0
I would have preferred not to do lines in the car on the way to Godwin but cokers rarely stash as we plan. I'd known before the end of my first year as a pot user that I couldn't always rule tomorrow from today, today from yesterday, and adjusted my expectations accordingly. I offered to share. "I don't want any," said Faith, which was wise if not quite truthful. "Did Throck hear you?" All summer I'd been relieved neither chose to use the drug.
Throck hadn't heard, and he accepted when he did. It would be an interesting drive, Faith thought. She hoped her headache would get no worse. She was driving because someone had to, not because she liked it, but she was pleased at the big car being entrusted to her. (We were in Florence’s car; by the time--March 6, 2003--I noticed I’d made no mention of how it came to be at the farm, I’d forgotten how it had gotten there.) Being trusted mattered to Faith, and she thrived on being needed. She shamelessly mothered Throck, who habitually dealt with hunger by not eating unless she served him. She knew he was about to return to Tucson; she also knew that she was going into shock because of it.
I wondered what I would be like tonight in Godwin. Would I talk to anyone about what I was writing? I had several hundred pages of my work-in-progress with me, a significant sheaf. I'd brought it in case it seemed possible to work on it or I felt I could show it to someone.
Throck and I kept up with one another doing lines till, near our destination, the bindle was empty. The traffic had gotten notably heavier but Faith was going to make it. "I'm amazed my headache hasn't gotten worse," she said. Throck threw the empty bindle out the window in New Jersey on Route 17, a few miles from Ruth's, where we would stay with her and Dane and Mickey. I didn't like littering, but leaving the empty bindle in Florence’s ashtray would have been a blunder.
_____
As usual when I visited Godwin, I slept on a waterbed set up in Ruth's dining room. Our first night there was miserably hot for those without air conditioning; unable to turn down the air conditioner beside my bed because its controls were out of reach, I was kept awake by the cold (and the afternoon’s coke).
The next day I was out of bed and into my chair by noon, some the worse for wear. Faith and Throck had just left for Manhattan and I was trying to write about having spoken rudely to Faith before she left. I soon put aside my notebook, and when Jake arrived he found me reading Conrad's Victory. Jake hadn't come round without notice since his recent divorce from Ruth, but my living here had suspended the rules and there was a cook-out planned for tonight. Ruth and Jake had been easier together since the divorce than they had been in the latter years of their ill-starred marriage (but things would soon be worse than ever between them).
"Man, he's into the big stuff. He's good," I said to Jake, pointing at the Conrad. Jake read well, felt deeply. He habitually lied to women, which I deplored but couldn't change, and about which I couldn't help sometimes thinking and writing. He loved Ruth and Dane and Mickey and me deeply and forever. Ruth knew she couldn't trust him, that in her need he wasn't there. (A time would come, though, when he would be. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in spring 2000 and died that October; he had been with her every day.) Jake knew my family well--our blood, after all, was also his children's--and he would have recognized the unfortunate tone I'd used to Faith. Before Jake left, Faith and Throck had returned from their aborted trip to the city; they hadn't found the Park-and-Ride, where they were to have left the car to catch a bus.
_____
The poker game scheduled for tonight was to have seven players, three of them Clarence, Florence, and me. Tonight's seven and several others had, in one grouping and another, played dozens of times in the late 1960s and early 1970s; none of us would have taken 2-to-1 odds that Florence and I would be alive and at the table playing in 1988. The stakes, then and now, were substantial, a five-dollar per player per deal ante and a graduated limit that topped out at fifty-dollars on the last card. I hadn't played cards even a single time since 1971. The four unrelated players expected tonight were Lanny, Pico, Reuben, and the aptly-named Bee Lief; all but Bee had been students at Columbia when the game had begun.
I'd probably won four out of every five sessions in that game. I had loved to play and known I was good, but now doubted I was really as good as my results and had suspected even then that I was on a long lucky streak. When I was 14, I'd learned to play with confidence by playing 5-card stud against the local bowling-machine mechanic and cheating by looking at the top card when I dealt. The boy I was cheating was a few years older than me and could and probably would have hurt me had he realized what I was doing. The other kid I cheated as a youthful cardsharp was smaller and younger than me and stole the money I then took from him from his father. I'd been ashamed of my cheating (and felt guilty about it, too) but learned a great deal doing it.
After breaking my neck I never dealt, which kept me relatively honest, though I liked to think I'd not have cheated anyway. Pico, on the other hand, had been banned from the game for some years after being caught dealing himself an extra card, and when Clarence had said Pico would be at the reunion game we'd laughed and agreed to watch him. Lanny was a droll gambler out of Boston who'd supported himself through Columbia Law betting at the dog track. He’d taught Transcendental Meditation the past ten years and now made most of his money as a lawyer. Reuben had gone to prep school with Bee and for years had significantly enhanced his life style with the money that he won from him. Reuben too was a lawyer now; he boasted of having been ranked 450th and last in his Columbia Law graduating class of 450. Bee had always paid his sometimes considerable debts and was looked upon as a game-maker. I'd rarely traveled to play in those days and the games were almost always scheduled at my (parents') house; the games to which I had traveled had been in New York City and had featured Bee. I didn't, then or now, know the source of his money.
As the game began, Pico was on my right. To my left were my mother, whose game suffered from her all-too-often unquenchable desire to be dealt one more card; Reuben, who had always liked Florence on his right; Clarence, whose record in the game had been good; Bee, whose love of getting one more card exceeded even Florence's; and, on Pico’s right, Lanny. Before I won a hand my first stack of chips, a thousand dollars, had disappeared; I was the first to buy a second thousand. I won my first hand midway into my second stack, and the flow came to me for a while. I made mistakes, got caught thinking, waited too long to bet on an early bluff. My best hand all night was two pair in a hand of 7-card stud, but, still tough, I won a few hundred dollars. I was home at 3 A. M.
"How did you do in the game?" Hannah, my brother David’s wife, asked the next morning.
"I won a little," I said.
"Florence said before the game she was worried about you; she talked about how good you used to be and wondered whether you'd embarrass yourself."
"Bold!"
"How did she do?"
"Not too good, but she held up physically. I was relieved."
Hannah and David had come to New Jersey from their home in Texas for Clarence's party. A year ago, the party would have featured abundant semi-clandestine pot and cocaine use, but Clarence was drug-free now. He had smoked cannabis about daily since before he was twenty and continued to do so as a professional basketball player in Israel, through law school, and into his early years as a lawyer; cocaine was less benign.
"You wake up in the morning thinking, 'What did I do,' and if you remember, you're horrified, because it isn't you. You know it isn't, but you go ahead anyway," Clarence said. He'd been bad and had to change, and I respected how he'd turned himself around. It was inspiring. Human effort is inspiring. (And drugs are tricky. I behaved with cocaine as I'd not have and didn't undrugged, but thought my behavior very much me.)
It was a good party, though it would have been better had the temperature and humidity not been above ninety degrees and ninety percent respectively. (I would've preferred some pot and a few lines, too.) The mosquitoes descended at dark and I beat a retreat, returned to Ruth's with David and Hannah and Shell, Shell, like David and Hannah, especially in town for the do. After we'd left, Clarence began doing lines. (He would do in-patient rehab in the fall, is, August 23, 1996, almost through his eighth year of abstinence from recreational substances.) Faith and Throck joined the refugees from Clarence's abstinence at Ruth's. "Look," said Shell, happily laughing. His gesture took in the room. "There's seven of us, and every one of us has a cigarette lit!" Except for Faith and Throck we were all doing lines, too.
_____
I'd been working hard before this trip and in Godwin stopped, completely stopped. Would I resume when I got back to Jamesville? I guessed and hoped I would.
August 15 Jake was the wheelman for the trip back. Throck had delayed his flight to Tucson an extra day and a few miles outside Godwin we dropped him where he would catch his bus to New York City, leaving Jake, Faith, and me in the car. Faith would be as good as alone now with her strange old man in the country, and I felt for her. Past Watertown a storm broke and rain fell for the last half hour of the trip, but when we arrived at the farm it had almost stopped. Dee came outside to greet us and leaned in the car window to kiss me on the lips. She brought me a line while I was still in the car. Joe and Angus were picking up a used refrigerator in a neighboring town, but they would be here in an hour, more than ready to indulge after five drug-free days.
When they had left Faith set me up. "I'm glad to be back to my mirror," I said.
Back at Wurts Farm. I'd taped over part of August 8 on August 9 with an insert for July 30. Now, I must listen to the insert.
He was working. It was a trade-off for the drug. He had, in his twenties and thirties, wished, simply, to write every day; he had believed that if he worked hard that some of what he wrote might be as good as anything by anyone. He had come to think in his forties that his working hard was more important than what he wrote. This would not have been true had he been more prodigally gifted, but the truth was his talent, while large compared to the norm, was small compared to the best.
I taped side 5B, then wrote some more. I had at first not felt tonight but now did, my recorder on my shoulder and the microphone by my mouth; I thought of Jake, who loved sex and claimed to have masturbated at least daily since puberty.
I imagine Jake walking in on me as I feel,
Me laughing, telling him the story that I mean to tell in Love Note.
He would speak as I do not imagine,
Say exactly what he would.
Jake's genius was oral, and the version of his perspective I wanted was his, not my imagining of it. I was uncovered; I hoped he'd knock at my door and knew what I'd say if he did, which kept me stiff and made me stiffer. I knew that the tape recorder would immediately make him think of Kerouac, Cassady, and Visions of Cody, and thought that he would see what I was doing as heroic; he would affirm it and me as I could not, from the outside. Writerfellow, supposedly, was out there too, but his words so far belied that assumption. Jake's wisdom would be balm.
Now I was singing:
I have not spoken to him,
Did not speak at all in Godwin to anyone of what I write, Still haven't written but imagine I'm about to.
I said tonight to Jake
I hoped that by November I could show him some of what I've done.
I stopped the tape, pulled up, and wrote in my notebook, still thinking of Jake.
jake's rejoicing at the taping
blake and need, kerouac and cassady
the audacity of the imagining
the absurd delusion and the truth
When I lay back after another line and a hit of pot I sang to Anne. I knew I didn't know her but ignored it. Had I known her when we’d been in love?
"Will you marry me?" I'd said to her August 15, 1963 in Buddy's and Emma's kitchen.
"Are you sure that's what you want?" she had responded.
"I think it is," I'd thought. "Yes," I'd said.
What had she thought? Who had she been? Ten days from today was August 25, when it would be a quarter century since we'd died together in the Nevada desert and I'd been chosen, as it were, to live well and prosper and call to her tonight, surrender to her. My eyes were closed and I could smell her breath, feel it on my face. I sang:
Thank you for loving me, Anne,
For loving to be with me, Anne;
Please. . .
--I did not sing now for a time, almost a minute, felt her with me, pleased and willingly pleasing--
. . .take my body, Gentle Anne,
Please take my heart.
Blessed be this tryst with you.
_________
To access Chapter 15 part i of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. Has your genital feeling been affected by SCI? If so, how? I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
Edited by Coach, 13 August 2006 - 07:28 PM.
Top
