Two nights after Lindy’s visit to Phi Psi, Jon came into the bathroom as a few of us were brushing our teeth. Making a show of ignoring me, he turned to Dave and said, “Did you see? My former live-in whore was by here the other night.”
I whipped around. “You fat bastard!”
He seemed startled more than anything, that someone dared address him so irreverently. “You’re going to take that back,” he insisted.
“Like hell I am!” I stared hard at him, then added, “Pretentious jerk!” and looked away.
He put his head down and charged at me like a rhinoceros and, as I swung back, he tried to pin me against the mirror. I slid out of his grasp. He lunged again. Toothpaste, shaving cream, sundries crashed to the floor. Then Dave grabbed him and, with Phil’s help, pulled him out and led him back to his room: “Cool it, man; cool it.”
A week later Jon moved out of Phi Psi into the dorms.
Life had followed the script of a Lawrence novel—a hermetic undertow that carried me beyond plot and character into the heart of my own text. Betsy had stood at the gateway, an unknowing guardian spirit. Then I had a date with the wrong girl … and someone else was in the alcove, waiting.
Where Ginny led, I followed as if Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun were my guides—until we were riven down separate paths. Lindy was waiting at the ripples of the Stream of Probability. What was elusive with Ginny was as now tangible as life itself.
We made spring into our continuous study date: alongside Paradise Pond at Smith, on the Phi Psi lawn, in Valentine between meals.
During the term Schuyler threw in with Larry and Jim, juniors from my Lawrence seminar. The four of us maintained a running satire in the dining hall as we spoofed Amherst styles, noting the passage of “cowboy cool,” “big man,” “jockdom,” and “pseudointellectual popinjay.” Larry and Jim were high-stepping cowboys of their own contrivance; decked out in jeans and leather, they shared a souped-up old sedan and spoke in periodic Laurentian and Keatsian mime. It was running theater—cut-up plus panache.
One Saturday Larry drove us to a swimming hole north near Vermont: Jim, Schuy, me, and our dates. I felt an ancient wistfulness, as Lindy and I lay on our backs in bathing suits in the grass … clouds blown apart in the jetstream. I was chasing the bare eclipse of a form, itself a shadow. Beyond the hill, the land dipped precipitously into the unknown, an obliquity that masked a chimera. Something indelible was lost; something equally remote beckoned. I saw on a smoke-thin arras a Sphinx. I felt my own skeletal existence.
Then we dove into the water, smashing sky. That icy plunge resolved all muddles, a splash into the Now, as water opened my heart to gratitude beyond complication. No indecision or keepsakes allowed—shun sixes of cups, those munchkin children in their gardens of forever throwback nostalgia!
That evening Lindy, Tripp, and I took a walk along backroads—he delivering dialogue from Godot, she improvising with gumption and wit. Then she spat from a small bridge into headlights—a Colorado method, she said, to gauge the speed of cars. “Pretty tough girl,” he confided later. And he was the ultimate judge.
Schuy’s friends turned out to be more than collegiate rebels and cowboy poets; they were rogue revolutionaries. After keeping their alter egos secret for months Schuy finally confided in April that Jim (known as Axis, a near-homonym of his last name) was king of something called “guerrilla warfare,” conducted on Saturdays after midnight at the Psi U fraternity house. “It’s beyond description,” he said. “If you could just see it you’d realize that Phi Psi is a bunch of wimps.”
Later that month he extended a guarded invitation: Axis had arranged for me to witness a skirmish as a noncombatant. He couldn’t a hundred percent assure my safety, but I would be under his protection. If he prevailed no one would bother me. If he were defeated it was every man for himself!
Just after midnight I met Schuy at North. From there I followed him along College Street to Psi U. He elbowed a crack in the front door, pointed the way downstairs, and then led me through catacombs to an unlit sector. I expected an empty cloister, so was startled by what I saw. The room was crammed wall to wall with bodies. A single lantern shone. Occasionally someone let out a shout, but mostly we jostled one another in a zombie-like group sway.
Suddenly—with a scream—Axis leaped onto the bar. His chest was bare, painted in blocks of color, American Indian style. He stared down at the revenants. Then he danced in place as others threw objects at him—mostly their cups of beer. He retaliated with the hose from the keg, its spray splattering the crowd, a few beads of moisture reaching Schuy and me at the fringes.
Gradually the scene became more frenzied, as Axis goaded the others with taunts. People tried to yank him off his perch, but with the help of his allies he beat them back. Clashes broke out, and Schuy whispered, “Stay close … just watch. Do you see, it’s The Plumed Serpent!”
He meant Axis’ favorite Lawrence novel, in which males transcend their mediocre social condition and enact soul-magic. But this was an Ivy League fraternity not a kiva. The ritual at the bar was more like a primitive attempt at courage, a way of striking back against the allure of women. Here in the basement, after curfew, their dates dispatched, they could be godmen and literary critics at the same time:
Now she understood the strange unison she could always feel between Ramon and his men, and Cipriano and his men. It was the soft, quaking, deep communion of blood-oneness. Sometimes it made her feel sick. Sometimes it made her revolt. But it was the power she could not get beyond.
As some of the brethren raised hand-made torches, the room shimmered. The keg nearly empty, Axis demolished it with a hammer. He poured kerosene on its pieces, and Larry applied a torch. Spinning before the fire, brandishing a lance and dislodging challengers who came at him with sticks and ropes, Axis all but transmogrified into a visage from Aztec myth. As the Psi U basement resounded with baritone chanting, I saw a parody of late baroque Lawrence: males in round dance, fascist and patriarchal.
Schuy and I slipped out of the communion while Axis was still king—though we had to shove past grabbing arms and punches of a few “enemies” to clear our way. Nowadays I smile when I read in the Amherst Alumni Magazine of the “king’s” appointment to boards of psychiatric hospitals. I wonder what his colleagues would make of his reign in the Psi U basement.
Later that spring Paul and a fair complement of Phi Psi made plans to join Freedom Summer, a campaign to register African Americans in the Mississippi delta. As students from various New England colleges showed up in our living room, Tripp was a scornful spectator. “It’s a waste of time. What are these jerk-off college kids going to do against the resident rednecks? Protests don’t bring change; they just generate conflict. Only acts of radical art bring big enough shit into the world.” He struck his guitar strings a few times.
While some of our guests bristled in umbrage, Paul commented sardonically, “Count on you, Jeff, to stand in the way of social justice.”
“I certainly hope so. ‘Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will flip around like a snake, and strike the other way.’ I’m quoting someone with a much deeper grasp of such matters than Martin Luther King.”
“Who’s that?” Paul bit.
“Jean Anouilh.”
Jeff, it turned out, had a personal stake in our loyalties. He had invited an avant-garde film-maker he long admired to show his work the weekend of the Mississippi-bound gathering. He wanted Phi Psi—and especially me—at his event. I was ambivalent and told him so.
“Well, get your priorities straight, guy. This is a crossroads, and what you choose, you just may become.”
The filmmaker’s name was Stan Brakhage; he was an official guest of the college, but he had arrived a few days ahead of time at Jeff’s invitation and was staying in Phi Psi. After spotting him, Jenkins warned Paul and me to expect “a cross between a water buffalo and a Spanish revolutionary.” It wasn’t a bad thumbnail. Aloof and humorless, Tripp’s burly gunslinger prowled the second floor, snubbing the rest of us while passing between the bathroom and the stairs.
My ambivalence came to a head on Friday night when Brakhage’s showing coincided with a parley for Freedom Summer participants. Right up to the last I intended to go to the meeting, and I was angry at Jeff for pressuring me otherwise. Had he no appreciation for the Dylan of “You better start swimming / or you’ll sink like a stone”—this self-anointed maven with his Porsche, guitar, and private acting troupe? But then I found myself walking from the dining room to the theater with Schuy, no clear reason except that this was where my heart had been all along.
On stage in front of a screen, waiting for the room to settle, Brakhage paced, hands behind his back. Schuy admired his snarl: “No one’s gonna push him around. He’s a tough hombre all right!”
After a flamboyant introduction from Tripp, the artist launched into a discursion of his aesthetic theory: “My work has largely been preoccupied with birth, sex, death, and the search for God. That’s it, make what you want. Narrative cinema like Hollywood is a great pleasure, I grew up with it. It was my hobby and my church. People in the darkness share the same tears, the same joys. But what my film is about is totally different: the closeness of the eyeball to the brain, the literal rhythm of seeing, of existence, of survival. It’s not a story or some throwaway event. It’s how we live and see before we die. Each space between the sprocket holes of film is an individual picture which will, when projected, flash prisming colors in some other darkness at a fraction of a second. My inspiration for that is later Webern or Johan Sebastian Bach, but visually, 24 or 16 frames per second since the medium is light. I am a fool of light.”
Then he read from his journals, punning and undercutting his own meanings, to stay free (as he put it) of the patterns of literal speech. At one point he appropriated the “ie” from “Vietnam” to a make statement about the parenthetical drift of consciousness toward mindless warfare. It was that brash and untethered.
Twittering and hissing, much of the Amherst audience left before the lights were dimmed, their catcalls echoing down the hall. But I was elated. I had been preparing for this talk unknowingly for months. Brakhage was the opposite of cowboy cool, and he certainly wasn’t some water-buffalo cartoon—that was Jenkins’ misread: cultural stereotyping plus a predilection to mock anyone who didn’t fit. This was a guy who survived by defying conventions, by inventing his own forms and confronting the universe head on.
In concluding his riff, Brakhage described a marriage outside societal norms, a partner and artistic collaborator named Jane, the birth of their children in a cabin in the woods. Like Lawrence (whom he quoted several times) he was showing us how to live on the roller-coaster, of mind and heart.
In the first film a man in slow motion struggled up a snow-covered mountainside, his dog running beside him … light distorted, mirrored, scratched, twinkling, eroding, reconstituting, floating disjunctively in layers that seemed to dissolve through one another into new images at different scales and perspectives. Sudden flares of the sun’s corona shot through a black silhouette of a tree … then both were gone and we saw the actual surface of the film cracking, a baby being born … snow falling … wild flowers … unfinished spirals … night traffic … fragments of faces … actual constellations … waves of colored fish … a brief moon with clouds crossing … he and his wife naked as lovers … nothing … a door opening to a house … a woman’s breasts … candlelight.
This irregular chorus rose and fell in visual harmony. Dog Star Man was beyond science fiction or surrealism; it was a pulsating, irreducible life montage.
The second film was only four minutes long and made from moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass pressed between strips of splicing tape. “As a moth might see from birth to death if black were white,” Brakhage explained.
It was one thing to record moths in their nocturnal flutters; it was quite another to make the translucence of their wings the basis of the glow on the screen. Here matter transcended metaphor, transcended even cinematic montage and, in casting an opalescent death frolic, educed something fundamental about nature and art.
The next film was pure night interrupted only by widely separated strokes of lightning. Suddenly a syncopated double-star appeared, as if to remind us that our life takes place in a burst of radiance on a strange world under inexplicable circumstances—then a single unearthly cry: the slowed-down recording of a child being born (this was the only sound in any of the films). Fire of Waters, its maker called it—fire of the light of which we are made, waters of the birth canal in which we are washed ashore.
Schuy was thoroughly won over. As Brakhage stayed in the front answering questions, my friend remained long after I got sleepy and returned to Phi Psi. The next day at lunch he summarized his take:
“We’re completely enslaved by these advertising images, all the crap we’re supposed to be—so that we can look like soapsuds men, so that girls will like us, so that we can get jobs. He’s outside of that, so he’s able to make his own things—and without the derivative academic language of Marx and his buddies.”
In truth, there was no resemblance between the life Brakhage presented and that of my teachers and parents. They came from two different civilizations, two different solar systems. And his, oddly, was the more familiar to me.
Frustrated at having missed such an event, Lindy hatched a plan on the phone. Upon hearing that Brakhage lived in the mountains outside Denver, she proposed maybe I could come visit her at Christmas and we’d go find where he lived. An inventive and daring strategy, it seemed to assure a future for us too!
Later that week she and Schuy joined my Abnormal Psych class at the movie David and Lisa. Lisa was a mute, schizophrenic girl-child, darkly beautiful; David was an uptight compulsive teenager, obsessed with clocks and death, phobic about being touched. They were residents of the same mental hospital and, gradually through the story, drew each other out. At first she talked only in rhyme, saying things like, “Hello, kiddo” and “Today I’m low, low; so, David, go, go, go.” In the culminative scene, as she unexpectedly breaks her rhymes, he approaches her, hand extended, desperate for connection, asking her to take it … and she lays her fingers gently across his and clasps them.
Schuy was enraged at this outcome. “What’s wrong with alienation?” he demanded. “He didn’t want to be touched. He understood clocks were the enemy. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why did some pretty girl come along and invade him?”
But I was all for David’s submission to Lisa, letting her contact and melt his shell. Soon after the showing, a classmate who liked to play literary critic, a guy who later wrote for Esquire and Playboy, ridiculed the movie at dinner by reciting Lisa’s rhymes in a dopey voice. My words never impeded his ego trips, so this time I picked up my plate of spaghetti and sauce and dumped it on his head.
On a Saturday morning in mid-May I was sitting in a patch of sun in the Phi Psi stairwell, hand-scooping breakfast from a carton of Corn Kix into which I had poured half a carton of currants. I was reading the New York Times, feeling mellow and content. There were Mets box scores and articles, plus seasonal averages. Lindy and I were going out that night.
I felt a sudden jolt from nowhere, a shift of texture. The ocher hue on the rug seemed to flicker, become unstable. I took a quick breath and put my attention back into the stats, but they were chaff compared to what was happening.
There was a brief hiatus before the paling came again—a wobble followed by a series of tremors, their sheer output incredible.
I bolted from the stairwell and sank to the floor of my room, squatting with my legs drawn up to my chest. I felt another upheaval materializing, the biggest one yet, dilating from my center.
I told myself that nothing was really happening. It was some sort of passing sensation like heartburn or a headache. Take an aspirin; maybe it would go away.
I knew better. I could tell how fixed and solid it was. Everywhere I turned, it was coming at me like the tentacle of an invisible octopus, looming up from the background, neither simple nor manipulable.
As if to grab its thread, I reached behind my neck and contacted a string of odd bumps. Had I developed tumors? I grabbed frantically along the top of my backbone. It was hard as stone!
I raced to the bathroom mirror, running my fingers up and down my spine. I had always had a backbone, but what was that floating lump above it?
The childhood panic was back. I had thought I had vanquished it, outgrown it like bedwetting. But it had been there all along, an eclipse of an unknown form at the lake, an immeasurable depth of sky and clouds.
There were times as a teenager at Grossinger’s when I woke homesick, which made no sense given I was “home,” or at least where I wanted to be. But the light was too wan, the color of sun on the walls. It made me feel that the joys of the Hotel weren’t that at all.
Usually this melded into something more remote and wistful, too vague even for Dr. Friend’s radar. I tried to explain it to Aunt Bunny because she had perfect psychiatric pitch, but she was stumped too. She assumed it was a form of anxiety, or that maybe I did miss my other family.
Flurries of Hotel activity swept away the mood.
Other times I melded with a diabolic presence, like when setting pranks at Niagara Falls.
Yet all told, till that spring morning sophomore year of Amherst, I had not had a full-fledged panic since my tutor Mr. Hilowitz charmed me out of the last one in sixth grade with tales of the French and Indian War. Occasional flutters of terror I rationalized as aftershocks of childhood, normal mood shifts in an erratic universe. I had grown up intrepid and tough, a weed through debris. I didn’t turn into the mental patient everyone predicted or an irreparably damaged teen. I applied to the best colleges, got into one, and went. I was dating the prettiest girl in the Smith book and, even when I found out, I didn’t back off as unqualified.
Despite asocial acts, despite psychiatry’s warnings about primal trauma—its cyclical breakdowns—despite the comeuppances of freshman year, I placed no limits on myself. I could still be anything I wanted. I identified with my sanity alone.
But Dr. Friend had seen the other side of the coin. He expected me to apply to Columbia; he knew that Amherst was pure bravado. He recognized, all along, that panic had been biding, not diminishing, veiling itself in false rollbacks, tracking me through daydreams and compulsive rituals, instigating neurotic gags and numb binges to postpone the inevitable relapse.
For all my vigilance, I had failed to recognize the truth. This wasn’t a stable life I was living like Stan Brakhage or even Paul Goodman. It was phases of a fugue, all the way back through Horace Mann and Chipinaw. For years I had been a centurion, keeping at bay wolves who weren’t wolves and who wouldn’t be held off indefinitely.
My mind had become sophisticated, articulate. I had been trained and taught by adepts. I had replaced the obscure bogeymen and augurs of a five-year-old with informed hell realms, nihilistic proxies, incarceration in a God-forsaken universe—a view validated by no less than Samuel Beckett. To think that I had exalted his lines without realizing Godot was the dungeon stairs. I couldn’t embrace its literary form while fleeing its sober fact.
This was a life-or-death matter. If nature was warped and malevolent, existence tragic, there was nothing to be done, no bargain to be struck. Same deal always—spooks and aliens at the window, storm troopers at the door. Same as my brother punching ghosts in the dark, asserting valor against invincible, maniacal intruders.
The real threat was a million times worse than the Cuban missile crisis, for nuclear war would only incinerate life. Beingness would be blasted into nothingness. This, however, would go on forever, waking me up from every life and death to experience it again. The only remedy was to be totally expunged from existence—never to have been at all.
I summoned Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to my aid. They knew about the darkness of infinite spaces: the wasted sky, the false dawn, troubled sleep, fugitive reprieves—they understood the void left by an absent or unwilling god. They were not afraid, not like this; they had survived a World War and a Nazi puppet regime. They found dignity in resistance. They didn’t freak out or devolve into berserk jigs.
We were all in this together. The universe didn’t select me alone as its pawn and quarry. My plight was universal not personal. If they could sing in the darkness, I could sing in the darkness too.
Time passed. Colors restored themselves; life began to take hold again. The pangs became a weather front from which I was separating. I sensed them in the near distance, their premise absurd. The cure was live. Nothing special: Just live.
“Hurray!” I whispered to myself, thinking to charm the demons by my ingenuousness. “Hurray again!”
I rejoined the human race at lunch and spent the afternoon studying for a geology exam.
Lindy and I met for dinner in Northampton and afterwards sat on a lawn at Smith; she stroked my suspect backbone, felt nothing odd, and reassured me. The anticipation of seeing her buoyed by the logistics of hitching there had sustained the day. In her presence the world was soft and sensuous again, a mere fraction out of orbit. I thought maybe I could outrun it and live.
But panic came the next morning with the dissolution of dreams. Sleep had not dissolved the spook, it only made matters worse, much worse. My nightmares were not showdowns with hideous entities or plummets into an abyss; no terrifying things happened—I was not chased, threatened, drowned, pushed off a cliff, or dismembered by Hitzig. There were only pasteboard events, labels on bottles, from which I awoke dizzier and more frightened than from any “real” nightmare. It was a nightmare only because it felt like a nightmare—far worse for scaring me with a banal skit. It was a nightmare without amelioration because there was nothing to ameliorate, nothing to ameliorate it with. Everything was a foil of cracking glue.
I was drifting from any landmark, context of any known shore.
Getting dressed, I heard someone’s distant radio like a foghorn in another world. I saw the vernal celebration outside, guys beyond the window in T-shirts and shorts—so much lush easy-going life it was intolerable. Just two days ago I had been one of them—baseball, banter, milk shakes, spring fever. I was a bit of a rebel, a nut, but okay. Now I passed like a phantom. I ate without appetite, exchanged speech without recognition. I plodded through pretenses of classes and conversations. I couldn’t meet the challenge that every “cowboy cool” dude (whom I had so cavalierly mocked) aced with each casual step across reality.
I remembered the alcove of the Y with its fruit machines, as real as yesterday, more so in its mucid gloom. Not only were the apples poisonous, they weren’t apples, they were red decoys. I saw a natal sun through swamp vines from a Miami-bound train. They were dismal then, yet hauntingly beautiful and profound. Now those same vistas were neither romantic nor literary, they were cold and lethal.
I thought: I can wait this one out.
I couldn’t. Every second, my heart beat … and I took another breath. This thing was bigger than the known universe!
I was back with the five-year-old, experiencing a lesion of consciousness, the insufficiency of the world to repel the greater dark,
Through the next night too, I woke terrified from sterile dreams, often with a start—jangly phenomena like a film that wouldn’t stay in its projector track. I dreaded falling back to sleep.
Throughout the following day I paced the world, looking for anywhere to alight. Spates of terror came and went. I couldn’t hold up my end of the bargain or contribute to the collective mirage. I searched inside me for anything mutable, capable of faith or humor. But time itself had stopped. I had moved outside to where existence stood static and still as a grandfather clock in an abandoned house, that would never tick again. The world was a fake paradise, its occasions stale and inappropriate, everything in it a cruel hoax.
I tried to study. I sat in classes in order to be somewhere, but I had to muster every ounce of concentration just to keep myself moored.
I had truly fallen down the stairs, past Nanny’s grasp, into the darkness forever.
I bolted.
Lindy was studying for an exam but took time off and walked around Paradise Pond with me. We sat on its far edge. “You’ll be okay. You’re really a wonderful person; you’ve just forgotten. It’s as though your mother put something inside you—a curse—and you have to find it and defeat it. Ghosts are so much harder than daylight. But you’re courageous. You’ll do it.”
I returned to Amherst, heartened by her support.
Days passed, interminably. I wrote Dr. Friend for the first time in more than a year. He sent back three sentences of upbeat encouragement. I sensed his unwillingness to admit the obvious, that we were the blind being led by the blind. He was cheery by professional obligation and pride, in honor of Freud, who wasn’t cheery at all. Standing by a bust of the master (in a film shown by Heath to our class), Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones had declared, “Life is not to be enjoyed, life is to be endured.”
Two weeks ago I would have opposed such cynicism on principle. Now it was my mantra.
I hitched grimly back to Laura Scales.
“You show up here looking spooked,” Lindy snapped, “and what can I do that I haven’t done?”
I stood by her, sheepish, agreeing. She was a scholarship student needing to keep up her grade-point average; she had too much schoolwork to squander any more time on someone else’s crisis.
Her down-to-earth obligations shamed me. But I was desperate and she made an offer to study together by the pond. Beside her I was in a state of remission and grace. I finished a week’s worth of overdue assignments as the sun crossed the sky.
We headed toward her dorm, late afternoon, holding hands. She grabbed my arm and wrist together, as though to snap me out of it, coaxing me with lines from David and Lisa:
“Your face is nice; not like snow, not like ice.”
I laughed appreciatively.
“Haven’t you been this bad and gotten out of it?”
“Never this bad. Never like this.”
“Well, maybe that’s just because nothing has been at stake before.”
I knew that she was right. She was trying her best to help, but this was her life too, and she couldn’t just give it to me.
I promised to let a week go before I called again. During the days at Amherst I let tremors build and disperse. I tried to defuse them by reasoning against their hysteria, tracing the semblance of their origin in me. I packed in as much mundane life as I could. I asked my panic to teach me. And it did.
I could tell Dr. Fabian now that it wasn’t just the fear of something terrible happening; it was far more convoluted than that. “Okay, Fabian, how about this: a combination of horror, hopelessness, arid grief, and blind desperation? It’s inconsolable because no one can help; obsessive because you can’t take your mind off it; restless because, with your mind on it constantly, you flee frantically from place to place. It is paranoid because it suspects others of humoring and falsely reassuring you. It is isolate, cut off from human contact, the antipode of eros—and ineradicable.
“How was that, Fabian?” I cried out as if from Beckett’s empty stage. “You thought you knew everything, but you didn’t know the likes of it when you led me down the primrose path of Paul and Martha’s divorce. What a red herring! What a song and dance! You were waiting for Godot too.”
On a Saturday afternoon, a week into the fugue, I looked back through all the years and saw nothing, just thousands of meaningless ballgames on which I had wasted my life, staged psychiatric sessions bought by blood money, Towers and Grossinger melodrama, pages of nervous-energy writing rejected finally by Catherine Carver. It was a wasteland. It passed for a life because no one had looked at it closely. I wasn’t the hero of my own romance. I wasn’t a scion of magic and vision. I wasn’t a spokesman for my generation. I didn’t care about the greatest good for the greatest number. I was self-involved and ungrateful—Martha’s bane, Jonny’s saboteur, Dr. Fabian’s traitor, a petty prankster. I had been grade-hungry at Horace Mann; now I was sloppy and negligent—same narcissistic guy.
No wonder my friendships were thin and empty. No wonder I felt obscure and forlorn that day at the lake.
All the time telling myself, no! retreat!—I hitched back to Laura Scales.
“I can’t keep doing this, Rich! You’ve got to solve this yourself. You’re not some special case. We’re each of us alone with our own ghosts.”
We went out again. “Just a short walk this time,” she made me promise. She loped beside, withholding comment, in warm sun then shadow. I wanted to be regular like her, to stand up and live the damn life.
Yet ordinary existence seemed like play-acting, and I couldn’t fake it or carry its weight. Nothing except the fact of us interested me, its symptomatic relief. Everything else was a life sentence. I thought, “I’m destroying this, this one possible thing I have.”
“I’m weak,” she said. “Don’t you see that? I can hardly save myself, let alone you. The world is not ugly; the world is good and beautiful.”
I trudged silently as the sky proved her right, showing its last sienna-mauve hues before twilight. Why couldn’t I be there too? The beauty of ordinary things had once been good enough, the flow of mundane events. I had been kept on track, as I looked forward to each next pleasure, challenge, novelty, even impasse, it didn’t matter. Regular stuff, like every other gal and guy, every creature of field and sky too. In fact the gods had treated me well. Why couldn’t I give up this fixation, let go of the string and float with the other balloons? Whose faith was I keeping, whose meaning pretending to impose on meaninglessness?
A cat bounded across the path and stared up. Lindy smiled and extended a palm in its direction. Everything was so studied, so flat.
We reached her house. “End of the line, kiddo.”
How did anyone live?
For lack of any better option I kept going to classes, almost losing hold of Geology because I didn’t have patience to sit through a lab with rocks across the floor imitating a landscape for our autopsy. I wrote my response as a Beckett-like script, with the monadnocks and mountains and rivers announcing their roles aloud. It was a wonder I found breathing room to pull it off. But I got Professor Foose’s bemused C.
Abnormal Psych was my single solace, for I could pore over the textbook for symptoms that applied to me, and many of them did. I mostly feared being like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, a specter passing through a nihility. I wanted to be a solid, diagnostic episode in nature like an oxbow lake or continental drift, an explicable fault line that Dr. Friend could cite from his years of work with me—any voucher to stop my open-ended free-fall. Even the deepest fire-spewing volcano had a cause, a thermodynamic vector and libidinal charge behind it; it could be charted and tracked. Cameron and Rychlak made that clear:
Anxiety attacks are acute episodes of emotional decompensation usually appearing in a setting of chronic anxiety, and exhibiting to an exaggerated degree the characteristics of normal fright. The fright usually comes from within, from a sudden upsurge of unconscious material that threatens to disrupt ego integration. The anxiety attack often climaxes a long period of mounting tension to which the anxious person has been progressively adapting, but with ever-increasing difficulty. Finally the limits of tolerance are reached, he can compensate no further, and the continued stress precipitates a sudden discharge into all available channels.
“… into all available channels!” No kidding, guys!
Whether or not the patient is able to verbalize what he is doing and what attracts him, the basic situation is the same. He is impelled to repeat his futile, frustrating behavior—in overt action or in fantasy or daydream—because of the relentless pressure of unconscious infantile urges, fears, temptations and conflicts.
The more the underlying anxiety increases, the greater the somatic discharge, and vice versa, until terror becomes inevitable. The attack merely relieves a contemporary build-up of cathexis and tension; then innate, self-perpetuating anxiety reasserts itself and begins recruiting toward the next attack. At least as good as a rupture in the crust of a planetary object!
But what were those infantile urges, temptations, and conflicts? How could I get a grip on them, defuse their charge, turn their torque, their flow of lava the other way? How could I apply seismic leverage to something so impalpable and fugitive?
The answer was the question: the outbreak of terror is how the unconscious gets the attention of the ego. Something even more unbearable is being converted to “mere” panic and given passage in its camouflage—something obviously bottomless and brutal because panics are horrific in themselves.
Was it that, without terror, there would be nothing at all, I would drift in empty space forever, no jetties or signs? William Faulkner conceded as much in The Wild Palms: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
Perhaps that’s why Jon fought ghosts in the night. Better them than nothing.
The next time a wave of panic came I went straight to Heath’s house. I was about to see him anyway—he was scooting down his front stairs en route to our class. I tried to explain my state, but I had no words for it. In frustration I clenched my fists, ran fingers through my hair down over my face, grabbed my arms. I dug my nails into them as deep as I could. He stopped and gave me a mystified look, a gaze both of wonder and admiration. Then he began walking again. “What affect!” he finally declared without breaking stride. His observation cast a mirror, and I saw myself absurdly, a figure in a textbook.
“There’s a battle inside you,” he continued, “an enemy you can’t face. It has no identity, no symbolic form, no reconcilability or contingency. Everything in this so-called world must look to you like some sort pale imitation of the world inside you. Obviously no one understands; they just cite textbooks like me. Only you know. And that leaves you so alone. It is an existential state more than a pathology. You are teaching me something about death instinct. You are fleeing death by pursuing from it. And you are pretending to know what you are frightened of because that at least suggests there is a world, there is a solution.”
“I deserve an A in this course for living it.”
Both of us laughed, as I accompanied him to class.
That night I dreamed of an immense wind. It blew across darkness, carrying images, image fragments, scraps of paper down avenues of the City. Fierce, unformed animals—wolves and cats and curs—tore off the dream shroud, led me through its scar into a hollow, a gentler void. UFOs patrolled an outer sky of too many planets and moons.
This counted. This was an actual place.
They never spotted me as I ran through high grass and hid in vines. The wind was frantic, bracing, euphoric. Everything that needed to be changed it ripped apart, swallowed into its momentum without distraction or regard. It was as elating a spectacle as I had ever witnessed, and it was core. It cleared the stage and re-set me.
In the morning I felt both better and worse. I was woozy and hung over but, paradoxically, not as afraid. I went to geology without fully appreciating the shift. I finished the day’s lab by working through half my lunch hour. Then I realized: I had a spark, I was normal again!
I ran back to Phi Psi in glee. It was over! I knew that implicitly, even as I knew when it began with currants in cereal. There was no explanation; it was just gone. In its place was something like the dream wind, carrying the most beautiful images across a spring morning—shards of a yet-unwritten ode. The world was magnificent, the clover and dandelions so exquisite they broke my heart. The sky was scrumptious, a sheer miracle.
The shadow of doom had been replaced by an ebullience so fathomless and vast, with so much rhythm and design, it was absurd. Was this ever a stunning day—such azure infinity, so many blossoms of primary colors, such delightfully goofy insects and birds, each of them stately and wondrous to exist at all! I didn’t have enough outright kudos for them, but I found a patch in the Glen and took those lines that came:
Day of blind flies, lethargic clouds, tardy stars.
Once again you have come to haunt me dead….
Four sheets of paper later I came to a crescendo:
And for the first time you asked the only question
That you could never stop asking
Until weary with wrinkles and questions
You stood by another fence,
Eons apart,
And knew that the sun of the tarot,
That Apollo,
That the golden blood of susans
Were born before men
And planted in men’s eyes
To pull men back
To the honeyrod fields of time.
The phrases and beat translated themselves from nature as lucidly as if they were stanzas of Virgil. Nothing eluded me, nothing fooled me; subjunctives and strings of participles were right at hand, in the breezes, fragrances, and luminosities of spring. All I needed was to decode the mumblings of a slightly unfamiliar dialect into words. Correlatives arose wherever I looked: a back-up first baseman from the old Yankees (Don Bollweg transformed into granite-gneiss pinstripes), daisies across fields of childhood, the haunted land beside a cobblestone road, “a tiny dead bug / drifting across a marsh moon / into the black / forever,” “the fleeting blackbirds from maple pies (four and twenty in four and twenty speckled swarms),” “the Spaldeen rabbit bouncing home.” The stream through the Glen uttered the oldest proverb of my life:
Depart this dawn-haunted house.
Depart this laughing kitchen. It is
A tide of the rising sun,
For the dancing yellow heart.
Run out beneath the long sky
Before it mellows
To the purple wine of twilight,
Comes supper comes terror!
Comes terror if you have not sweated, loved, or sung a song
On a day of the haunted dawn.
By mid-afternoon I had entered the realm of the planet Jupiter:
… a sea of Jovian pomander
of squashed gases,
of methane-smoking caterpillars,
of purple electric breezes
That come with the ozone rain
And the neon rainbows.
With spring I am launched
From the quiet frozen moon
Of Io
To the dense bosom
Of swirling clays….
The prehistoric wish,
The Cro Magnon sperm,
The weeping willow of Om,
All lost All not lost:
The ancient baby of Tigres
The young ageless of Atlantis….
After twenty pages I dropped my pen into the grass and calmly took in the summer that had arrived in my absence. I was starving. I felt as if I hadn’t eaten for days. I ran to the snack bar and ordered two cheeseburgers, a plate of fries, and a maple-walnut frappe. I sat there consuming them in bliss, each sip like the first time I ever experienced a tree’s creamy caramel sap.
Years later I arrived at a cover story for my panic: I had been coasting impetuously, thinking to get by on the status quo, to ride my new identity into happiness. But I had to earn my freedom from my mother’s whammy. The Greeks knew this: once Medusa hexes you it is no mean feat to break her stare. She doesn’t yield to mere persuasion—she won’t grant passage without exacting a toll equal to the gift
At some point in childhood I had walled off a paranoid terror that was unsustainable, probably unsurvivable, cocooning it inside my life, below its discharge threshold and spike potential. Cocooning isn’t a usual strategy. People with traumas tend to eke them out, averaging their waves into duller, more dissociated states. But I wanted to be sane, and not just sane, I wanted to feel what was happening. Not only did it interest me, seemingly from the get-go, but it led to those magical, elusive layers of epiphany and gloom—the heart of meaning. And each state was too real and salient just to discard or antidote.
As long as the venom was bundled and insulated, I could coexist with it. It didn’t supplant my normal existence or get deflected by the usual Freudian aberrations, inhibition or denial, into dysfunctional maladies.
After sixth grade, I panicked only fleetingly, and they were brief supernatural visitations, modes I could diffuse or turn into binges and pranks. Otherwise I became a moody, erratic boy, comforted by my own soap opera.
Lindy ended all that in a flash. She drove me out of the solipsistic trance I wrapped around my teenage years. She intuited the truth too, that nothing real had been at stake before. She wasn’t “pretty.” She wasn’t a “girl.” She was far more stringent and irreconcilable than that.
The price of being found by her, of getting the so-called “true romance” I had wanted more than anything, was having to wake up. There was no free ride there either. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t stay in my bubble—I would have willingly accepted that deal—it was that the act of being touched by another person was radical and ineluctable. Lisa’s charm notwithstanding, David had it right.
Without warning, I changed personae overnight. I lost the capacity to bury myself soporifically in box scores, Corn Kix, and other artless totems. I couldn’t be a child anymore and I couldn’t tell myself I couldn’t be a child, for I wasn’t ready to be anything else. I had resisted becoming a man, not for the usual reasons, I believe, but because I didn’t want to rouse the dungeon-keepers or give them reason to suspect hubris on my part. I didn’t want them even to know I existed. That was the carapace of the cocoon.
Now I needed a shot of whatever was in that chrysalis, however ghastly, to claim my spirit, to grow a male backbone, to meet my plucky, no-nonsense girlfriend with some degree of style and grit.
The spring-of-’64 panic came when I was nineteen and a half. I made a hairline crack in the cocoon, and through it the entirety of my life got recapitulated in delayed terror. I could not be conscious of what was happening because there was no conscious form of it. It was beyond mediation: too complicated for ordinary intention, too elliptical for analysis, hieroglyphic and paradoxical beyond ideation. It couldn’t blandish by words or insights; it had to assert itself by pure exigency. To be conscious was to be token and strategic, was not to do it at all.
There was no substitute or stand-in for the mystery of life itself.
And it said: feel this, you have always been willing to feel. It said: break asunder, you will know how to come back together. It said, meet your shadow before its separation from you becomes schizophrenic. It said, forfeit joy and solace; their concession will inoculate you against later loss.
You will awaken fresh, able to see the world in utter, meticulous depth, find words you never knew, taste maple for the first time, parry obliquities and chimeras (for they are as devious and bottomeless as they seem), court your lady for real.
I had been scared to death, almost obliterated at birth, but I crawled out of that venom on a leaf floated to me by a child.
A long latency followed, for I wasn’t ready to fly. Now my wings were drying off.
I panicked because, at core, I suddenly didn’t know who or where I was. My conscious self thought I was eating Kix and currants, dating at last, happy as a clam, or at least happy enough. My unconscious self realized how deep the waters had gotten, felt the bends, and sent its warning signal across the interstellar-like barrier that separates unconscious and conscious space.
I thought I was in civic territory, another mundane neutral zone, but I wasn’t. I had entered the chapel unawares, for the gods needed to rouse me for sacred battle.
After the incident, I came to think of panic not as an enemy but a teacher and truthsayer. What I didn’t realize then was that it was also a transubstantiating shadow, a preparation by proxy for real crises that were to come. Having sparred with the ghost within, I was ready to confront forces in the world that opposed me with far more insidious gauntlets—for they could never be as dire and seminal as what I had already undergone. My family and its subculture stood against the kind of man I needed to be; they had always stood against it, and that fucked up my childhood and made my brother my foe. I had to win that ribbon on my own, have the moxie to see it through. That was what panic was teaching me. By taking the dark bath, by being immersed in the baptismal waters of Flash Gordon’s horrific shower, I was awakened, prepared, tempered.
Jon had been wrong about those ghosts: you weren’t supposed to defeat them by literal or lavish exertion, and you couldn’t defeat them, it was a false battle. The courage required was more like Christ’s: submission, obliteration, then rebirth. Faith means faith in the unbearable too.
I said “a cover story,” meaning as penetrating analysis as I can do. It is more like shreds of overlapping cover stories. No one knows the big picture. Crises with deep roots come closest to spilling the beans, to disclosing who we really are—they are looking-glasses through which our personal reality forms.
Before the end of the semester Lindy went to Penn to see her old boyfriend Steve again for a weekend. I was dismayed but still exhilarated for having gotten out of the whirlpool. I figured rather than wait this one out, I’d put myself in motion too. The previous summer I had made friends with one of the hotel drivers, a kid about five years older than me named Jimmy McAndrews. He said that any time I’d like to bypass my father and phone in a trip from Amherst he’d be thrilled to come and get me, see that part of the world. So I called Jimmy at Traffic, and on Friday afternoon, like magic he was sitting in the Phi Psi parking lot in my father’s black Cadillac.
“I don’t think anyone really knows where the PG went,” he told me. “But no one will miss it for a while. Everyone will think someone else has it.”
It was great to have the Hotel come to me.
On the way home Jimmy heard my tale of woe about my new girlfriend who, sadly, was checking out her past guy in Philly—even that scenario so deliciously secular compared to the pagan oppression of panic. As he let me drive my first two hundred miles on the open road, we mustered a plan. Coming back on Sunday we’d intercept the last bus from Philadelphia in Hartford. Maybe she’d be on it; then we’d drive her back to Smith.
Sunday evening we filled the PG with sandwiches, fruit, cookies, and Heinekens and timed our departure so that three hours later we beat the bus by fifteen minutes. Astonished to spot me out the window, Lindy immediately got up and debarked. She collected her suitcase and jumped in.
By the time we reached Smith we were all three jiving and drinking beers.
The following week I received an acceptance letter from Seattle, but that seemed a pipe dream. Once again I went to the Phi Psi room committee, hat in hand. They assigned me the large double on the first floor for fall, to be shared with a wide-eyed sophomore-to-be from Boston named Marty.
The last visit with Lindy was agonizing. We were already planting a necessary distance between us and, as we strolled by the Smith boathouse holding hands, we argued about where our relationship was going. The time apart would be good, she said. Now that I was strong again I should build on my strength. “We can date new people and write each other as confidantes, wonderful intimate letters about our adventures.” Her jovial mood made me sulky. I accused her of tearing down what we had.
She had brought me me a goodbye card with a quote she had hand-copied from painter Joan Miró: “Everywhere one finds the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists in staying at home and close to Nature. Nature who takes no account of our calamities.” As I read it, she added, “Remember that, dear, the next time you get stuck and I’m not around.”
She said we would always be good friends but could never be more than that. I didn’t want such a limit, didn’t see any reason for a limit now that we were parting anyway.
Fred had loaned me his mythical Rambler for the trip to Bradley, Hartford-Springfield’s airport, so I drove the forty-five minutes there. I kissed her quickly. Our goodbye passed without lingering—a girl with a suitcase merging into the crowd.
Upon my arrival at Grossinger’s my father told me with a hint of sadistic fanfare, “You’ve been promoted to desk clerk.” I flashed him a cod-liver-oil look. Playing hotel was not in my plans, plus a visible front-office role afforded no loopholes for escape. After thinking about it for a day I told him I’d rather find my own job.
He was momentarily speechless. “Okay,” he responded with a series of perturbed nods. “I’ll give you a week. If you don’t get something by then you’re washing dishes all summer.”
That seemed a fair challenge. My main impasse, transportation, was quickly solved when Grandma Jennie offered to lend me her Lincoln Continental, the JG, for the summer. It was far too ostentatious a vehicle for a nineteen-year-old with radical visions and only three hundred miles under his belt, but there were no ready alternatives. I knew that my father gave her periodic grief about it; apparently she held her ground because, other than continually making me re-park it in a spot that existed only in his mind, he never interceded.
Lindy was going to intern at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and I figured a newspaper was the most promising opportunity for me too. Setting off in my oversized white sedan, I turned east out of Ferndale onto Route 52 and drove fifteen miles to Ellenville, site of the Nevele. For the next three days I tried newspaper offices from there through Monticello, Liberty, and smaller villages, filling out employment forms that were probably in files discarded when computers took over thirty-five years later.
Then I worked my way west on 52—the less populous direction out of Liberty along the Delaware River, across train tracks into Hortonville, past ramshackle farms and covered bridges. This was even less promising: no newspapers at all. On my last allotted day I came to the Pennsylvania border town of Callicoon, thirty miles from home. On its main street I saw a classic Norman Rockwell storefront: The Sullivan County Democrat. It seemed too mirage-like to be real, a façade I might have conjured as the state line imposed a fateful barrier. Compared to my cognitive map of Grossinger’s home county, Pennsylvania was as uncharted and remote as Wyoming, and my prospects were sliding fast, dishwashing on the horizon. I poked my head in far enough to glimpse an alcove dominated by hanging galleys and stacks of metal type.
Its proprietor was a mountain of a man named Fred Stabbert. He extended a hand to the young stranger and, with a cordial bark, grilled him in the doorway, his bulk precluding further entry.
He was succinct: he’d hire me once he determined I wasn’t running away from home. “The last place I need trouble from is Grossinger’s.” The Democrat was the one anti-hotel paper in a conservative Republican county, and it struck Fred as odd that the son of the owner of its largest resort should show up at his door looking for work.
I was ecstatic. The twenty-two miles from Callicoon to the G. flew by like ten. Fred no doubt took pleasure in his phone call to Paul Grossinger that afternoon. I imagined their cagey exchange. My father said nothing initially, but at dinner that night he seemed genuinely pleased—though he added quixotically, “So you don’t want to go into the hotel business?”
“You know I want to be a writer.”
He agreed he knew that.
I sent Lindy an account of these events and began work on Monday.
For the first week at the Democrat, I sat at a desk proofreading county news and writing captions for photographs of car wrecks, retiring supervisors, and high-school swimming stars. Fred kept teasing that he was working me up to bigger things.
I enjoyed the time there regardless, especially bag lunches with him, his sister, and the rest of the crew by Callicoon Creek, luxuriating in sun and breeze off the water, exchanging regular chitchat and repartees. I tried to bring everyone a dessert from the previous night’s meal at the Hotel. My boxes of cakes and cookies were much anticipated, the politics behind them discounted, their yummies promptly eulogized and devoured.
Finally Fred dispatched me across the Delaware into Pennsylvania to cover a town meeting about snow removal. I mailed my front-page article to Lindy.
Her job in Denver was comparable, except that she was an intern at a big-city daily. She proofread too and rewrote other people’s articles. Otherwise, she was sent to cover veterans’ meetings and hundredth birthdays. Her first letter detailed all that and then stated explicitly everything I most feared:
You will unfortunately get to know me much better in letters. Unfortunately in that what I write in these always has and will be too truthful; whatever last trace of a gossamer mask there was is now off because we have started letters. They are the great disarmer; I’m stripped now because they are the first and last source of communication. Your letters I prize too much, perhaps even more than many of our conversations which were distorted by fear on both our parts. What will happen is that I will end up talking about you a lot more than you will about me in these letters, which fact is a fact and deserves to be wondered at. I think you’re interesting but I also think I’m interesting—but in the last ding dong ding dong of the world it will be you we’ll go down discussing because I am uncomfortable under the glare of the operating table light….
I am not so secure that I don’t love love when I see a little of it flowing in my direction. I think I am horribly idealized in both your and Aunt Bunny’s eyes now, and probably to see me again in flesh and blood would wreck the beautiful image that has somehow been created. Connect now with the moments when you hated everything I said during the last times, as I do, but then always give the exquisite rationale that I do, that those angers were because I was leaving. All this makes me tiptoe and not count on a thing—people or you seem to be so changeable that I’ll be wary and fly back up my tree before eating out of your hand.
I’m very ordinary. I go to work every day and am a cub reporter on a Scripps-Howard tabloid. I write crap well and they like it and me…. I see Steve as often as I can which is infrequently. I was in Aspen with him when you called, and there is no sense in playing games, leading you on, or worst of all, having you build images of me (too positive or too negative). I don’t want to be another Betsy; idealization is not flattering to me. Steve is the end of a long quest and search. I have perhaps found him prematurely because now no one else will ever really do in his role. You and he play different parts. I play a part to you which is not sufficient for you; you will need someone else to play the part that Steve plays in my life. The role is indefinable—it’s not exactly that of a lover but perhaps that of a stronger person. I’m too weak for you in the end, and you are too weak for me. This is maybe too much honesty, but I would rather knit alone than have any sham falsity. What you are is perhaps the closest friend I have and have ever had. I can’t depend on you but I can write you with this candidness and not be afraid of losing your friendship….
I dread next fall in a way (and this will hurt you, but don’t let it) because we will either split or change. I dread having to face you because I will have to be freer than you let me be. If I can’t be as free as I want I’ll just fly from you, try to get away and out of your pocket. I’m only good when I’m free to study, grow, explore, and develop on my own and the only people who have ever held me have been those who let me fly. I’m nobody’s parent, wife, lover; only friend.
Fred directed me to Ellenville to talk to a Japanese man who was saturating the Hudson and Delaware Valleys with cherry trees. I took down his tale: immigration to America, homesteading in rural New York, a vow to spread this gift from his homeland to his adopted country. I posed him in front of his orchard. My boss loved the story and decided I was more valuable hunting up human-interest features than proofreading. I was given free rein to come and go.
I drove to small socialist hotels and bungalow colonies—diametric opposites of Grossinger’s—where I interviewed guests and staff. I met Kurt Shillberry, the most vocal opponent of the resorts’ tax breaks. He thought that establishments like Grossinger’s should pay for their share of County services at a rate in keeping with their revenue. Shifting restlessly on the couch, my father perused the published interview, then guffawed, “You’re a dreamer!” But at least he smiled.
Fred heard about a community of black Jews called the Gheez living in the woods by Callicoon. He thought it might be too dangerous to investigate, but then he shouldn’t have mentioned it. I edged the Lincoln to the end of the last dirt road and walked a quarter mile to their encampment. They were delighted by a press visit and took me on tour of their huts and temple, all the time spieling gospel and Biblical history. They had a gigantic queen whom they carried on a litter, but I saw only pictures of her and the throne. Fred published most of my account, removing my exotica about Egypt.
Next I picked another remotely situated institution, a boarding school called Summer Lane modelled after the radical Summer Hill schools of England. The director, a towering young minister, met me at the gate, then escorted me past clusters of suspiciously staring boys. Reverend George von Hillshimer was a Civil Rights activist who had been on the recent Freedom marches in the South. From his collar up he was a priest, but otherwise he was a charismatic gang leader, officiating over teens in leather jackets and bracelets, clusters of them dragging on cigarettes around low sheds. In the hour that followed, George proved capable of spontaneous oratory as well as bursts of startling ferocity, especially when something more untoward than tobacco caught his eye. He seemed more dangerous than the kids.
For the remainder of July and August I left the newspaper office once a week at noon and drove back roads to Summer Lane to share sandwiches with Reverend George in his grove. We talked Lawrence and James Baldwin, and he read to me from his own political and philosophical writings. “It is crucial,” he admonished, “not to live a typical American adolescence, which is self-indulgent and conscienceless. Go through life as a hero. James Baldwin dreamed of ‘another country’ without prejudice and human-inflicted pain. Well, he knew—and we all know—it doesn’t exist. Your generation has to make it from scratch.”
My clippings delighted Lindy. “I am of course jealous you get to range through far-out and meaningful territory. And they support you? I’m astonished.”
Well, not always. I sent her my typewritten editorial about the presidential candidates in which I compared Lyndon Johnson to a man driven by a malign unconscious force, as the tides by the moon—the moon being Barry Goldwater, whose war-mongering had purportedly stampeded LBJ into sending troops to Vietnam. I closed: “It is nightfall in America!” Fred had refused to publish it.
“You’re too damn radical for me, boy,” he said. “This stuff is downright depressing.”
To the amusement of the staff, Fred and I engaged in ongoing ideological debates. Head of the county Civil Defense agency, he insisted that atomic bombs were no big deal. “It’s just one more weapon,” he informed me. “It’s been the same since the caveman. You invent a weapon; then someone finds the defense for it—so you build a bigger weapon. You can’t halt that parade. Atomic bomb’s just a big bomb, but it’s not more than a bomb.”
I was glad it was only the Civil Defense (and the Democrat) that Fred oversaw; still his rhetoric frightened me. I feared instant holocaust if Goldwater were elected, and the fact that a union guy like Fred could support his position on armaments was disconcerting. Leo Marx had tried to convince us that the liberal tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Adlai Stevenson was America, its ascendance inevitable, but outside of Amherst and New York City I never seemed to encounter it.
Driving country roads back and forth to Callicoon and newspaper assignments I visited sleepy antique shops and, on my salary, bought old jugs and lamps, which I used, along with props left over from Hotel banquets (including a plastic potted tree), to decorate my room. I created an informal shrine in which I hung Klee and Miró prints. I lay in my arbor, reading Olson and Nabokov and enjoying the sounds of Phi Psi: Bob Dylan, Jim Kweskin, Dave Van Ronk.
“Change or lose me,” Lindy had warned. Since she had gone back to Steve I did not feel disloyal noticing a pretty waitress at a station near the family section. She was a heavy-boned girl with an Eastern European face. Casting subterfuge glances her way, I tried to discern if she was really as attractive as I thought she was. She was—her appeal gave no ground. A riveting actress with rolling hips and a pouty stare, she lugged trays more fully loaded than most of the men, delivering fancy chow from her platters with a sulky, imperial demeanor. She was charismatic, impossible not to look at.
We seemed to catch each other’s eye more than I was willing to admit, telling myself those self-conscious smiles were part of her routine act, not for my benefit. Then one night in early July after the dining room had closed and she was cleaning her station, I approached cautiously until she looked up, a twinge (perhaps) of “Finally!” in her moue.
My role at Grossinger’s had become totally ambivalent to me. Whereas once I took my identity from being the owner’s son, now I was embarrassed by ruling-family privilege and tried to downplay my affiliation. Yet it was part of the courage I drew on in approaching her—that, plus pure beguilement and the reckoning in Lindy’s letter.
Her name was Jean, nickname Smokey. Polish Catholic, from Pennsylvania, she was working for her college tuition and despised the Hotel and its guests (as was evident to anyone with half a brain).
“Yes,” she said, she’d love to go out to dinner, “off the grounds presumably.”
Through July, Smokey and I saw each other regularly, supping at local inns, going to movies, exploring backroads, listening to records in my room. After two such dates I kissed her while dancing and she kissed me back. Then we stopped dancing and lay on the bed making out.
We hiked to a meadow on the edge of the woods and wound together in the grass. Her dress was shiny over her large butt and hips, her perfume pepperminty. I was encouraged by her sighs and rough hugs, but she broke off, jumped to her feet with a hearty laugh, and brushed away the weeds.
Schuy had gone with his family to their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard to race his sailboat. He was working with his Psi U buddy Larry in a restaurant as a dishwasher:
Thanks for your two letters and I’m sorry I didn’t write before. It sounds to me like the best thing about this Jean is that this all gives you a chance to get Lindy in some kind of perspective—get some of your power back, speaking ‘Davidwise’—which turns out to be the same problem I have here. The first day on the job I saw this interesting and thin attractive girl—after a day made an Axis-like remark to her about how the people around seemed all to be so affected by the bureaucracy and so forth, took her out to coffee, etc. All was nice—she turned out to be a Smith grad who writes poetry, hated Smith, didn’t date Amherst, is earning money to go to Europe, and anyway I really like her.
Her name is Dona, and I’m kind of relieved to be going out with someone with such a derivative name, like in the song, “I Had a Girl, and Donna Was Her Name”—you know, the embarrassing mushy one. I have been dating her a lot. I can’t stand her being a waitress right there and me washing dishes. I don’t understand what my position with her is, and what I’m trying to do is make her change her mind about her being 22 and graduated and me being 21 and (I lied) a senior—and I really do think she is 22 (and I’m not really 21), but I don’t think it should make such a difference. Anyway, I’m trying to act tough—you know, the way Axis does—to try (I guess) to shake her up. But I’m pretty weak about it. I guess I’ve been seeing her quite a bit. A week ago we had this big moment at a party, and it was “I do love you, but I’m not in love with you; I want you to be a friend, even though I know how ridiculous that sounds.”
I have been sailing every day now for three or four days, since I got the boat in the water. In the first race I did well till we got lost in the fog and had to be towed in. Larry is my crew, and we are living together in this little sort of shed-garage apartment. There’s a bunk for you if you want to come visit….
Coaxing a few days off from the Democrat, I drove the Thruway north past Albany to the Mass Pike, then veered south of Boston. Beach towns to my left, I caught sudden quaffs of salt air, found the Terminal, parked, and caught a ferry.
Larry met me at the dock, and we went straight to the fabled restaurant. When I saw Dona I fell in love with her too. She was a brown-haired, sun-tanned Jersey girl with a 1920s style reminiscent of a co-ed strutting the Charleston, Schuy poked his head out of the kitchen in his dishwasher’s costume and greeted me clownishly.
After closing, the four of us went to hear Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band. It was a small club, the performers breathtakingly close—thimbles on washboards, honking jugs: “Washing-ton at Valley Forge, / Freezing cold and up spoke George…. ” Between sets I edged over to Kweskin and mentioned Phi Psi, where he had played before my time. “Hangin’ out with Mr. Tripp!” he proclaimed with several nods. “Well, give him my best. Maybe you guys can come up with some bread and get us back to Amherst.” Then he sidled away.
The next afternoon while Schuy raced, Dona and I sat on the beach trying to spot his sails. She knew I was a writer and had brought along her binder of poems. She read from it—clean lucid lines, playful and insolent—one piece of free verse suggesting to a lover that they spend their lives together scraping off the insides of Oreo cookies with their teeth. She invoked landscapes of bygone summers, toy boats, shiny pebbles.
I had only the cards with me, so I laid them in the sand and read her fortune: felicity, strife, unexpected bounty.
All the next day Schuy ignored both of us. When he wasn’t washing dishes he worked on his boat. So Dona and I used his car to drive the single road to the cliffs at the end of the island. We talked Freud, Lawrence, and Sartre, as she pointed out the sights. Rapport established, she questioned me about Schuy, why he had to act like a tough guy. I tried to cast his motives in the most favorable light. “It’s really quite silly,” she remarked.
Yet I hardly understood my buddy anymore. He was growing a mustache and had declared that his name was now Scotty. That evening at work he pretended not to notice Dona except to snap commands her way. Later he explained: “I have to break her, like a horse.”
He smashed the two 45s I brought him as a gift—Richie Valens’ “Donna” and Paul Anka’s “Diana,” saying, “That’s exactly the kind of mushiness that destroys relationships.” He was not amused by my suggestion that Anka’s words could be flipped from “You’re so young, and I’m so old” to “I’m so young …” Then he berated Larry for his performance on the boat, blaming it on his reading Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, “I need sailors, not candy-ass Hindus.”
“This is all bullshit, man!” Larry snapped. “Who do you think you are, Axis or something? You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re running off at the mouth, acting like some spoiled cretin. Try treating your girlfriend like a human being for a start.”
Then Schuy ordered him out of their shared domicile (his mother owned it, so he held that card): “Take your belongings! Go find another place to live!” When I tried to mediate, he cut me off, “Just fucking leave too. I don’t want you around here either. You’re both children. I’ve got enough problems.”
I asked Larry if he could run me to the dock. It was perilously close to the last ferry, and I had no fallback position. I caught it by a minute. Driving the Mass Pike barely awake, I woke once with a start, the car drifting toward the guardrail. I pulled into a rest stop and fell asleep on the front seat. In the morning I covered the remainder of the 300 miles.
It had only been three days, but Grossinger’s felt like somewhere I had never been. My room was someone else’s too, though I welcomed its guise; I had no better offer. The Hotel always wooed me back, perhaps for its luxuries and prerogatives but mostly for the sheer spaciousness and optimism of the place. It no longer felt the way it had in childhood, but it still touched something deep and dormant in me. I had a daffier, more rhapsodic self there, one that floated up and met cumulus parades that stretched far beyond Grossinger’s. I touched a calm and peace inside me and imagined endless possibilities. Of course it wasn’t Grossinger’s. It was creation, but I couldn’t get into it any other way. Grossinger’s was where I first felt it and where I had to be for it to happen.
With one day left before work I headed into New York City, the first time driving there myself: rock ’n’ roll on good old “Double-U A B C,” hitting the George Washington Bridge and rattling across. I shot down the Henry Hudson Parkway like the Towers Mercury of yore, crossed over at 96th Street, and parked in the basement of 300 Central Park West. Without advance notice, I stood at 8C and rang the bell. I hadn’t been back since fleeing eight months ago. After my family got over the shock (and I finished distributing pastries and lox), I was welcomed by everyone, even Martha.
“How about some old times together,” Bob said, finishing off the last of the salmon with an appreciative smile. “Feel like the reservoir?”
“Of course.”
As we took our commemorative stroll—Debby tossing crusts over the fence to ducks, now as then—my mother unexpectedly clutched my arm and slowed her stride, causing us to straggle behind the rest. She told me how difficult my brother had become. “I can’t control him anymore. You were impossible, but at least I could reach you.”
“Right. I was the loyal one.”
She nodded, missing the irony. “He’s beyond me.”
I feigned surprise, but I had always known. My duplicitous attempt at sympathy she brushed off like a fly.
In the afternoon I drove uptown to Chuck Stein’s apartment near Columbia. It was our first meeting in person since Horace Mann. He had changed dramatically in two years, having become a full magus with a bushy beard and a pipe. In the hour before sunset he led me to his favorite bench along the Hudson. There I quizzed him on Olson poems. After he deciphered a few lines, he reminded me that it didn’t matter whether one got all the references or not. “Like Brakhage films,” he said, “the meaning is not in the literal presentation. It’s in the mode of consciousness the words represent.”
On the phone I had asked Chuck to teach me how to use the tarot as a meditation tool, and he offered to do so on my next trip into the New York. Now he removed my deck from its box and went through it, pulling out the major trumps: twenty-two sovereign cards without wands, swords, pentacles, or cups. Each of their landscapes, he explained, was more than just a solitary arrangement of symbols and messages. The cards had relationships among them and could be placed in a matrix representing the formation of the universe and everything in it—though it took a shift of perception to get it.
I knew the basic designations from Ervin’s class and my books, but I lacked specifics and a formula. Neither Waite nor Case told his readers how to design a matrix of trumps. Chuck had learned the rudiments of tarot meditation from Case’s posthumous course—biweekly lessons in the mail from Builders of the Adytum in L.A.—but then he put his own spin on the curriculum, and that was the abacus he was about to lay out.
First, my friend ordered the cards by numeral; then he sorted them on the grass in three rows of seven, the Fool on top. A daydreamy youth strolled along the mountains of card zero, carrying elemental plasma in his knapsack. “He’s the source,” Chuck declared, “of all substance and form. Note how he bears its atomic fuse fecklessly.” He pointed to a white rose dangled between the thumb and forefinger of the Jester’s left hand. “He’s oblivious to the fact that he’s about to walk off a cliff, but then he’s not a person as much as a ground potential. Zero is the cosmic egg that contains all the other numbers and number systems.” He wagged his right hand over the 21-card alignment beneath the yellow-skied cipher.
The Fool’s lemon background reminded me of my first Gene Woodling card. Yellow was the Sun, Marvin Gardens in Monopoly, my favorite Sorry! token—Revelation!
“Look at the whole as a dynamic grid with something akin to binary code or the I Ching hexagrams but in parallel rows of seven operating below the forcefield of the Jester.” He waved a palm back and forth across the pictures in the grass as if to stroke their invisible steam. “They represent successive phases by which vibrations become molecules and cells and are translated into the world as meanings and designs, thought with form. Let’s start at the beginning of the first row.”
Card one was the Magician, white hydrogen garments under red robes, an infinity sign above his head. Chuck pointed to his right hand raised upward and bearing a trident. “That wand converts cosmic into worldly energy. The downward-pointing left hand conducts its current down into Nature.”
“We felt its heat,” I reminded him, “in Ervin’s class.”
He smiled. “That was a gimmick. We’re moving on.” I flashed him a playful pout as he proceeded. “On a wooden table before him—see, there are the four artifacts of the lesser arcana: wand, pentacle, sword, and cup. Those are the implements he uses to create phenomena.”
To the left of the Magician (our right), clad in pale blue watery robes, sat the High Priestess, at her feet a crescent moon. “She is reflecting and converting the Sorcerer’s magic.” he remarked, drawing an invisible line from the Magician’s trident to a scroll marked “Torah” in the Priestess’ lap, its ‘h’ hidden by her robe. “The drapery of ripe pomegranates behind her represents the latency of Creation. Without her mediation the Sorcerer’s field of operation would never get conducted into matter and mass.”
“Or into paramecia and diatoms,” I offered, for I had internalized the flow between the Magician and Priestess back at Horace Mann where it evoked Freud’s unconscious latency for me.
“Into any set of values, encodings, or syntax,” he rejoined.
In card three a deeply contemplative Empress reclined in her curved cathedra, in her right hand a scepter crowned by the world. “DNA at work,” observed Chuck. “The twelve zodiacal diadems on her tiara represent the space-time continuum.” He made a quick circular motion around her head. “It’s Eden but also biological diversity, Nature itself.”
“I think of it as the reflecting mirror of the chlorophyll molecule.”
“Sure. She converts the Priestess’ transmissions into a lush grove and garden represented by those trees behind her and the ripening corn at her feet. See how its stalks rise to meet the current of her robe. That’s a continuation of the Priestess’ garment.”
The next vista was a stony ram-adorned bench formed by mountainous uplift. There a grim Emperor held forth. “He has to wrest his domain from the first three cards,” Chuck explained. “Magicians spin phantasmagoria till time immemorial, at least on a cosmic level. Emperors issue laws and physical rubrics, apply them to nature. The fourth trump keeps every molecule in the universe in place. Newtonian territory.”
“I suppose he can’t intervene to save to save a single swallow,” I proposed, “because his equations are essential for the preservation of matter. If he interceded unlawfully, Nature itself would collapse.”
“Yep, you’ve got it.” I was pleased; I had been nurturing that conceit since assimilating Case’s summary.
At position five was an androgynous Hierophant. “He encompasses both prior pairs,” Chuck demonstrated, lifting the card and waving it back and forth. “Magician and Priestess, Empress and Emperor. The Hierophant founded the first temple and organized the universe in symbols and cycles. He’s responsible for the tarot deck itself.” He thought about this for a moment, then added triumphantly, a cat pouncing on a canary, “I get him now in a whole different way: each card’s field contains all the trumps in microcosm, so the overall matrix is operating at 22 to the 22nd power.”
“That’s perfect!” I exclaimed. “Here’s my take on the Hierophant. While the Emperor is holding three dimensions in a cube and locking the stars and planets into their courses, the Hierophant is inventing astrology and shamanism. During the Renaissance he turned them into religion and science. He conquered the Emperor with a single eclipse, but they actually enveloped and transmuted each other, sort of like your matrix of twenty-twos.”
He nodded. “Can you imagine Clinton listening to this? He’d shit a cow.” Then he brought our attention to the next trump, the Lovers. “They are Adam and Eve in most versions, but really any man and any woman. From far off, the Magician’s golden orb illuminates their passion. They are looking at each other’s souls, but first they have to transcend their false-personality egos.”
He paused for a moment to let me drop into the frame: a naked woman looking up at a winged androgynous angel, fiery corona for its hair, wings and hands conducting rays from a golden sun-star onto a planet. A naked man beams at the woman as she beholds the higher being.
“Eve gets her illumination from the macrocosm,” Chuck demonstrated, dabbing a line from her eyes to the angelic effluence. “Adam has to find the reflection of the macrocosm in her.” He circled a finger around the billowing clouds between them, for they deterred the man’s view. “He can’t get it from inside himself; it’s not there. But she is looking right at the form and transmits its essence to him. The card doesn’t necessarily mean man and woman; it’s also spirit and soul, anima and animus. It’s saying that nothing in the universe operates on its own.”
From the Lovers he switched his direction inside the matrix, electing to follow the sixth vertical column rather than complete the first row. Directly beneath the Lovers was Death, card thirteen, a skeleton in armor on a pale horse bearing a black banner with a white snowflake-like ornament—kings, princesses, and children crumbling before his prance. “Now we’re following a different tier of emanation. See how the erotic energy of the card above gets translated into a wholly different form in the card below. Death is a kind of love. It creates by transforming; it preserves essence while destroying appearance. What you are calling a snowflake is actually the white rose of immortality. Here, by the way is your Scorpio card: resurrection.”
He paused, then amended his take. “The Waite card is misleading. He had some sort of nonsense about concealing a few of the images’ esoteric meanings. In traditional versions, there is no horse. The skeleton is standing or walking on the ground, chopping with his scythe. Hands, feet, and decapitated heads lie fall around him. In Case’s version a shape like a UFO appears in the left-hand sky. I think that goes back to a mark or rune from centuries earlier, before anyone knew about flying saucers. In general, Case gives esoteric meanings, Waite provides fortune-teller’s thumbnails.”
From card thirteen he continued a vertical trajectory. “Below Death is its own collective manifestation, number twenty, Judgment. Don’t be fooled by the traditional symbolism here. This is not the Day of Judgment but the simultaneous appearance of every creature and event on Earth. They are arising from the coffins of three-dimensional space and floating on a timeless, dimensionless ocean. Waite and Case both spell this out: the forces represented by this trump tear down the limitation of form as teeth break up food.” He clenched and extended his fingers a few times over the sea of coffins, then went back to where he had left off with the Lovers.
At the end of the first horizontal row in position seven sat the Chariot, its meaning familiar. It was my favorite symbol complex, so I playfully paraphrased Case, “In his false-motion vehicle flanked by black and white sphinxes beneath a cloth sky, the Charioteer establishes the first city.”
“Do you see the fusion of all six of the prior cards here?” Chuck asked.
I did.
“Why don’t you summarize them so that I know you got it.”
“Okay, the cyclotron of the Magician, the binary ciphers of the Priestess, the floral patio of the Empress, the algebra of the Emperor, the esoteric mudras of the Hierophant, and the galaxy-igniting passion of the Lovers, all leading up to a pre-Persian, pre-Mayan metropolis at the dawn of civilization.”
“Good. Remember, the Chauffeur of the seventh trump rides along, unaware that his armor is a symbol too, that his words are not objects, that his vehicle is motionless.”
“Yes, the zodiac has become a woven arras, a bonnet hanging above a stony cab travelling so fast it is stationary: the Earth, the City.”
That caused him to look up at the darkening violet over Jersey and realize that our window of visibility was closing. “Let’s get enough done,” he urged, pointing to the second horizontal row, “so that you have a foundation to build on.” He picked up at card eight, Strength. “The Waite version is wrong here too. Supposedly showing the angel holding the lion’s jaw shut rather than opened conceals some important secret. Anyway, in the traditional version his jaw is opened because he is breathing the first row from the atomic table and formless mind into history: hunters, cultivators, tribes and villages. Of course, it’s not really the elements or even their electrons; it is the force behind all that, which is represented by the infinity sign over the angel’s head. Jaw opened or closed, the point is, such a lion cannot be mastered—he can only be charmed.”
At position nine under the High Priestess, a Hermit stood on snowy mountaintops, bearing a cookie-like star in his lantern. “He has wandered through the integers,” Chuck intoned, tempering his voice heraldically as if beginning a fairy tale. “He is an old man with a beard, yet younger in cosmic time than the Fool.”
That was the “Stein Man” I knew, the wood-chuck-chuck-chuck from Horace Mann—whimsical and magisterial, an inscrutable blend of Donald Duck and Spinoza.
“The Hermit has no cardinal power. All his potency and wisdom come from his acceptance of prior forces that precede and make him up.” Was this attribution or confession?
Night with its early stars was fast upon us, as my friend hastened through Sun and Moon and Star, assigning crabs, pelicans, and battlements, elucidating pools stirred into motion by cosmic meditation, the blue strands of our five senses poured from an angel’s earthen jug onto an alien landscape, ocular jellies sucking up the wisdom of molecular sand.
There in evening’s glow, Venus bright over the Hudson, the twenty-two buds of the Major Arcana seemed to radiate with not only the last dregs of sunset but their own phosphorescence as they formed a magnificent foliage in the grass. Barges travelled on the River (a form of card seven), the Palisades and Jersey lights (card four) beyond.
So did Chuck teach me the esoteric tarot.
We reentered the metropolis, the World as cosmos—the last and twenty-second trump. The City brooked no sphinxes or tridents; it spun so fast its inhabitants were unaware of its motion. As the zodiac opened and closed at the speed of light, the cube melted, and the anagram of the Wheel of Fortune ran through its permutations (tarot, … tora … rota …), Bull and Lion faced each other no more. A new dimension arose trillions of years in the future when there would be a different universe—a different reality for consciousness, a different deck for the descendants of humanity.
We hiked back along the avenue at the Western edge, down its lamp-lit thoroughfares. Creation shimmered inscrutably. Even streetlights and billboards had become illuminated papyri, sacred flames with meanings. Then Chuck proposed that gossamer threads of our very thoughts were manifestations of the forces of gravitational fields around stars—they were cosmic mind-stuff generated by the energy in the deck.
The dancer had become the dance.
On a midsummer eve Aunt Bunny and her compatriots packed wine and towels and hiked to the Lake. The men took their clothes off and dove into chilled water. Afterwards we lay in the sand philosophizing—Johnson versus Goldwater, the bomb, bad marriages. Sam the revolutionary wished he had died there in the hills with Castro on assignment for Time because everything since had been downhill for him—his marriage, his career: “Total bullshit, capitalist crapola. Is that what our lives are,” he mourned, struggling for articulation against the stars, “one flash of brilliance and then it’s over?”
A renowned art-film director couldn’t believe Bunny would stay with Paul, so he proposed to her on the spot; she turned him down.
“You’d tire of me,” she said.
In late July I made friends with one of the few black guests at Grossinger’s—well, not a guest but a regular named Bitty Wood. He was in residence all summer, as his wife, Damita Jo, a nightclub singer, used the Hotel for her base. They hung out there with my grandmother’s consent—she still had the authority to sponsor long-term residents, or at least no one dared override her. A lanky middle-aged musician, Bitty sat in the lobby talking bop and poetry, rapping fingers in constant rhythm and laughing with easy good humor at the cluelessness and ostentation around him.
“Dump that freeloader, will you!” my father barked one evening. His threats were not idle ones. Milty Stackel, Irv Jaffee, Jack the waiter … all had been fired. Each time I’d come back after months away someone else would be missing. Nat the hypnotist, Abe the athletic director, Kurt the ice-skater. “Crooks,” he would say.
“All of them?” I would ask, disbelievingly.
“They stole from me.” His eyes riveted in revenge.
When I arrived at the beginning of the summer Jimmy McAndrews was gone too. He had made the mistake of phoning some friends in California from Traffic and then joking about it. “Big deal,” I said angrily, “a few West Coast calls. He was basically an honest kid.”
PG couldn’t get over the fact I had known and hadn’t told him. “And I don’t want you hanging around with you-know-who,” he said, not willing to dignify Bitty with a name. “It doesn’t look good.”
In my letters I brought Lindy up to date on Chuck, Schuy, Diana, my job, the Hotel, even Smokey. She was sorry to be so slow in answering. Her only mention of Steve was an embarrassed aside that he had dumped her. But now there was someone else:
I date police reporters and get depressed by their views, and for the first time in my life went out with a married man the other night. I must have been totally out of my mind to think that all he wanted was intellectual companionship, but I didn’t know so found out. I don’t want to do reference work in sin; there always seem to be bigger and better sins just when you think you’ve exhausted the list. He was interesting, as people are….
Smokey and I continued to spend evenings together, exploring our flirtation. But our making out was becoming more like a wrestling match. One night her kisses became bites; she gnawed my upper and lower lips as if she were perforating a line. It hurt more than seduced. I held her, half like a boxer trying to restrain an opponent, half like a lover. Then I let go and ran my hands lightly over her body under her dress. She sighed, returned my hug, then clawed my back, first sensually, then more like a panther—ow! Suddenly she sat up hard against the wall—thump! She put her hair back in place. I looked at her.
She said nothing.
A short, swaggering cook at the Hotel had taken a liking to her and begun to date her on alternate nights. When she and I went out to dinner, he followed the JG on his motorcycle, buzzing us left and right. One time we lost him en route to a diner but, when we came out ninety minutes later, the car wouldn’t start. Then—in speechless mime—he appeared from behind a tree, threw open the hood, plugged the distributor head in, and zoomed off on his cycle. She shook her head admonishingly.
The next morning at breakfast I blabbed a version of this event to the Head of Security who was nursing his last cup of coffee as I arrived. Some guy wanted to date the girl I was going out with and had messed with the JG, I said. No big deal, just an entertaining story. That night Jean shot over from her station to confront me, eyes like guns. “You shouldn’t have done that!”
I looked at her blankly, imagining something sexual. “I would have handled it,” she fumed; then more quietly: “There wasn’t any damage done.”
The house detective had approached her courting cook and threatened his job.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I protested.
“Sure, you didn’t!” She turned and marched away. I saw myself now through her eyes, sitting at the head table among the bosses—the owner’s son, a model of false innocence.
I went to apologize to the cook at his post in the kitchen. Before I could speak he spat out his challenge: “You can do anything you want, but it’s not going to stop me. Do you know that I’ve given her my mother’s ring? That ring is sacred to me!” He was almost hysterical. “I’m going to marry her. I just want you to know that.”
“I’m not your rival,” I said. “Smokey’s just a friend.” But, even as I tried to appease him, summoning all the earnestness I could muster, I was blarneying us both. Jean and I were hardly just friends We may not have gone beyond the rudiments of making out, but that was daring for its time, and a luxury and novelty pour moi. I had never engaged in idle erotic play before, so I wanted it to continue. Yet my sexual dalliances couldn’t approach the gravity of this guy’s propositions. Even with the distributor-head caper, I was profane by comparison.
I was beginning to see my heedlessness, my vain assumptions and spurious modesty. It had been a joke to try to pass myself off as an artist or Jean’s peer. I was the boss’s son, a ruling-class fink; I could never not be that.
A muddle of agendas, I tried to explain myself to her in a letter. I knew we weren’t right for each other, but how to say that without risking the what was left of our tryst. I acknowledged that she had this other, more serious courter. But was she encouraging his pursuit—did she want to marry him—or was she merely angry at me?
Likely if she had been a boy (or I a girl) Smokey and I would have been enemies. I was the wiry, innocent youth; she the bruising, worldwise trucker. We necked as much out of antipathy toward each other’s types as attraction. Unconsciously we were combatants from centuries of our ancestors’ wars.
She wanted to pummel me as much as caress me; the more intimate the act, the less she could discriminate the two. My appeal was mainly as an object of curiosity, plus a sadomasochistic desire to touch the enemy, to seduce him and get him under her power. But I was just as curious about her.
I closed my letter by apologizing for what that had happened. I wanted to sound noble and pure. I oozed false innocence. Her answer was indignant and revealing: “You think just because your father owns this place you can make all the rules and push everyone around.”
We parted enemies. We had indulged in a brief erotic encounter before sinking back into our ethnic stereotypes.
Lunchtime at the Democrat, everyone was shooting the breeze around the presses. I sat at a lone desk in the copy room, laying down the tarot as Chuck had instructed me: three rows of seven, The Fool aloft. Before me sat the upside-down Hanged Man; the Magician with his platform of sigils; the High Priestess with her rippling robes and fruited veil; the Tower with its larval sparks and toppling king and knave; the lantern-bearing Hermit; the many-rayed Sun with its row of flowers and child-bearing horse; the angel of Temperance pouring her unidentified vibration between gold cups; the legatee of Justice, bearing an ethereal sword in one hand, the scales of quantum physics in the other—he, the Charioteer, the Devil, and the Lovers quadruple personae of the same emanation. Like Vance Packard’s “hidden persuaders,” these keys radiated a subliminal message; only it hadn’t been loaded cynically by executives at ad agencies but was disseminated by avatars in other realms. (The admen’s too of course, over the long haul.)
In the sun in the window the cards were beautiful—not great art but beautiful: their esoteric colors, the faces, the glyphs, the white pillars of temples, the stream of celestial mind-stuff deliquescing unconscious waters….
I followed the azure rivulet that materialized out of the Priestess’ robes, pouring across the downed oxbow moon at her feet, bubbling behind the granite cliffs of the Emperor, between edifices of the Chariot and the City, until it drained through galaxies and civilizations into pools of Star and Moon and became an ocean of many dimensions on which ordinary boxes floated.
An actual blue seemed to trickle across the semblances as they came together—a three-dimensional deep image as alive and real as the world, only more radiant and essential for converting symbols into meanings. It was startling, hallucinogenic, not like a dream at all but an emanation from a different portal.
Then I looked up and saw the water along the rocks of Callicoon Creek. It had transferred its subliminal after-image to the shiny inked cards and turned their cartoon into a four-dimensional hologram. Matter, phenomenon, and symbol were one. I had known that intellectually; now it was lucid.
Leaves rustled against dusty windows, sunlight through them and dust breaking into thousands of coins on the table. Around me was the yellowing rag on rollers, the decay of history, of material reality. All this lived and would die, as Beckett had observed, but it wasn’t empty or, more accurately, its emptiness was precisely its fullness. Malone and Malloy had roused and inspired me, but their despair and nullity were not the foundation of the universe; they were a way to feel how profound and antithetical the forces of the universe actually are.
Our lives posed no danger to the real Creation. Even the atomic bomb was the handiwork of the Magician; so was Fred’s fallout shelter—a mere Hierophantic outpost and shack. The Death Card stood near the center with his scythe. In my mind’s eye the hermetic archetype prevailed, commuting Waite’s horse-borne skeleton into its more fearsome unmounted form, mowing down every living form but obliterating nothing, transforming only so that new cells, new molecules, new electrons, new views of the cosmos were born from the paring of antiquated ones: a billion insects dancing in the fields beyond.
I could hear the ripple of the Priestess’ robes, Callicoon Creek rushing toward Jeffersonsville. I stared at its twinkling rocks. I looked up through the trees at a disk in the sky. Even the so-called hydrogen of its formation was a mask concealing a Magician; Ahab knew as much. I turned down to the deck and, for an instant, saw white suns exploding everywhere, in alien skies against dreamlike arrases. I saw wheels turning and currents delivering signs deeper and deeper into substance. The figures of men and women wandering through the deck became the same man and woman, not at different moments but at once.
This wasn’t a fantasy. I was staring into the actual cosmos with my third eye.
The vision held for five seconds, maybe six, maybe seven; then the cards fell back into their temporal grid.
I stood in a daze. Tears crinkled the corners of my eyes. I wiped them away and poked my head into the next room. Fred, his sister, and the others were back at work. I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t. They were standing in spirit fire and didn’t know it.
And at night, filled to the brim, I had no doubt anymore, so I sent Lindy my joyfulness in a poem:
Do you listen
To the burning of the stars?
I am the burning of the stars:
Do you search
For the silent sandy people?
I lead them:
Follow me.
Do you hear
Sometimes a distant lonely whisper?
I hold one promise:
It is there.
Do you want
The rainbow flock?
I am one of its sheep:
Want me!
“Some long overdue letter here,” she wrote back a week later. “I thought your poem was beautiful and good. It sang, as they say here, and the song it sang was good. You are doing good things still, are amazingly productive and active politically and writing-wise.”
We were more than halfway through the summer and still dancing, still possible—still on the brink.