Clock with No Hands
In the beginning was real time. A woman enters a garden that is bursting with color. She has no memory, only a burgeoning curiosity. She approaches the man. He is not curious. He stands before a tree. Within the tree is a word that becomes a name. He receives the name of every living thing. At one with the present he has neither ambition nor dream. The woman reaches toward him, gripped by the mystery of sensation.
I closed my notebook and sat in the café thinking about real time. Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.
The Arcade Bar, Detroit, Michigan
Fred and I had no specific time frame. In 1979 we lived at the Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit. We lived around the clock, moving through the days and nights with little regard for time. We would stay up until dawn talking then sleep until nightfall. When we awoke we’d search for twenty-four-hour diners or stop and mill around Art Van’s furniture outlet that opened at midnight and served free coffee and powdered donuts. Sometimes we’d just drive aimlessly and stop before the sun rose at some motel in a place like Port Huron or Saginaw and sleep all day.
Fred loved the Arcade Bar that was close to our hotel. It opened in the morning, a thirties-style bar with a few booths, a grill, and a large railway clock with no hands. There was no time real or otherwise at the Arcade and we could sit for hours with a handful of stragglers, spinning words or content within commiserating silence. Fred would have a few beers and I would drink black coffee. One such morning at the Arcade Bar as he gazed at the great wall clock Fred suddenly got an idea for a TV show. These were the early days of cable, and he envisioned broadcasting on WGPR, Detroit’s pioneering black independent television station. Fred’s segment, Drunk in the Afternoon, fell in the realm of the clock with no hands, unfettered by time and social expectations. It would feature one guest who would join him at the table beneath the clock just drinking and talking. They could go as far as their mutual intoxication would take them. Fred could communicate well on any subject from Tom Watson’s golf swing to the Chicago Riots to the decline of the railroad. Fred made a list of possible guests from all walks of life. On the top of his list was Cliff Robertson, a somewhat troubled B actor who shared Fred’s enthusiasm for aviation, a man close to his heart.
Depending on how it was going, at unspecified intervals I would have a fifteen-minute segment called Coffee Break. The idea being that Nescafé would sponsor my segment. I would not have guests but would invite viewers to have a cup of Nescafé with me. On the other hand, Fred and his guest would not be obligated to communicate with the viewer, only with each other. I went as far as to find and purchase the perfect uniform for my segment—a gray-and-white pin-striped linen dress that buttoned down the front with cap sleeves and two pockets. French-penitentiary style. Fred decided he would wear his khaki shirt with a dark brown tie. On Coffee Break I planned to discuss prison literature, highlighting writers like Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin. On Drunk in the Afternoon Fred might offer his guest some extremely fine cognac from a brown paper bag.
Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know. Unexpectedly, when we returned from French Guiana, he decided to learn to fly. In 1981 we drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to salute America’s first airfield at the Wright Brothers Memorial, taking US Highway 158 to Kill Devil Hills. We then made our way along the Southern coastline, moving from flight school to flight school. We journeyed through the Carolinas to Jacksonville, Florida, and on to Fernandina Beach, American Beach, Daytona Beach, then circled back to Saint Augustine. There we stayed in a motel by the sea with a small kitchenette. Fred flew and drank Coca-Cola. I wrote and drank coffee. We bought miniature vials of the water discovered by Ponce de León—a hole in the ground gushing the supposed water of youth. Let’s never drink it, he said, and the vials became part of our trove of improbable treasure. For a time we considered buying an abandoned lighthouse or a shrimp trawler. But when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another.
Fred finally achieved his pilot’s license but couldn’t afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.