Gravity's Rainbow (121 page)

“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as
being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually
is
backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you
mean.”

“Uh,” sez Slothrop.

“This is only one of many American Mysteries,” Säure sighs, “I wish somebody could
clear up for me. Not you, obviously.”

Säure got a lotta gall picking on other people’s language like this. One night, back
when he was a second-story man, he had the incredible luck to break into the affluent
home of Minne Khlaetsch, an astrologer of the Hamburg School, who was, congenitally
it seems, unable to pronounce, even perceive, umlauts over vowels. That night she
was just coming on to what would prove to be an overdose of Hieropon, when Säure,
who back in those days was a curly-haired and good-looking kid, surprised her in her
own bedroom with his hand around an ivory chess Läufer with a sarcastic smile on its
face, and filled with good raw Peruvian cocaine still full of the Earth—“Don’t call
for help,” advises Säure flashing his phony acid bottle, “or that pretty face goes
flowing off of its bones like vanilla pudding.” But Minne calls his bluff, starts
hollering for help to all the ladies of the same age in her building who feel that
same motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there’s-time-for-him-to-rape-me ambivalence
about nubile cat burglars. What she means to scream is “Hübsch Räuber! Hübsch Räuber!”
which means “Cute-looking robber! Cute-looking robber!” But she can’t pronounce those
umlauts. So it comes out “Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!” which means “Helicopter! Helicopter!”
well, it’s 1920-something, and nobody in earshot even knows what the word means, Liftscrewer,
what’s that?—nobody except one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamics student in a tenement
courtyard far away, who heard the scream late in Berlin night, over tramclashing,
rifle shots in another quarter, a harmonica novice who has been trying to play “Deutschland,
Deutschland Über Alles” for the past four hours, over and over missing notes, fucking
up the time, the breathing ü . . . berall . . . es . . . indie . . . ie . . . then
longlong pause, oh come on asshole, you can find it—
Welt
sour, ach, immediately corrected . . . through all this to him comes the cry Hubschrauber,
lift-screwer, a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes he knows
exactly
—and can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in the
hatchways with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling screw
we see you from above there is nowhere to go it’s your last alley, your last stormcellar
) to stay inside and not interfere? He stays inside and does not interfere. He goes
on to become “Spörri” of Horst Achtfaden’s confession to the Schwarzkommando. But
he didn’t go to see what Minne was hollering about that night. She would’ve OD’d except
for her boy friend Wimpe, an up-and-coming IG salesman covering the Eastern Territory,
who’d blown into town after unexpectedly dumping all of his Oneirine samples on a
party of American tourists back in hilltop Transylvania looking for a new kind of
thrills—it’s me Liebchen, didn’t expect to be back so—but then he saw the sprawled
satin creature, read pupil-size and skin-tint, swiftly went to his leather case for
stimulant and syringe. That and an ice-filled bathtub got her back O.K.

“‘Ass’ is an intensifier,” Seaman Bodine now offers, “as in ‘mean ass,’ ‘stupid ass’—well,
when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’”

“But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects.

“But gee that don’t make it mean forwards,” blinks Bodine with a sincere little break
in his voice as if somebody’s just about to hit him—actually this is a bit of private
fun for the spirited salt, it is a William Bendix imitation. Let the others do Cagney
and Cary Grant, Bodine specializes in supporting roles, he can do a perfect Arthur
Kennedy-as
-
Cagney’s
-kid-brother
, how about that? O-or Cary Grant’s faithful Indian water-bearer, Sam Jaffe. He is
a white-hat in the navy of life, and that extends to vocal impressions of the fake
film-lives of strangers.

Säure meantime is into something like this with instrumental soloists, or trying,
teaching himself kind of by trial and error, currently ee-ee-aw-aw-ing his way through
some hypothetical Joachim playing his own cadenza from the long-suppressed Rossini
violin concerto (op. posth.), and in the process driving the household mad. One morning
Trudi just goes stomping away into an 82nd Airborne mass jump over the conquered city,
a million fleecy canopies in the sky, falling slow as white ash behind around the
silhouette of her good-by stomp. “He’s driving me
crazy
.” “Hi Trudi, where you going?” “I just told you—
crazy!
” and don’t think this wretched old horny dopefiend doesn’t love her, because he does,
and don’t think he isn’t praying, writing down his wishes carefully on cigarette papers,
rolling up in them his finest sacramental kif and smoking them down to a blister on
the lip, which is the dopefiend’s version of wishing on an evening star, hoping in
his heart she’s just off on another stomp, please only a stomp, let it be over inside
the day
just one more time
, he writes on each good-night’s reefer,
that’s all, I won’t ask again, I’ll try not to, you know me, don’t judge me too hard,
please . . .
but how many more of these stomps can there be?
One’s
going to be the last. Still he keeps on ee-ee-aw-aw-ing with the Rossini, radiating
his mean, lean, living-at-the-edge street-longevity, no he can’t seem to stop it,
it’s an old man’s habit, he hates himself but it just comes on him, no matter what
attention he brings to the problem, he can’t stop drifting back into the catchy cadenza. . . .
Seaman Bodine understands, and is trying to help. To set up a useful interference,
he has composed his own
counter
-cadenza, along the lines of those other pop tunes with classical names big around
1945 (“My Prelude to a Kiss,” “Tenement Symphony”)—every chance he gets, Bodine will
croon it to the new weekly arrivals, Lalli just in from Lübeck, Sandra who’s run away
from the Kleinbürgerstrasse, here’s vile Bodine with his guitar ambling pelvis-wiggling
down the hallway after each naughty defector, each choice little sexcrime fantasy
made flesh, singing and picking a moving rendition of:

M
Y
D
OPER’S
C
ADENZA

If you hear, a “box” so sweet,

Play-in’ tunes-with, a peppy beat,

That’s just MY DOPER’S, CADEN-ZA-A-A-A!

Mel-o-dees, that getcha so,

Where’d they
come
from?
I
don’t know!

(h-ha) It’s just MY DOPER’S CADEN-ZA(A)A-A-A!

These days, the tenement is known as “Der Platz,” and is nearly filled up, all the
way in to the last central courtyard, with friends of Säure’s. The change is unexpected—a
lot more vegetation seems to be growing now in the tenement dirt, an ingenious system
of home-carpentered light ducts and mirrors adjusted throughout the day send sunlight,
for the first time, down into these back courts, revealing colors never seen before . . .
there’s also a rain-structure, to route the rain among flumes, funnels, splash-reflectors,
waterwheels, nozzles, and weirs to make a system of rivers and waterfalls to play
in this summer . . . the only rooms that can still be locked from the inside are reserved
for isolates, fetishists, lost stumblers-in out of the occupation who need loneliness
like the dopefiend needs his dope . . . speaking of which, everywhere in the complex
now you can find army dope of all kinds stashed, from cellars to mansarde floors are
littered with wire loops and plastic covers from ½-grain syrettes of morphine tartrate
squeezed toothpaste-tube empty, broken amyl nitrite containers looted from anti-gas
kits, olive-drab tins of Benzedrine . . . work is proceeding on an anti-police
moat
around the entire tenement: to keep from drawing attention, this moat here is the
first in history being dug from inside out, the space directly below the Jacobistrasse,
slowly, paranoiacally, is hollowed, sculpted, carefully shored up under the thin crust
of street so the odd tram won’t find itself in unscheduled plunge—though it
has
been known to happen, out in the late night with interior tram-lights warm-colored
as clear broth, out on the Peripheral runs through long stretches of unlighted park
or along singing fences of storage depots all at once like a mouth pursing MF the
blacktop buckles and you’re down in some dripping paranoids’ moat, the night-shift
staring in with huge denizen-of-the-underground eyes, faced not with
you
so much as with the agonizing problem of deciding
is
this a real bus, or are these “passengers” really
police agents in disguise
well it’s a touchy business, touchy.

Somewhere in Der Platz now, early morning, somebody’s two-year-old, a baby as fat
as a suckling pig, has just learned the word “Sonnenschein.” “Sunshine,” sez the baby,
pointing. “
Sunshine
,” running into the other room.

“Sunshine,” croaks some grownup morning-voice.

“Sunshine!” hollers the baby, tottering off.

“Sunshine,” a smiling-girl voice, maybe his mother.

“
Sunshine!
” the baby at the window, showing her, showing anybody else who’ll look,
exactly.

S
HIT ’N’
S
HINOLA

“
Now
,” Säure wants to know, “you will tell me about the American expression ‘Shit from
Shinola.’”

“What is this,” screams Seaman Bodine, “I’m being set
tasks
now? This is some
Continuing Study
of American Slang or some shit? Tell me you old fool,” grabbing Säure by throat and
lapel and shaking him asymmetrically, “you’re one of Them too, right? Come
on
,” the old man Raggedy Andy in his hands, a bad morning of suspicion here for the
usually mellow Bodine, “Stop, stop,” snivels the amazed Säure, amazement giving way,
that is, to a sniveling conviction that the hairy American gob has lost his mind. . . .

Well.
You’ve
heard the expression “Shit from Shinola.” As in, “Aw, he don’t know Shit from Shinola!
’bout that.” Or, “Marine—you don’t know Shit from Shinola!” And you get sent to the
Onion Room, or worse. One implication is that Shit and Shinola are in wildly different
categories. You would envision—maybe just because they smell different—no way for
Shit and Shinola to coexist. Simply impossible. A stranger to the English language,
a German dopefiend such as Säure, not knowing either word, might see “Shit” as a comical
interjection, one a lawyer in a bowler hat, folding up papers tucking them in a tan
briefcase might smiling use, “Schitt, Herr Bummer,” and he walks out of your cell,
the oily bastard, forever . . . or
Scchhit!
down comes a cartoon guillotine on one black & white politician, head bouncing downhill,
lines to indicate amusing little spherical vortex patterns, and you thought yes, like
to see that all right, yes cut it off, one less rodent,
schitt ja!
As for Shinola, we pass to universitarians Franz Pökier, Kurt Mondaugen, Bert Fibel,
Horst Achtfaden and others, their Schein-Aula is a shimmering, Albert Speer-style
alabaster open-air stadium with giant cement birds of prey up at each corner, wings
shrugged forward, sheltering under each wing-shadow a hooded German face . . . from
the outside, the Hall is golden, the white gold precisely of one lily-of-the-valley
petal in 4 o’clock sunlight, serene, at the top of a small, artificially-graded hill.
It has a talent, this Seeming-Hall, for posing up there in attractive profiles, in
front of noble clouds, to suggest persistence, through returns of spring, hopes for
love, meltings of snow and ice, academic Sunday tranquillities, smells of grass just
crushed or cut or later turning to hay . . . but inside the Schein-Aula all is blue
and cold as the sky overhead, blue as a blueprint or a planetarium. No one in here
knows which way to look. Will it begin above us? Down
there?
Behind us?
In the middle of the air?
and how soon. . . .

Well there’s one place where Shit ’n’ Shinola do come together, and that’s in the
men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip
down the toilet, as revealed in the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously,
from that hospital’s great holocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid
of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe
but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and private own
asshole
, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what that white toilet’s for. You see many
brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums,
that white porcelain’s the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine
polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet slappin’
on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born the color
of Shit ’n’ Shinola. It is nice to think that one Saturday night, one floor-shaking
Lindyhopping Roseland night, Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid’s shoes and caught
the eye of Jack Kennedy (the Ambassador’s son), then a senior. Nice to think that
young Jack may have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on overhead—did Red
suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moiré there
to let white Jack see through, not through to but through
through
the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop’s shoes? Were the three ever lined up
that way—sitting, squatting, passing through? Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got
murdered. Slothrop’s fate is not so clear. It may be that They have something different
in mind for Slothrop.