Dhalgren

“Yeah,” I said. “You know I feel better about these than any I’ve written before. Not that that means anything.”

“Good enough to have a second collection?”

I grinned at her. “I think I’m even more anxious not to have one.”

She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them.

Wrote till I was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the left loft where Denny was lying down already; we fucked on and off all night. Slept. Woke up before they did. Took all the pages I’d done out on the kitchen steps and in dawnlight almost too dim to read by, read them: made six more changes. Now they are finished. Copied them out (and it was full day) but found I still [wanted?] to go on writing. So turned back to one of the pages with space left near the end of the notebook (there are very few of them, and I have just started putting entries—like the beginning of this one—in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins) and wrote this, continuing it on a page I found free here near the beginning.

I recall/ and want/ this wanting:

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you’ve been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us /have/ come here by way of it.

[Here the correction marks—except for one entry further on—stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had annotated the final, rather than the first, few pages; there are half a dozen passages to come where even these attempts at variora might be preferable to the most informed supposition. As to the marks employed: indications of authorial deletions are self-evident; we can assume brackets mean editorial conjecture. The bracketed question mark, however, with or without additional word or suffix, seems totally arbitrary. After much debate, we can only suggest that words in virgules are probably interlinear additions; but even the quickest perusal reveals this accounts only for most cases. While he plies us with quaint descriptions of paperclips and staples, he fails to record date and letterhead material in the Calkins letter (perhaps there were none), nor does he mention whether any (or all) of the entries were typed or handwritten. Internal evidence (it is a spiral notebook, not a loose-leaf) suggests the latter. Corrections, however, such as balnk [blank?], That8[’?]s, and bendh [bench?] bray out for the former. Also, “Rose…a brown fist up beside her chin…” and, a few pages later, “Fist against his chin, Stevie…” suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running page left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent “entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins”—that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber’s editorial adieu (“Here one page, possibly two, is missing.”) can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were—say—the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

“Sound [s?] like you had a reporter standing

“The[n] how did they know

grinding her palm on the grey[n]? formica. (That superfluous ‘n’ again suggests a typing, rather than a hand-written, error.)

Are you going to keep them here[?]”

He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary ‘sic’—Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other—for the mere lack of an upper-case ‘D’!]

We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away—to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room—curious if she’s ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

I can’t smell it.

This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored slacks) and her friend Risa (who I wished looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys’ jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

Jack the Ripper: “Little girl, you must have been fucking a Goddamn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!” at which Denny, perched on the table’s edge, laughs the shrillest.

Gladis, under Spider’s arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

The Ripper’s laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinder-block yesterday).

Gladis leers and says, “Fuck you—” She’s fifteen? Sixteen—?—“you big cocksucker!” with the inappropriateness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use “nigger” other than in rage.

Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: “You don’t get no belly like that sucking a cock!”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” Spider shouted, “well, Jesus Christ, if I’d ’a known that—” making much to get his fly open and free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her feet and lurched away.

I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of Orchids, leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn’t look at me.

Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. “You like that?” I asked Risa.

When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.