hip's blade pushing above the beltless loops. And up at me again. His hands, out for balance, were bloated the way some winos' get. He started to speak.

I said: "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know where you got it. I don't want you to ask me where I got mine. Fuck you, man. I just don't want to hear—" catching my voice lowering and a fury rising neither he nor I understood.

Black Mak watched me, frowning.

White Tom dug in a can of beans (hot on one side and cold on the other?) with his fingers.

Red swallowed.

"Sure I eat pussy!" California shouts and shoves Tarzan backward.

"Hey, man, hey—" D-t moves along with them.

"You God-damn right I eat pussy!" and shoves again.

"Come on, now, man, what you—"

"I'd eat
your
fucking pussy if you had one!" and Tarzan crashes back into the fence.

"Now come on!" D-t, a hand on either of California's shoulders, moves him away, and Tarzan, abandoned, suddenly starts to—