MOZER’S FIRST DEALER was a Latino named Spoon who roared up Chester out of Hough each Thursday in a vintage black-over-white Mercury so sweetly tuned it seemed capable of speech—a thunder as throaty and pure, Spoon told him once, as oratory itself. Spoon always parked behind the Church of the Covenant, and Mozer would appear a little after noon, just before his class in the Romantics. The dialogue and actions never changed: Spoon would say “Man!” and “Madre!” and “Don’t be sneaking up like that, hombre!” and Mozer would slip himself into that auto slowly and with great ceremony, its interior so full of red plush and shiny leathers it could have been the giant steel shoe of Satan himself. Spoon always had the radio tuned to JMO, or another spade station, his head, with its fertile hairdo, bobbing to a rhythm Spoon identified as equal parts funk and blood-stuff, the bass in the door speakers so heavy it seemed to pound on Mozer’s leg, maybe make a bruise and leave a welt.
Spoon dealt primo toot, iced and crystal, white enough to be a starlet’s thigh, which he presented to Mozer in a glassine packet, rolling his Juarez eyeballs heavenward, saying the blow in question was either Chilean or direct from the Golden Triangle, strong enough to bend iron or set off train noises in the deep, primitive corners of your brain pan. Mozer always did a sample, which was protocol, the first snort bitter and laden enough to send him in search of words like churl and hunch. Then he paid, in old bills, Spoon the superstitious sort who thought of new money the way the Huns thought of achievement in bronze. They’d say adios, Spoon still caught up in the throes of thump and new music.
“You be careful,” Spoon would say. “Maybe one day you don’t want no more nose, okay? Maybe you go loco, want to be a bird or flashy gangster.”
The woman came into Mozer’s life during that one semester he was calling Coleridge and Keats “tangents of lust” and “the milk-spurned bards of indecent closure,” a pair like Mutt and Jeff, one full of limp and midnight oil, the other a dingus on the upside of the perilous peak that was a wintry but heartening time of versifiers. The coke, he figured, made him blabber that way: the several lines before class each Tuesday and Thursday that spun him into the lecture hall in a state he accepted as wired and supreme, all about him afflicted and cast low. Exercises in wonder, his lessons were breathless accounts of perfection and the mysteries that attend knowledge, which invariably ended with him throwing off his sport coat, or climbing onto his chair, and shaking his fists as if he were leaving this life for fable and legend.
Elaine Winston was a Miltonist, a first-year assistant professor with an office on the first floor, and, as he learned happily, herself mad with learning. His hair slicked back, he went to her one day, followed her into her office after seeing in her face what he was convinced was scepter-love and, well, theophany.
“Miss Winston,” he said, his voice full of his Louisiana upbringing, “looky here.”
Yet, before she could sit, even before she could say hello, Mozer placed on her desk a vial of fluff Spoon said could launch you into Deityville by way of your own biles and ferments. It was Colombian rock, Spoon had said, mayhap as old as the earth itself, on account of it had evil in it, which led to an expanded view of the universe, which led in ultimate terms to a consideration of shit like Hierarchy and Ultimacy itself. Mondo heavy stuff. Made you want to bark, to perform a foulness with your fingers. Took the contemplation right out of the daily business of finding and keeping.
Both of them agreed later that it was no surprise that immediately, her hands steady with purpose, she opened the vial and, with the patience of a DEA assassin, laid out two thin but exact lines. After all, she told Mozer, she’d read the literature and had been to the movies; plus, she’d watched TV and, in her UC–Santa Barbara days, had tried root and downers and something which a now-lost boyfriend had described as Laotian, a melted fungus which you waved before your lips and lugged with you into Old Night—which was what Mozer yearned to hear, so, as he locked the door and switched off the light and unzipped her teacher’s skirt, he was saying the Lady—the toot, the snow—was, like themselves, the outmost work of Nature, much beyond havoc and spoil and that they, Elaine Winston and himself, Richard E. Mozer (of Tulane and the University of Texas-Austin), would soon be passing beyond tumult and din for the uplifting horizons of organized beauties and that composite body in which incorruptible matter predominates, love.
For months after this, through a Cleveland winter frigid and piled with ice and into a glorious spring, Mozer’s lectures were magic and biology both—hour-long sessions even the student newspaper, the Observer, in an unsigned editorial, called bifurcated and multifarious, “the eldest of things.” One period Dr. Mozer spent on Shelley’s “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” spotting in its eight lines neither the beloved nor the quick, but privation and deficiency—in his mind the vision of a serpent with hips leading a legion of duteous and knee-crooking knaves. When he grabbed the chalk and dashed to the board to scrawl figures of analysis, he looked like a caveman, his face beleaguered, as if he’d embraced each and every one of his rascally needs. He told Elaine Winston, and she him, that they were entering a time of gulf and effulgence and pouring forth—a time washed by the waters of Abana and Pharpar, a time of fawn, renegade, and hapless wight! During another class period, when he was to be addressing the horned moon and Mr. E. K. Chambers’s A Sheaf of Studies, he tenderly fixed his head against the bosom of Mindy Griffith, a South Philadelphia sophomore COSI major, and claimed to hear, through her sweater and blouse and brassiere, not the heart but the steady, fairyland tromp-tromp of Mr. Wordsworth’s footsteps in the Rydale woods.
“No bramble,” he whispered. “No evergreen, no palm.”
Then, holding her by the shoulders, he said there was in her courage and outlawry, even the wonted face renewed.
That March, when he should have been concerned that Elaine Winston was speaking of warmth and beachfronts and heavy palm trees, he began telling his classes about his family, offering his vision of child-rearing and where woe comes from. And one day, after taking a richness from Spoon that was said to have come from the very ash, honest, of the rood itself, he informed his class, while his organs beat like a Sousa drum corps, that he’d had no youth at all, that he had vaulted across the decades, from gamete to scholar, without benefit of the swerve and downwardness of adolescence; and that, were he to wed, it would be to a woman whose face had something in it of friskiness and of thorn.
That afternoon, drinking Pepsi under a young maple in front of Gund Hall, Mozer told Elaine Winston of the goody Spoon had promised him: a mixture likened to the tears of a lost people—the Goths, say—cocaine cut with the subsoil those NASA technicians at Lewis Research Center were bringing back from Uranus, stuff that made fire of water, and earth of air. Lord, he said, it was itself love. Which was the gift, he told Professor Winston, he most wanted to give her, conveying this wish by licking her hands and mentioning conglobed atoms and seminal forms and female divinity.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
He imagined them on the flaming ramparts of the world, him crafty and gaunt, her light incarnate.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s impossible.”
He mentioned glimmer, heart-baking rays, splendor.
“Please,” she sobbed, “no more.”
It was love, he said, and were she coke, he would now be at her toes, she that blessed white rail that stretched to infinity, she that orbit of song and purity; he was ready, he insisted, for transcendence.
It was then, while he kissed her cheeks and eyes and forehead, that she confessed she’d taken another job. In Florida. She would be leaving at the end of the term.
For his next appointment, Mozer went flying toward Spoon’s Mercury like a hawk with serpent wings, his topcoat flapping, his ski cap pulled shut over his ears. He believed that his innards, all link and hook and snap of them, were frozen, rattling like bolts in a bucket. He was sobbing, too, and even before he flung himself into the car, he was well into the latest chapter of his life, that unlightsome and diminished part, that part of yoke and aery gloom. Mozer saw himself in the upper waters of this world, drowning. He gagged and something inside—his spleen, he thought, or junked heart!—banged hard against his breastbone.
While Spoon studied him, Mozer spoke of the circumfluous liquids, the calm upon which the World is built, the metaphorical jasper, the unmixed fire, the goo and slop, the pneuma of the Stoics. He told Spoon about Elaine Winston’s decision and the wreck he was because of it; and, watching students gingerly tread the ice-slickened sidewalks near the building next to him, he speculated on the nature of man, the hylomorphic principle, multiple and gross, of substantial composition into the material world. He spoke of the Fons Vitae of Avencebrol. The Hokmah. The Yod and the mysterious AWIR. Before running out of breath, he said that he was dumped, mashed, crazed, wrung out, wracked, and no more good for this world than war.
For a second, while those on Spoon’s radio sang to them of high-heeled sneakers and wig hats, neither spoke. Then, like a hungry man sitting down to a thirty-dollar T-bone, Spoon said, “Doc, don’t worry. I have just the thing.”
And from nowhere—or the next world, Mozer thought later, or the world after that—appeared several grams of doody cut fine as morning mist. It was a weight, Spoon assured him as he left the car, that in minutes would strip away the pain and lay bare the shiny, cartilaginous root of himself, his spring and heavy, greased wheel.
...
During April, Mozer got used to the idea Elaine Winston was leaving by rededicating himself to his work. It was, he would say later, his period of plucking up and casting out, a time of victual and wound. He scratched out a paper on “So We’ll Go No More A Roving” for the MMLA section on Byron for the St. Louis meeting, a paper he delivered with such a sorcerer’s fury that it appeared to many in the Marriott suite that, at a mention of laurel and myrtle, he might burst into flame. He mumbled about “features of intelligent genera” and marched into class wearing a rag around his ears, saying he was pity and Dido’s pyre, that heavy-headed carouser who was the sin of apotheosis given tendon and hackle.
In one class, rolling on a circuit made smooth and gleaming by two lines of what Spoon claimed was flake chipped from Eden’s first tree, Dr. Mozer forged a lecture that linked, in a moment quiet enough to have come from death, the Ens, the hinder parts of God’s essence, and the “houmoousian,” the latter of which his pupils were to conceive of not as the Father and Son and the Holy Ghost, but as Larry, Curly, and Moe—the modern Wise Men of burlesque and pain. It was an insight, Mozer noticed, that left eager Mindy Griffith limp with hope.
The following Tuesday, in the parking lot of the Church of the Covenant, the sky dark with soot, Mozer told Spoon he wanted stuff that said “smote” and “wither,” that would his soul and bounteous fortune consecrate.
“An ounce,” he said.
Spoon, in a yellow fedora that could have come from a Mickey Spillane book, nodded gravely. “You feeling low, Doc?” he wondered.
Mozer said that he and Elaine—for old times’ sake, really, one final fling—were taking a room in the Shoreway Holiday Inn during finals. He used the words mode and issue.
“I can dig it,” Spoon said, and in an instant, as if it had materialized from the black world, Spoon was placing on the seat between them a Baggie that contained a substance that, to Mozer’s mind, seemed, apart from its glow and density, to be alive. “No mas,” Spoon was saying. “As of today, I am out of business.”
He was going back to Mexico, he allowed, where an acquaintance, a big-hearted caballero like himself, was in league with an hombre who knew a figure who had a contact with the so-called, which might develop, given ingenuity and gorge, into resplandor, radiance. There was much dinero to be made, he said. A man in the grip of an idea, he said, could go anywhere in his life.
The world tilted a little for Mozer, the sky crumbling into a hole in the horizon.
“What about me?” he said. There was music in the car, of course, metals and whines—the chorus of a thousand banshees and madmen. “I thought we had an understanding,” he said. “Amigos, no?”
Spoon was making smacking noises. He said not to worry, El Professor was muy especial, he was being turned over to a gent—“like a colleague, man”—who, in Mozer’s moment of need, would appear, bearing some Lady that was virtually coeternal with the Father Himself.
As he would reveal to his next dealer, the Suit, and the one to follow him, and the one to follow him, his week with Elaine Winston, now-departed assistant professor, was lived in a place unapproached through necessity and chance. It was part manifestation, he said, part similitude. A haven hewn from hardiment and hazard. “There were no hard feelings,” he would say. “No guilt.”
The first two days, they lived off room-service chicken and wine and a varlet’s concoction which, Elaine swore, made you use the terms hath and ye. It turned thought to deed, and that to a thing which uttered in complex/compound sentences. If anything, Mozer would declare for years, they both grew more luscious: She was the bringing forth and the shining unto; he, decree and ascent. He sprinkled lines on her breasts and thighs, and once he entered the whooshing, ornamented, fibrous, and unsettled chambers of her heart, as she sang to him of the whip and the cradle, the prattling bush and the fetching metabole. Later, he laid a trail which led over a dresser, across the floor, and to the coffee table before climbing a chair, following the curtain folds and ending, it seemed, at the mouth of a warm cave, the first principle of things—“the junction,” he hollered, “of form and meaning!” In his joy, he became ape and first man, a being of lope and skinned knuckle and savage mien.
After the third day, and until they left for the airport, they didn’t again use the phone or open the drapes. One time, after not speaking for an hour, he went to her as he imagined Keats had gone to his Grecian Urn, muttering about the dales of Arcady, plus pipes and haunting timbrels. She was lamentation, he told her. He looked into her ear, discovering a spot to put everything—his smoking brain stem, the shame and prize of himself, that ragged wind in his chest. An hour later, he found himself yelling about the cataract and trodden weed. She—no, not she alone, but Eve and Sweet Betsy from Pike and Mother Hubbard and Little Red Riding Hood—she was garland and seashore and silk. She was, he decided, swarm populous and writ itself—chaste but messy writ—like a message from the soul.
“In me, there’s the rose,” Elaine Winston announced. “And ire. And compass. And kirtled Sovereign.”
Collapsed against the bathroom door, Mozer applauded. He was seeing everything from beginning to end—from bang in the dark, through swamp and savannah and bustling boulevard, to bang in the dark. And then she stood at the end of the bed, its sheets a snarl of white, her breasts heavy and dark, her head so far away it seemed to scrape the ceiling.
There was in her, she vowed, alimental recompense and humid exhalation.
She was quoting, he knew.
A progeny of light, she was saying. And recess of miracle. And supernal expanse.
When she finally pitched back onto the bed, exhausted, she was talking about optic emanation and preparation and the all-embracing, without which there could never be any, yes, privilege.
In the next hour he knew, even without his watch, that it was time to go, that days five and six had passed. What had come to him, he decided, was understanding, and it came when, feeding from a line that seemed composed of socket and hook and perfect mortise, he looked up and realized that her flesh had vanished and what remained—what he slurped and bit and sucked, and what shouted to him of void and fathom and nitre—was not Elaine Winston, Miltonist, but his own love, brawling damp and full of fear. His love was gnash and twisted limb and lips of dew. It was text and high estate and supped wonders—a clamor of sally and retreat: unsorted, turbid, clip-winged and no more noble than a donkey in ferkin and wig. Most of all, he saw himself as a Mongol, pounding across a cedarn cover—that land of S. T. Coleridge!—hot for the maid that was passion: a chase which would take, he concluded, forever.
Mozer’s second dealer, the Suit, was an insurance lawyer who toiled downtown and did not care, as Spoon had, about music or shiny vehicles. He was a Yale grad who, as promised, wanted to discuss life and the meaning thereof, who would arrange a meeting in the men’s room on the eighth floor of the Statler Office Tower on Euclid; and who would, before laying on Mozer crystal the size of a heavyweight’s fist, address the context of the blow, its bewitching history and its humble provenance. One time it was Mao-informed stuff, advanced but cryptic, scrutable only to those who knew of the universal hubbub and the mutiny of the spirit. Another time the toot came from a slyboot, Lucretian kingdom and had to it much blindness folly. On another occasion, the stuff was Hebrew, tartareous and cold.
At the meeting before the start of the fall semester, when Elaine Winston had been gone for almost three months, the Suit quietly locked the washroom door and plucked from his jacket pocket an envelope which held what the Suit said was sublimity itself, rumored to have been harvested from the soaked deltas of Mars—misrule made elemental.
“Jesus,” the Suit said, placing the item on the counter.
It appeared to be vibrating, as if it had breath and muscle. They peered at it awhile.
Mozer said something about awe—the scalloped rim of the universe.
The Suit nodded.
Mozer said something about firmaments—the quaint auguries of nightswains.
The Suit nodded.
Mozer said something about glories, and when the Suit wondered what the Professor was going to do with this modern miracle, a light flickered on in Mozer’s memory. His brain shivered and quaked, its fissures and folds darkening.
He had one idea, then a second—both electric and comely, as if he were a mathematician, a scholar versed in the joys of a problem and its meet solution. There was, it seemed, a machine’s click in his forehead, and he beheld, the Suit still at his elbow, the crooked and croupy in himself limp away into blackness. He took a deep breath—the first in months, he believed—and he heard, as if with a castaway’s ears, a shout and a call, human noise after eons of silence.
He was thinking about Mindy Griffith, that sophomore from Philadelphia, that one whose major in communications science had taught her, doubtlessly, the subtle but potent differences between talk and speech; yes, that fetching, unsafe creature who’d nearly fled her desk that noontime when he’d read from the Biographia of shag and rack and the dim, wicked hunter. Oh, he knew now what he would do, all right. And he knew, too, that while one might say that Mozer was a pretty slimy motherfucker, at thirty-five, to hustle the innocent, another might say that he was one hell of a fine person, confident as a gambler, with the courage of a Columbus, to share, to shepherd someone into that new world of love, that enchanted province of paradise and dread.