Moise and the World of Reason (13 page)

The roommate was awake.

“It's you or the dog,” he said.

“You mean?”

“One of you has to go.”

“Since the dog is a wolf, or related to the wolf family, why don't you turn it loose in the woods since it's a hazard to mankind?”

“You don't belong to mankind, in my opinion, or the dog's opinion, and the dog could not survive in the woods without me. You got Lance but all I got is the dog.”

There was no answer to that.

I crawled into bed and although Lance had never felt warmer or smoother or more protective to touch, I whispered to our roommate,

“Okay, it's me, keep the dog, but occupy a single room with him.”

“Singles are hard to come by.”

“That I know but I have come by them often.”

(Yes, like now, tonight.)

I stop for a while for breath and I look down at
BON AMI
.

What is, or rather, what
was
BON AMI
? I know it means good friend in French and I remember that when I inquired of Lance soon after I started using it as a work-desk, he said, “Oh, shit, it's some old product that's off the market, I reckon, like you and me are gonna be off it someday.” That wasn't all he said. Lance resented
BON AMI
because he liked his sleep and he claimed the eyeless black domino which was given him by Moise in the days when she could provide such things before she ran out of such things to provide. He claimed that it pressed on his eyeballs and blurred his eyesight. Of course this wasn't the problem. His eyeballs were not the balls to which the domino and
BON AMI
were an offense. Lance resented
BON AMI
and the black domino because they interfered with or delayed the rituals of love which were to him an essential for a night's sleep.

“Git your ass off
BON AMI
and into bed, baby!”

“My ass is not on
BON AMI
.”

“Don't talk back to me, Thelma.”

“If you call me Thelma again, I'll”

“You'll what?”

“I'll call you”

“You know better'n to call me nothing with this royal straight pointed at you and you with a single pair.”

The talk would go like that, but I am an obstinate writer, as obstinate as unsuccessful, and if Lance persisted in trying to interrupt me when I was hotter for a Blue Jay than even for him, I would run downstairs and continue on the Blue Jay in the Pier Ten bar which used to be across the street from the warehouse but which exists no longer.

(I remember one summer night I did this, and Lance followed me to Pier Ten, he came looming in the door, his bare skin above pants level shining like brass which had just been polished, and everybody looked at him while he looked at me, pretending to be unaware of his entrance. He sat down at the bar and began to talk in ferocious language about me.

“See that prick at the table that thinks he's a writer?”

The barman would utter a low-pitched
“Aw”
and a drunk or two would sometimes turn to look at me at the table and make remarks about me which once incited me to throw a beer mug toward them, but usually, no, the barman would tip them off, if they didn't already know that Lance and I were dangerous to discuss. Lance would go on, though.

“Thinks he's got a literary career but I happen to know that his career is what he is sitting on whenever he's not standing or lying down.”

Well, I wasn't afraid of Lance even when he talked in public in this degrading manner. Of course it did stop me writing anything but one phrase over and over in the Blue Jay, and that phrase was “fucking son of a bitch.”

Love talk is often rough.

And after a couple of minutes, Lance would come to the table and he would literally pick me up from it and carry me to the warehouse with my Blue Jay and pencil clutched in my fist and

Rough love is appreciation.)

(Now I shove
BON AMI
from me and begin to root around in its interior for more writing surfaces and I find them. Oh, boy, do I find them. You wouldn't think that a big crate like
BON AMI
had enough space in it to contain all the rejection slips and envelopes they came in which are stashed away inside that box. Although some are mere printed forms to the effect that time does not permit the reading of unsolicited manuscripts, some of them, as I've mentioned before, are graced, so to put it, with those hand-written comments from the editors which I've mentioned before. They appear to be increasingly outraged by the libidinous material of my work, the phrase “sexual hysteria,” or something like it, repeatedly surfacing in these put-downs. Miss Sylvia Withers informs me that the world is full of charming subjects for fiction besides the impurely erotic, which is not a preoccupation of
New Humanities Quarterly
. Mr. C. Henry Faulk of
Guard Before Monthly
suggests to me a period of confinement, recommending a monastery in the Great Smoky Mountains where silence and celibacy are practiced.

(Both of these mags are now defunct, ha ha! The laugh is hollow as the bravado of a defeated boxer. Of course I know that I suffer from a chronically inflamed libido and am frequently subject to hysteria. After all, I am Southern with foreskin intact and the organ is somewhat larger than would be proportionate to most male bodies of my size, I still wear shorts with a twenty-eight-inch waist and barely tip the scales at more than one hundred thirty pounds. Lance used to remark, “Baby, I am well hung but you are hung out of sight for a kid that is five foot seven and a fraction or two, and when my heart breaks on ice while your little ticker beats on, I want you to watch it.” Watch what did he mean? The consequences of bearing between my thighs a peninsula to my body that, if detached, could pass for a banana approaching maturity though not yet yellowed by the sun? No, I think he meant something of a less material nature, something that had more to do with a future which he feared that I would crash into.)

What is the future of a being with a chronically inflamed libido when the bird of youth has flown out of body and spirit? There's no empyrean into which it ascends like a paraclete. Unless it is corrected or controlled, it could take you to the baths someday and that's where dignity stops and all pretension to it. That is the time of eyes inflamed toward daybreak as the libido, and the haunting of wanting unassuaged by no matter how many mouths. Lance used to tell me about an inscription on the wall of a cubicle in a Boston bath. “Wonderful night of fun. Had ten cocks, took eight biggest up ass.” This triumphant inscription on the wall was signed “The Size Queen of Back Bay.” No. Repeat no. I would prefer the castration of early death to that sort of future.

A few months ago I ran into a black from Harlem who was into the history of Harlem music and dance from Blues through Jazz and Be-bop and its moods through the wild to the cool and now into the mellow, and he said something that stuck in my mind. “God don't come when you want Him but He's right on time.”

Oh, God, I've taken it out of my pants and I'm holding it in my hand and

At home and alone the libido, during these hours, is bound to enter you like an incubus, and if your resistance is down he will control your hand and direct it to where he makes you think you live. You've got to shout to him, “No, I don't live there, not in Place Pig Alley any more than in Sacré Coeur de Montmartre but

Where do you live when alone?

Slowly and sadly, now, I put it back in my jeans and button them up on it as I ask myself that question, “Where do you live when alone?”

In a corner of the dayroom of that asylum on that island in that river to the east?

Words!—
don't suffice. . . .

I have just now discovered a very old laundry cardboard, the kind inserted in a laundered shirt, dating from those days when shirts of mine were sent out to be washed and ironed at a laundry no longer existing that was called the Oriental. It is far from an ideal surface for the pencil, having turned darker than its original gray and curling up at the ends and smelling of

I will say it, cockroaches, insects which are so abhorrent to me that I shudder as I

This dates back to the kitchen in Thelma, Alabama, this cockroach phobia of mine. Even in my childhood I associated sleeping alone with death and I would get up barefooted at night to enter the kitchen and before I could reach the light switch there would be that awful crackling and squishing sound underfoot and I'd know I'd stepped on one. That awful content of it, yellow as mucus. I'd sit on the edge of the sink running cold water on the sole of my foot till it was removed, all of it, and I felt clean again.

To be cleansed of defilement is so lovely a thing, and thinking of it, I recall an incident in Thelma when my first symptoms of puberty were appearing, the faint down over the groin and in the armpits, the changed voice, and the penis, rising in sleep, in a dream, to an ecstatic emission of sperm, “the damp initial of Eros,” as I once called it in a poem much later.

The incident is this.

A strange limousine had arrived in the city containing four strange young men. No one could fail to notice their elegantly slow drives about the town and the lingering and staring out at male adolescents employed at the stave mill, and Thelma being an innocent town, their reason for this behavior was not suspected correctly. No one knew where they stayed if they stayed anywhere except in the limousine. During the daytime they never rolled down the limousine windows but at night they did to call out in soft voices to youths on the walks. They were there for two days and nights only and it was most commonly rumored of them that they were from Tuscaloosa or Birmingham and were visiting Thelma to attempt to stir up union trouble among the stave mill employees.

On the second night of their stay in Thelma, it was not a stave mill employee but to me that one of the four called out, soft as a dove's voice, from a rapidly rolled-down window of the limousine which was dark as their reputed reason for being in Thelma.

“Son, boy, want a lift where you're going?”

The light of a corner streetlamp shone on his face. He was the blond of the four: I was attracted by the soft voice, the charming intensity of his pale eyes, and simply by the courtesy of the offer of a lift in the handsomest car that I'd even seen in Thelma.

I had been to a Gary Cooper movie at the Bijou and had been so entranced by his face that I'd barely followed the story.

“Why, yes, thanks.”

Quickly, silendy, the back door of the limousine opened to admit me, and the blond who'd spoken to me lifted me across his knees to the space between him and a sculpturally motionless young man with equally intense-looking eyes.

No sooner than I was sitting between the blond and the dark than the window was raised and the limousine purred into motion.

The blond did all the talking at first.

“Where are you going, boy?”

“Home.”

“Where's that?”