Chapter 9: June 19-July 6, 1988.

i

June 19 in bed and hard I wrote notes for Part I. Start with me and Hettie and Angus driving south last October. Hettie: "It doesn't make sense to me." Arthur glad he'd not spoken. In Tucson he would. I continued writing after I'd been (in fantasy) with Jane. With Jane I was utterly absorbed in the family. While she cooked and cleaned I sat nearby and we talked, Owl or Tanager often in my lap. Family life.
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The day in April 1981 on which Jane moved with Owl and Tanager from the house Story and I shared with them was very strange, and that it left Story and me living alone together I knew was funny. They hadn’t moved far, a dozen blocks or so, and I supported Jane's decision. It confused me, but I knew she was confused and desperate and had ample reason to think that to protect Owl and Tanager she had to do something; I didn’t quibble that the something she had done left me not only without her but also without the children I had studied so carefully to avoid thinking of as mine. The silence of the childless house was poignant and disorienting.

Story and I, already peculiarly close, grew closer still the next few weeks as we did lines and, of course, smoked; he poured his heart out to me and I listened, aware it likely I was his nearest and best--maybe only--friend. I didn’t hate him, though I knew his behavior hateful; a time would soon come, after he had left with Owl and moved to Utah, when I would argue to myself I had better kill him than allow him absolute control over Owl’s upbringing. I could not at the time refute my argument, but, partly due to logistical problems and probably fortunately, neither did I do as I thought I should. Soon after Story and Owl left town, Jane, with Tanager, again went on the Northwestern fruit trail, soon to meet up with Seth. She clung to the idea that if she correctly interpreted and followed certain if not all of Story's rules, he would eventually respect her parenthood as she respected his. I thought her effort misguided and doomed but said so to no avail and didn't nag. I stayed alone in Tucson, dealing small quantities of coke and pot and receiving the help I needed gratis from my community of friends, but after a month I was robbed; the thieves wore masks but I soon knew that one had been the lover, the other the ex-lover, of a close (and of course mortified) friend. I had feared only sneak-thieves, and had left another friend's 15-year-old sister to deter by simply being there while I dashed out for lunch. The men, both professional heavy-weight boxers, had tied her to a chair, found the drugs and money, bemoaned the absence of any cocaine, and left without physically harming her. Two days later, deeply relieved the girl had not been hurt, deeply in debt, and deeply aware an immediate change was necessary, I flew to Jamesville, looking forward to being with Jane, Tanager, and whomever else in the fall.


We tried, even Story tried.
We tried.

We failed.

The summer of 1988, Jane and Tanager hadn't seen Owl and Story since before Thanksgiving 1987. Owl loved him, and Story continuously used his love as a weapon against Jane. It's his choice to be with me, Story had insisted since he'd first taken Owl, not yet 3, away from her in May 1981. Tonight in bed I addressed the Story I imagined:

You in your fashion love me and
I didn't think you'd hide with Owl again.
For me, if not for Tanager or Jane, relent, chance love.
And if not for me or them, for Owl and for yourself.
You need your son to know his mother and sister;
You have to dare to trust him or you'll never know he loves you.
Let him know his mother and sister;
Be torn more sensibly.

Story had once defended his desertion of Tanager by telling me that he would be unable to trust himself around her when she was older. I’d thought it a particularly repugnant excuse for abandoning her, but tonight I wondered if he hadn't been right about himself. If he'd have eventually molested her and by abdicating his parenthood had saved her from his doing so, wasn't his decision in its sad peculiar way a good one? He'd deserted her but had he saved her from worse?

I lay back and briefly imagined Story with me as I was tonight, imagined him saying, "Holmes, you always were weird." I shook my head and laughed. Not weird enough to have sex with Story, not even when he wasn't there.
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The next day I worked several hours at the typewriter on Part I and then rewarded myself with lines. I continued to work, hard, abed. Would I, I wondered, be able to excerpt the notebook entries? Did I sit in the future now, McElroyan (it had taken three months, but I'd read all of James McElroy’s Women and Men last summer), offering me help that this book might be written well and truly? I did what I could that it might be as though so.
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June 22 I again saw the black-billed cuckoo by Ciceros', as I had three or four times a week the past three weeks. Farther toward town for the only time all year I also saw a yellow-billed; it flew across the road in front of me and though I stopped in the hope that it would reappear, it didn't. Home, I was delighted when Storris appeared; I never knew whether he would come on any given day. He'd won yesterday and I was hungry for action.

I succeeded in avoiding sgurd the rest of the day and that night but, the next day, June 23, didn't. All the taping I'd done on and since May 27 was on the B Side of Tape 1. Tonight I planned to listen carefully to it all, had promised me I would in exchange for permitting me to sgurd. I rewound to the beginning, put it on play, pressed pause, then leaned forward and lifted my left leg away from my right. I lay back and pulled my balls free, then pulled myself up, hit the pause button to start the tape recorder, and lay back. Soon--my left hand now held my penis, which was small and soft--I heard my voice, comfortably loud and clear. If I am to be my lover. . . . I spoke for several minutes about the split between my night-time certainties and day-time doubts. At first as I lay naked, listening, feeling, I knew that I could write about 1B i and that what I wrote would begin Part IV, the farm, 1988, but I soon discovered that except for its first few minutes 1B was irrecoverable. I recorded over what I'd said.
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Joe Cicero was being a model of restraint, using sgurd only two or three times a week even though I was doing it four and five and six times and he knew I would share; but tonight was Saturday night and Joe was ready to party.

"Better start early, since you'll go to bed at 9:30," he said. "You used to know how to party. I'm not complaining, though; I'm just happy you're here at all, Artie boy."

I did go to bed early, leaving Joe and Dee, Hettie and Angus in the living room, and I was leaning on my elbow and writing as I had been when I wrote "Ways" when Joe burst through my door without knocking and asked if he could borrow the car.

"Sure." I said. "The keys are probably in it."

He thanked me and left. Neither of us had said anything about my position. Had Joe noticed how the pillows were stacked to keep my left leg raised as it crossed my right and how my hard-on was pressed back between my legs and visible from where he stood behind me?

Night after night I had been writing new versions of the same unpoetic poem; after Joe left I began it yet again:

I want to make love to you
But not as lovers do.
I want to do it by reading what I wrote you four last week
The night I went to bed and you stayed here with Steve,
And I want to read it positioned as Joe saw me
Tonight when, unannounced, he came into my room.

I was trying to be prosy and plain, lay my armor down and come forth naked. The result left problems, but one problem had been solved, and it delighted me to discover that I was now able to say of my fantasized position that it was how Joe had just seen me. With the passage of time, I accumulated language.
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Early evening the next day I was in my office and still writing about the night I'd written "Ways;" Ellen brought the day's newspaper to me and, looking over my shoulder, read the top of the page that was in my typewriter: "I want to make sexual love to my friends."

"Well!" she said, mock-shocked.

Would she mention what she'd read to Dee or Brian? Did I hope she would? What did I hope? I hoped to reveal the secret of my nights and for Love Note to take shape. Almost all afternoon my work had seemed to be going well; then it had seemed foolish and repetitive and to be miscarrying. I worked another twenty minutes before stopping for the day. I wanted to make love with my friends? I hadn't even (yet?) dared ask one of them to shop for a mirror for me.

In bed, aroused, I wrote a full-page insert for Part IV, then less than half a page labeled III. I recorded briefly and eventually slept badly.
_____

I was tired when I waked, tired when Storris and I played chess, and now, still tired, I was typing: Chess is not life. Art is not life. They are ways of life. The game we’d played had lasted three hours and, despite my tiredness, I’d won after having fallen behind by a bishop early, my win cutting Storris' lead in the year’s competition to 9 ½-8 ½. I thought I should beat him two-thirds to three-quarters of the time and that I usually did beat him about three games out of five. He thought we were almost even but I had a slight edge. He loved that he was winning this year, and whether his success lasted or not wouldn't change that he had been ahead for a delicious month, during which he'd been able to assure me, as I'd often assured him, that my attention would improve and that I soon would find my game. I took my medicine stoically; I’d been unaware how bad it tasted. Today’s game, we agreed, had been our first or second best of the year. (He had won the other.) The quality of my day's play reassured my day-light self. My night-time self, the feeling masturbator, needed little reassurance, and today's chess was the sort of evidence would keep it that way.

I, the metaphorical chess player, knew that my increasing cocaine use was a tactical risk and probably a strategic error. Still, given my position, I tried to make my best move. Life made its move simultaneously, and the board was forever new, but I thought I knew something important about the game and my opponent: Life, the unconscious-all that responded to each of my moves, while it was a grand master, nay, a realized master, was not playing to defeat me but, in effect--if I could but use it so--, to elicit my best. The slogan "Be all that you can be" had recently been appropriated by the United States Army. Storris thought the sentiment expressed a false value but I disagreed. I also believed both military service and snorting coke dubious avenues to the stated goal.
_____

The last day of June I finally told Hettie I wanted a large dressing mirror.

"Want to get a full look at the old bod, eh?" she said. "Makes sense to me."

"I've been amazed how shy I've been about asking someone to get me one," I said. We were doing lines in my office, the small room that had been my first bedroom here and was now where we often kept the coke, mirror, and straws. "The only other time I actually tried to bring it up, as soon as I said mirror, Joe said, 'Mirrors are for women,' and ranted on from there; I dropped it. Seeing how I'm being touched really helps me feel." I did not elaborate.

"I'm glad you asked me," said Hettie. "Once in a while a dressing mirror turns up at one of these auctions we go to. It'll be exciting having something to look for. Dee'll help."

"I knew she would. I was surprised I couldn't ask."
_____

Before I had talked to Hettie about the mirror I had written a new version of my book's first paragraph at the typewriter, and tonight I had brought it to bed to edit. Now, thinking it perfect, I put it aside and, still hard-penised, wrote in my notebook--as I had every night I'd done coke this summer. The page’s title was flush left, written in lower-case script and underlined; its text was eight lines, four beginning at the red line an inch in from the spirals and four indented about two inches further. The first three lines were printed upper case and the last five script with standard capitalization. Double- and, at the end, triple-spaced, it looked something like this:

a note to himself

YES!

I HAVE REWRITTEN

THE FIRST PARAGRAPH,

perhaps correctly!

Let me, God.

Write through me, Anne.


Let it be,

Against all odds and sense.

I prayed--to what I was which was not in linear time?--that the rest of Love Note would be worthy of its new beginning. Then I prayed to Anne that, if she wished, she should live through me, which I'd not done before. I'd no sense she was near. I neither believed in an afterlife nor disbelieved in Spiritualist phenomena; I did believe that if it were possible for the living to attach the dead (to what in dying they had left) that doing so was wrong. In my ignorance, I acted neutrally as I could, my allegiance to non-denial and being. I trusted Anne not to let me trap her on the earthly plane if she had business elsewhere and to know I did not need to speak to her; I wanted to say, explicitly, that I welcomed her help if she wished to give it. Would she teach me in a dream? Would I remember if she did? How would I know that I'd forgotten? If I forgot a dream, could it still have changed me? Did Anne exist? I felt the dead did not but if they did, if she did, then I surrendered to her. If she wished me ill, I gave her opportunity to work it. Love is risk. There is no safety in no risk.

"Use my tongue and body," I said to her. "Write with me what we may." I'd written so much--today, at the typewriter, and tonight, a poem and five full pages for I i. "F*ck me, Anne," I said. I heard no answer but I felt.
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ii

Clarence, the younger of my brothers, visited Wurts Farm for the Fourth of July weekend. He and his wife had lived here the first months it was Wurts Farm, in 1970, and it had been an emotional shock to me when, less than two weeks after I'd arrived, they had left. Clarence, now 39, was six feet three inches tall and a redhead. A month after they had left here he had been recruited by a college team-mate to spend the winter and spring of 1970-71 playing professional basketball in Israel, having first perjuriously sworn that he was Jewish. He'd not been a star but had been a fan-favorite. Now he was a lawyer at a firm he'd founded in Godwin. I had a sore throat and I’d hoped not to sgurd, but it was Saturday night and Clarence was here, so sgurd I did. Late, hard-penised and drugged, I wrote in bed at I i and worked on an insert for II.

Sunday I was at my desk reading Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus, published in 1896 in England. (In the United States it was called The Children of the Sea, not because the U. S. publisher was sensitive to racial slurs but because he thought the book-buying public wouldn't buy a book about a nonwhite.) Conrad's Waits is a dying man who insists he's well. "He was absurd to the point of inspiration." P. 129. Collier. I thought of myself as I copied the quotation into my notebook. I was as absurd? And might inspire as I aspired? My throat was still red and sore and I was determined to abstain. I made it to bed and to sleep undrugged.

Monday July 4 Joyner was my fantasy partner and I came and came. Toward the end of the summer of 1981, the year I was robbed, retreated to New York, and returned to Tucson in the fall to find I would not be living with Jane, I had become lovers here with Joyner, a close friend of Dee's. Joe thought Joyner wildly flaky. Dee and I loved her fierce independence and energy, which found few local outlets. She was married with two daughters but did not embrace her motherhood warmly and thought her husband dull and undeserving. She knew (intellectually, but emotionally?) that I was in love with Jane but didn't think it mattered, and that winter while I was dealing with not being with Jane and not feeling as I thought I should about Marjorie, Joyner was dealing with missing me. When, shortly after my return to New York in 1982, Marjorie had surprised me by announcing she would be at the farm in a week, I had failed to forewarn Joyner until the morning of the day Marjorie arrived. (The better time to talk I had awaited had, unsurprisingly, never arrived.) Joyner never fully trusted me again, but we remained friends and occasional if damaged lovers, had, most recently, made love a few days before Clarence's visit.

By the day to which this story has come, July 4, 1988, Joyner and I in the flesh seemed past understanding one another, but that night I remembered how close we for a time had been. I began a letter to her that I soon abandoned, certain she'd have loathed it; I started over, wrote half of a new first page, then a second and third page with gaps, felt a while, then made a few notes on the first page and filled in the gaps on pages two and three. Again I felt, Joyner with me. I was on my back, my ankles by my ears. When I lowered my legs I held my knees up and apart, as I did to do my morning leg-stretching exercises. I imagined her between them and me thrusting my hips upward, my hard-on stiffening with each (unmoving) thrust.

When I next paused I wrote a note to myself and then again tried to write to Joyner: I realized tonight we could talk. I remembered that we love each other. In our (undeniably separate) ways we did (still) love one another. I was wrong to think that we would ever effectively talk.
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The afternoon of July 6 Joe drove me ten miles to the doctor's, me in my chair in the back of his pick-up with my head in the wind above the cab of the truck and Faith beside me, helping to steady the chair. It was hot and the wind felt good in my face. Arrived, we waited almost an hour before my name was called, and I was then in the doctor's examining room as long again, most of the time alone. I was now reading Lord Jim, but concentrating was difficult. The air-conditioning was down and only a token breeze blew off the St. Lawrence, less than a hundred yards away; the waiting room and the examining room were sweltering. I had the towel I always carried resoaked at intervals in cold water but was unable to keep cool. The doctor examined my sore throat and prescribed an antibiotic.

After the doctor's visit and dinner I'd done a few lines (had for the second day in a row done no cigarettes, pot, or beer) and was now in bed writing. In the middle of the first page, I killed a mosquito, the fourth I'd killed tonight. (Today is January 31, 1990 and I am looking at the dead mosquito in the middle of the page, my words artfully arranged around it.) Even indoors the mosquitoes were heavy, Faith their favorite meal, and all night she’d wanted frenziedly to scratch her feet, her face, and high between her thighs.

Earlier Dee had talked about slides Clarence had shown the evening of July 4. "I was afraid we were being too straight with the things we've been buying for the house here,” she said. “But seeing your house in Tucson, I wondered if we should be getting nicer stuff. I mean, it's beautiful. If you want us to go someplace besides Sears, we can."

"I love what we've done here. You do great," I'd assured her.

In bed as I lay feeling--my mirror had been ordered!--I thought about Hettie and Dee.

to hettie and dee, that night that i was sick

if we were free?
we are
we are

the living are
he would
she would

we are
we are
being

But to whom, coke lacking, would I want to make love? I suspected to no one.

I thought of a line from Chapter 5 of Lord Jim in which Marlowe, the book's narrator, says he is willing to grant that each of us has a personal angel so long as he is granted in return that each of us has a personal devil. I wrote: I seem not to feel I have a personal devil.

Had evil seduced me; taken my soul with cocaine; obsessed me with my own penis; counseled me to write about it? Sex and drugs were classic diabolical tools, redrum stuff, and I didn't suspect a devil? I occasionally reminded myself to wonder, but I sensed no evil presence. Was I hubristically exposing myself to possession? How was it I hadn't called up some chthonic mischief maker? Was I already servant to some kin of Satan? I hoped (and assumed) not. I refused to let myself disbelieve in evil, but my working assumption was that humans, each of us and one by one, are what create good and evil. I problematically prayed to my and my fantasy-lovers' benign guides.
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