And my word the wrecks the two of us see together in our hundred-mile radius. Wrecks and deaths for no reason at all. I’d guess three quarters of all wrecks are caused by people with no destination. They are caused by goons driving as with a heart attack in progress toward positively distinctly nowhere. Or fifteen miles at eighty per to get a couple Vidalia onions or a bowtie for some lowlife prom. I’m going on because those wrecks, wretched as the fact is, work as aphrodisiacs on both of us. Something about being alive next door to horror, then not and very hot. We stop and ask questions and then look at each other, shamed but blushing with need, a hard and troublesome thing for two who’ve yet to get in bed together. I’ve wondered if we owe now this strange duty to others in the future and must have our own pointless great wreck. From our jewel of a little city in southern Missouri, in this radius of want we get even through Memphis and down into northern Mississippi, where I saw a woman in an unknown rage drive repeatedly at high speed around the lot of a Sonic drive-in until she piled into a stone picnic table and killed herself.
I was almost sure I had witnessed the highest order of some kind of love, a love that put what the surgeon’s wife and I had to shame. I refused to read any newspaper account of the incident and could not bear the sordid history that might be attached, because I saw, well, what I saw. Jane and I were so full of the wild gift of adrenaline once we looked at each other again, we could have ripped each other apart.
So were we good people then, because we did not follow through? No. Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory.They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon-whelp Romeo. Tornado in a razor factory, that’s what sweetness. That poor woman with her neck broken over the steering wheel was in their league, don’t tell me different. Without the stone picnic table, she’d have taken out all the help inside, and you’d have had the local scribes going for a year. Even the sad baritones on the box, too, tireless.
Once years ago I walked into a country juke saloon with a pistol to my head, but it was only a gag about music. Country folks don’t ever get tired of the same song, they just want it maybe faster and deeper now and then. Or maybe it wasn’t a gag. I’m just forty-two but sometimes very very weary.
I drive us, but I still do not have the main handle on whether we are in for construction or destruction. She has a way of looking at the floor and whispering no, unconsciously, eyes awfully flat and grim. Mary was absolutely right. I’m terribly glad she is my friend still. I’ll hate to leave her behind, little prissy happy-bosomed gal from Joplin, the only near-beauty I’ve ever known who would hang around without liquor at a parts store.
As you can see, behind the counter of my casual anarchy at the store, where only I know where parts are, I’ve had time to think and come up with some high county epigrams of my own, because I have not found this life particularly pleasant and it’s for damned sure my customers, the wheeled doofuses bred with a bad carburetor in their genes, aren’t going to show me anything new. If I were greatly handsome or had promise I might kill myself, but I’m not giving wags the pleasure nor Mary the trouble. The wags have a bad enough time coping with internal combustion. What would they say about me anyway? I have no problems. I’m begging for minor disasters, like several wealthy people I’ve known. I couldn’t cope with the options of wealth. The five or six I have in my present condition sometimes paralyze me. Also, the wealthy like money and are often so paranoid they pay someone to be after them, just so they will know distinctly who it is. To the man, every wealthy shop owner around the town circle here has a spread middle, a permanent bent neck toward the sidewalk from counting and playing with themselves, and nervous shoulders as if expecting to be poleaxed by a stranger from behind.
In my brief mournful summer in New York City years ago, I was attempting to get myself across as something I’m unwilling to discuss. All right, painting. Hustling my plain local stuff during the height of Warholism, inviting half smiles of almost Martian disdain from gallery owners, and with nobody else between me and them as I could guess they were begging there to be, since I was using precious seconds of their eyesight on my “work.” I had at this time the almost mystic confidence of the autoanointed third-rater and must have sounded very much like Harry Truman.
I met a boy my age who had inherited vast wealth and seemed to like me. He had no job, did nothing but wander about, and I saw him exit one or two parties with his head down, looking run-over, with people gazing at his back. I had never met a true creep — a slug — although we used the item handily all through high school and college in Columbia (Missouri). But here was your real specie at last, a young man who could buy anything and had omitted to buy (possible, of course) a personality. He just hung around. I became his favorite and he would show up at bar dates uninvited, somehow finding out about my appointment with another person around Charles Street in the Village. He would appear, then stare at me, then at the floor; now with his face to me, turned again, after an unsettling hungry look. He wasn’t gay as I suspected. He was nothing, just some sort of thing seeking my shade.
I had got to New York somehow without being conscious of Thomas Hart Benton, an artist from practically my own backyard — a real artist whose work, had I known it, would have discouraged me from New York entirely. But certain other artists loved the fact I’d never heard of him, and with them I was promoted in esteem. We were drinking a lot of cheap drinks in a cheap tavern and talking over my possibilities as a new savage (dream on), when this slug person, this creep, appeared again, looking at me, then down. I was drunk and angry over my treatment by the galleries, so I let him have it, very unlike myself. But he really was too much. I charged: What do you want? What are you after? Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead? His narrow shoulders, the cocked-over head with chubby face — I can still see it — the small burned dirty eyes. I watched real pain and a faint smile come over him, such a hopeless and yet triumphant look as I’d never seen. He turned around, and after saying “I’m so sorry” with his back to me, he left and I didn’t see him for a year.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my artist pal, a boy from Maine not as drunk as I was. “You’re the fourth one this summer. He stays and comes and interlopes and then an eruption from somebody like you he’s been begging for, and he goes out whipped. I think he loves it, I know he does. He works you for abuse, gets it, and now he might be off stroking himself. Then he moves to another person.”
I was staggered and instantly sober. My feel for the whole city was different now. I knew I was a loser too, but I was almost sick and very angry at what a fellow with every option like the creep could bring himself to. I thought I could even still smell his stale white oily body in here, like old margarine.