Landscape With Traveler (2 page)

 

2

Back

Home

Again

Back home again. It was good to find a letter from Jim waiting for me in the
mailbox. Perfect timing, really, as sitting on the bus starting out on the trip, looking at all those people, suddenly Jim popped into my head (a case of opposites!). Tears came, and a tiny haiku appeared in my mind:

Thank you, God.

I thought you had forgot me,

And you gave me such a friend.

I kept saying it over and over to myself, and felt so good that I couldn't begin to describe it. And whenever I was by myself, as on my walks (both nights I was there) along the beach, it stayed the same way—really a kind of exultation—and I'd sit on a log and imagine Jim sitting in California looking at the same moon and thinking of it as a sort of satellite for all our thoughts. Silly in a way, I guess, and rather childishly romantic, but there it was.

I do often fear that my effusion of friendship for Jim might put him off somehow. I pray it won't, but from past experience I know that it can do so. I guess that if it does, then it does, and no amount of worrying or reassurance can help. Offerings must be true, so that the receiver (if any) knows what he's getting.

How wonderful it would be if we could develop one of those ideal friendships in which each friend was totally natural and honest so that no word or letter or gesture came from anything but a true, natural impulse, with no feelings of guilt or reproach, but only of gladness and love and respect. In which I could, for instance, with no hesitation, beg him for a letter, and he could, without guilt feelings of any kind, not write one for a year even, if he didn't feel like it, and I would understand and love him even more for it. I think, naively, perhaps, that it's possible.

I wonder sometimes whether loving someone isn't simply paying attention to him. In friendship, paying attention to his mind and welfare, and in “love,” in its popular sense, to his body as well.

My own friendship with other men, particularly with “straight” men, such as Jim, gets into complications at times, and my motives are often suspect, even to me, and whatever I say, I do feel acutely the difference between us. I accept it, though, and live quite comfortably with it on the whole.

I was talking with a young friend of mine the other night about various “serious” things, including love. We were concentrating on that, because sort of offhandedly one night a few months ago I had said I thought loving someone was an end in itself. That is, loving someone with—deliberately, if necessary—no thought of being loved in return. Wishing for it, maybe, but no expectations. I think it's nourishing and makes one grow.

And this isn't just idle conjecture, either. I've tried it and it works. Tried it not in the way of testing out a theory, but because it once was forced on me. That was with Ilya in Greece (a three-volume novel in itself!). But when I realized that it was a one-sided affair I thought about it for a couple of nights in a very concentrated way (I couldn't think about anything else!) and rather than become bitter and vindictive and bitchy as I might have done, I decided (really consciously decided) to love him just the same for as long as I did love him. (Though a question arose as to whether “love” was love, but anyhow . . .)

That went on for a couple of years and got calmer and calmer and actually almost more and more beautiful, and that one experience—the blossoming (and going to seed, I suppose) of a lot of experiences in the then past—turned out to have taught me one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned.

Anyway, this friend of mine took it up and apparently has been thinking a great deal about it. He has his doubts, but I have now passed the point of merely believing it. I know it, and it's part of me.

I've been accused so often and by so many different people of being a bad influence that it scares me. We can know, it seems to me, almost anything except how we affect other people. No, that's not true. We can know nothing. It seems to us that we know certain things, but only because they are so unimportant to us that we never think about them enough to realize that we don't know them. But important things, like what people think about us, are frustratingly inscrutable. We can learn what are called “facts”—we cannot learn what we want to know.

In my own way, I'm very stubborn, which I can see in my way of dealing (in my own mind) with the world at large. I have decided how I like it and live in it as though it were that way.

 

3

Paradoxes

Spring

Up

on

All

Sides

Paradoxes spring up on all sides, it seems. It becomes both easier and more difficult to write, though the focus becomes finer as I go deeper into things that I am not used to talking about and so don't know how. For Jim, my response to his friendship, there is of course a lot more to be said. It will take me the rest of my life to say it.

If just one little thing had been different I'd probably never have known Jim. I wouldn't have known the difference, naturally. One could go mad thinking of the friends, the perfect lover still unmet because on a certain evening in
1953
one decided to turn down Fifth Avenue instead of going on to Seventh as originally intended. And I do believe the old adage about suffering being good for the soul—
if,
as it should, it produces understanding, which it has in his case even though it often does not. I'm sure he knows that—but who could blame him if he'd have preferred somewhat less understanding! The trick is to understand how much
everybody
suffers—to understand it and keep from going mad, that is. At the same time I'm saying all this I am blissfully aware it's all so much meaningless chatter. Saved again!

 

4

When

I

Was

a

Child

When I was a child, six or seven years old, I used to sleep on a daybed, as they used to call them, in the dining room of my Grandmother Morgan's house, where my parents and I lived during the Depression. My parents' room was off the dining room, and I had to go through it to get to the bathroom. Early one (probably Saturday) morning I finally gave it up and got out of my cozy bed, my mind full of goofy, gleeful little child thoughts and decisions about what to do with the wonderful day that lay ahead—a whole eternity it seemed—and went absently into my parents' room to go and pee. They were awake, my father leaning against his pillows, smoking a cigarette, so I delayed my peeing and went to kiss them.

My father smiled and said, “Who do you love the most, Francis, your mother or me?” Both of them smiled, waiting for my answer. Tears came to my eyes and I mumbled something about “I don't know,” and he pulled me over and hugged me and said it didn't matter and that I should love my mother the best. I knew he was ashamed of his question and understood that he was just as confused by it as I was, so in my own little pitiful way tried to put him at ease and went on into the bathroom finally to pee and get on with my day, which was ruined now anyway.

That was my first remembered emotional confusion, and however innocently my parents had inflicted it, my trust of them was changed forever, as was my whole personality, I guess, because I became less open, more guarded in general. And I learned, as we all must, how to answer such questions.

I don't reproach my father for it, and know these things happen, but I wonder even now how I'd have turned out without that question. Still it was a satori of sorts, and without realizing it at the time, I saw a great deal of what there is to see about people. For a long time now, years and years, I seem to have felt that silence is the only way to keep from hurting people. I guess catatonia was only a step away.

 

5

My

Earliest

Memories

I was born in Baton Rouge in
1930
. My earliest memories are from about
1933
or '
34
, a mixture of how good it felt to lie in bed on damp, cold Louisiana winter mornings, fighting for every second before I had to get up for breakfast (and, three years later, school) in the old-fashioned kitchen with the refrigerator with the big round motor on top, the rain outside making inside seem so safe and cozy, or in summers scraping up ice chips from the floor of the ice wagon (pulled by a gray and white horse, who was always pissing, so that eating ice and smelling horse piss are still mixed up with one another), playing “Doctor” with the little girl next door in my grandfather's stringbean patch or under the house, where we had a whole city marked out for our little toy cars and airplanes with Log Cabin Syrup cans for houses.

Actually, most of my childhood memories are sensual, like the warm bed and eating the ice, or overtly sexual, such as the Doctor game at three. And then, at about four or five, my hero of the moment, a big kid of about thirteen or so named Douglas who lived across the street, accepted my attentions on the condition that I would let him put “it” in my mouth. I was quite happy to do this, but it led to a lifetime of puzzlement because he had a foreskin and I did not, and therefore found that added luxury most fascinating indeed, sometimes to Doug's irritation, as he was not interested in anything but coming (which he'd thoughtfully explained to me before we began—“Don't worry, it's not piss, and you can swallow it.”) and my skinning his cock back and forth to the verge of self-hypnosis wasn't getting us anywhere to his way of thinking. Why had mine been cut off? (Doug explained circumcision to me.) I remembered my father's question. Now this.

 

6

I

Can

Remember

an

Old

Ford

Coupe

I can remember, also at about age three or four, an old Ford coupe my father had, one of those very tall, squarish things, in which I'd go happily for Sunday drives with my parents and an elderly Boston terrier named Bob, who was always farting and filling the little car with evil smells and great merriment.

But when my father would go around a corner too fast—about twenty-five miles per hour—the car would turn over and we'd have to climb out the top side and get somebody to help push the car back aright before we could drive on. Actually, that happened only once or twice and was probably due to rolling over the curb or something like that more than to velocity. But I was convinced that we were going at frightening speeds. It never seemed to hurt the car at all, even to dent it. And my father was known as a rather rakish driver thanks to these little incidents.

Another favorite Sunday afternoon entertainment was for my father and me to go down to the Mississippi and ride the old paddle-wheeled ferryboats back and forth for hours between Baton Rouge and Port Allen, eating Crackerjacks and drinking Delaware Punch (I switched to Dr Pepper much later). I can still remember the smell of muddy water and tar from those boats, and the way the wooden rails smelled, and tasted.

In all, I have only the happiest of memories about those days—except that I had no brother. Rather early on I turned off to my parents, but I had two wonderful grandmothers and one very nice grandfather who would tell me endless stories, which I have now unfortunately forgotten, about his own boyhood during the Civil War.

During the summers I usually went with my father to visit his mother, my Grandmother Mabel Reeves, and his two sisters and their husbands and sons in San Antonio, which I loved—and them, too. Mabel was a Presbyterian minister's daughter who went from the rectory directly to her first husband's ranch, where she learned to cuss and laugh with the ranch hands. It was she who taught me how to shoplift, and we had great times trying to steal things so each other wouldn't notice it, our technique being such that there was no worry about clerks and floor walkers ever catching us, or so we thought at the time. It is possible that, in those decorous days, our immunity came merely from the fact that the thought of a respectable-looking elderly lady shoplifting with her angelic grandson was inconceivable.

 

7

I

Can

Recall

My

First

Orgasm

Quite

Clearly

I can recall my first orgasm—at six or seven—quite clearly. I had just seen the movie
Lost Horizon,
and that night in bed I pretended I was flying an airplane over the Himalayas, searching for Shangri-La. Actually, I was Nelson Eddy searching for it! As I moved in the bed my penis rubbed against the sheet, and it felt so good that I kept rocking and dipping the plane. As I got more and more excited I imagined I saw it and started shouting “Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-Laaaaa!”
until my penis exploded, as did
my imaginary airplane against the mountains.

At about age eight or nine, I pondered that ejaculation (for which I naturally longed) might possibly be more a matter of suction than of age. Being one day alone in the house and having no friend handy to provide the suction, I turned to the vacuum cleaner hose. I carefully determined that it contained no grinding, cutting, or biting mechanism, inserted my poor little penis, and switched the motor on—an altogether hair-raising, terrifying experience as my tiny organ was violently whipped back and forth in the suction. I admitted defeat and set myself to wait a few years.

There was also that unforgettable time, when we were twelve, when my friend Timmy, as full of self-importance, I daresay, as he has ever been, took Rick and me out to his uncle's farm to initiate us into the ecstasy of fucking a cow. We were an odd triumpuerate, the school's two star jocks and I, but the relationship was one of three equals and not at all one that hindsight might have expected. But to that Saturday—we rose early and biked the ten or twelve miles out to the farm to rouse his cousin. He brought a box (“the” box, I guess) and we went to look for a suitable cow, Rick and I, the awestruck innocents, trailing behind the two masters. Having secured the beast to a fence and placed the box just right, Timmy mounted it, dropped his jeans to his ankles, and, with Rick close in on one side and me on the other to observe (the cousin was at the cow's head), inserted his ready prick into the flabby and rather filthy slit and started ramming.

It was as though his cock pushed a button in the wrong place. Immediately a huge flood of liquid shit poured out of the cow over Timmy's belly, cock, and legs, filling his dropped jeans and overflowing to the ground. Timmy's face, Timmy's face! Rick and I collapsed in laughter, as did the cousin when he saw. Timmy reddened for every possible reason—except where he was brown—but mainly fury.

The three of us stripped, picked Timmy up, and threw ourselves into the nearby creek. Our ardor was cooled, but soon revived, and we soothed it in the more usual way, which even the cousin, I believe, preferred to the cow.