Everything changed. On the plane to Frankfurt he lighted a Camel. Holding it by its hind legs he watched the hair along the hump sizzle: its smell, a fresh skid mark. “Turkish & Domestic Blend.” The city on the back was hot and dry: just the place to be: down through clouds: a glimpse of the vast metropolis. Settled in, he took the train out to Mainz and arrived at eleven sharp. Professor Rudolf Semler gave him a warm but brief intro and the students in the typical German fashion rapped their desks with approval. Hating the taste of a recently smoked Coffin Nail he climbed up. But it was better than Alfred's smoke in his face. Hungover, the would-be decided to try to merge his personal disaster with its desolation and psychic gangplanks from Georgia to Chicago and from the inner coils of his longing to Be-Somebody-Safe to their — or what he imagined to be their Black Forest, their old-woman-roasting-children-in-the-oven, Tristan and Isolde and their stained glass-fear of the same unknown he feared. Dreamer! Mason dared trust a blind connection: It was as insane as dumbass engineers of say a spermbank scheme — the gimmick of a nut with the smell of Hitler's asshole coming from the lower depths of the throat. These bright-eyed undergraduates? connect to
his mysteries? What shape could they put to the incongruous rubbish merged in this voice-filled presence? Perfection can never be deliberate!… Think about it: his crazy sea his gentle ladies fanning themselves his maze of one-night-stands his quickies his harsh knife-warfare-life behind the walls of Attica his, praytellblasted Celt! Could they see their own secrets through him and see through him? How about the crushed and cursed desperate enterprise of that night's rush to the isolated trainyard as a connective tissue in the action? Should they? And this deeper question (even halfway admitted to himself) of scathed name, of forged identity with its built-in layer upon layer of the genuine the unreal the sort-of-authentic, the honest geocentric force of the gray area — what of all this? What of this complex, plumed and damned quest to… well, you know the story! I don't cast the first stone, mind you. Well, at least he hadn't stumbled going up on the stage to face, three or four hundred faces. Here in this tiny city where the printing press had its beginning, Mason wanted so much to leave an imprint: to inform with form, to push a verbal text beyond a pretext. What could he on the other hand take away with him? That ancient sound of the press's grinding and the hard stone of germanic faith…? He tried everything: forced connections, exchange and conflict, the secret design, you name it. You gotta give him a bit of credit I guess: he did reach these inheritors of another kind of difficult history without telling them about his ancestors of West Africa and the Middle Passage and the pit. And the centuries. What he said was, at best, symbolic: the plan was this: survive and try to survive without too much humiliation and gracelessness. Nietzsche was right on at least one point: writers wrote to conceal. The possible reality of the effort? Mason's good intentions were not writerly, folks. He wanted out from under. He spoke a convincing game. Hark! Whatcha do wid dat? Had Mason's fear tipped the scales — now that he was insanely sure his game'd been peeped, at least by me — or would he swing the other way toward arrogance and defiance, toward graceless combat with shadows armed-to-the-teeth with expert weaponry? You're close enough: Ask him. Mason, step forward, my son: speak!