Mason was up — as he rapped to students of Florence. “My Apple, as they say, was not theirs: I smelled whisky on breaths. Gwen, my oldest sister, my mother too, wrote to me rarely. I was alone: in isolation: as though in a country where I didn't know the language. Casual affairs clung to me like fish-smell in the beard. Appletrees nowhere in sight. I screwed married women on kitchen floors: pale fire, pale leeway: possessed with keys to their own dark places these women went mad, on their knees before broken or drunk husbands, clutching Lower East-side yellow rent-stubs and smearing their red, red blood on Flea Market and Klein's furniture. They stayed hidden in First Avenue-deadness even when there was a Way Out. Their Deadness was equal to my own. And of course there were the young women so different from the older, married ones. How different? They were not shut-in damsels waiting to be serenaded below their windows. No eighty-miles-per-hour jerk was going to climb the vines of their castle-wall to get an axle-grease-coated finger on the elastic of their Bloomingdale-bloomers. My concern was also still Chicago: for the boogie-woogie oobop-shebam girl with sweat under her arms. They were doing the Twist, the Pony, the Cakewalk, the Superman — a dance I invented. The pill later did not rhyme with castle. Such a rich history: I'll never know how I spaced-out in Amesville on a John Deere, up to my nose in wet cowshit: I couldn't even see that Cezanne's Portrait of Henri Gasquest wasn't really Rod Steiger posing. Although gnatcatchers and beetrappers were after my sanity from the start, I turned out to be Somebody. Wesley could have, too, but he had no need. I took issue with the ache of my own body. Rather than leaning against my own death or ecstasy, I — Pokerface, Boston Blacky, Wild Dick, Holy Joe, Fingers, Mister Zilch — discovered Stein's American space and in that terrain sweated my way along the floor (ground, desert) of an orgy of heavy laughter, dry tongues; voiceless friction, dry areas, yellow eyes, red skin, sharp fingernails; breasts uneven and staccato teethprints in shoulders and necks; climbed into frowns, broke my way through polka-dot shame and awkward, uh, long sentences, twisted rhythm. In other words, I made direct contact. I pried open and entered salient spirits: slept well while growling, yodeling and chewing sounds surrounded me: as confusing as that scene where Florence played a bonyleg-squaw shielding the infants as the braves sent arrows into General George Armstrong Custer. She must be twice my age, eh? Never mind… Had I been the pilot of a two-engine I might have gotten a wider view of Stein's American space: from the aircraft I might have watched the wavers below wave at my waving propellers — might have thrown artful kisses to those poor suckers stuck to the terra cotta: those Goldilocks, Big Bens, Fatsos, Molls, Babyfaces, all of ’em! Innocence fun-crushed by tangy sadness, eh? From up there, ohboy… the shadow of my craft bewitching the pink earth with its purple shadow: tits for mountains. I might have looked, from on high, into my own darkness, my potshots, my wild guesses, my calls, this bamblustercated fear, my own—: not for perception or higher wisdom but for the oceans, seas, deserts, cities beyond Celt, that were surely in there. Know what I mean? But, like everybody else, I was stuck by gravity to the spongy earth: in birth action death. Framed. So by the time I first drifted to The Apple — with unreliable Celt just above my head — I needed quick solutions: to the mystery of married women; Deadness; being spaced-out; the problem of wild oats; unfaithful muses; the elusiveness of Stein's space; orgies; but more particularly I wanted a formula to solve the problem of the inherent muddle inevitably found at the bottom of, in the final stitch of, any given perspective. This was not to say: the world, history, couldn't be changed. People made it all up: it could be remade. But how, when and where. I played a lot of angles: for lack of an answer I got together a gang of shadows and captured the black angels, let them down into the slow waters of my own bad eyesight: Albert Ryder was back there riding a white horse against the dawn. The angels were supposed to protect: yet they could not prevent dancing devils from lynching my father at daybreak. I found pieces of my mother's flesh and hair in my bowl of soup. I tore open the chest of history and hundreds of years of blood, gall, acid, crossed-wires, frazzled brain tissue, broken promises, disremembrances, killings galore, starvations, diseases rampant as—. It all poured out. Too much for the normal eye. Terrible: sentimental, romantic. I'll never escape. Times when the hard, cold precise word, thing, refuses to make your point. Poor Amygism. I tried once being the king. Prayed for goodness but kept doing all the wrong things. Love? I gave up: it was hopeless. Wore a shabby beard, carried a tall staff — befitting my rank, spoke to everybody I met about the possible solutions to perspectives, and, uh, about other matters, too. I'm getting long-winded. Don't want to bamboozle you. It's just that I'm still sorta… Never mind… ”
He was in the bank when everything went out of focus. Next in line, he never got his American Express Travellers Cheques cashed. The floor turned slightly. Pictures reproduced from works by Raphael and Pinturicchio in silver frames behind the counter slid sideways. Mason felt as transparent as a metalpoint on blue handmade paper. His panic was reflected in the eyes of the clerks and other customers. The guard was the first to cry out. He was an old man who fished in his holster for his pistol without luck. The tilt continued for… who could tell how long. Time itself left the space. The ceiling cracked, slightly. “Che cos'è?” “Oh no!” “Oh no!” Was the ancient city of Florence being bombed? Mason found himself huddled in a corner with the others. A man who was probably the bank manager started shouting for everybody to go to the basement but nobody made it. Why? Six men with ski masks came in with submachine guns. They shot the guard then told everybody else to make like they were praying to Dante or God or David or Michelangelo himself. They all got their hands up. Although Mason was funny at times, this time he wasn't shaking like Willy Best as he held his hands above his head. His eyes didn't buck. His teeth didn't chatter. The floor beneath them continued to rumble. Five gunmen aimed their guns on the clerks and the manager. One took care of Mason and the other customers and potential customers. He kept talking to them in a Bogart voice, which sounded pretty funny in Italian. An old woman among them fell to her knees and started praying to Lazarus and a fifteenth century Tuscan pilgrim Mason had never heard of. The floor cracked as the clerks filled two canvas sacks with lire at gunpoint. When they finished, the plate-glass window facing the via D. Corso flew to smithereens! Mason couldn't help wondering if some nasty streak of bad luck was following him. He sort of wished he was sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying a glass of wine with Italo Calvino… When the police arrived, minutes after the robbers fled in their oxydized gray Fiat, the bank — as all of Florence — was still shaking like a drunk the-morning-after.
The bed in his room at the Argentina was lumpy. Sleep difficult. He was beginning to fear sleep anyway: it held too much danger. Yet he had no choice: the asymmetrical shot of a runner — himself? — (no longer a swimmer)… What mocking sound out there? Bats in the…? Nightmare alley… Hay, w-wait!… wasn't that an old Bogart-Eddie… No, you're thinking of The Wagons Roll at Night. Go to sleep, tough guy. You've made your own bed of nails. He who lurks in the company of hyped-up cons, charmed thieves, rejected marks, the damned in flight from search warrants, outlaws with golden arms, carpetbaggers, elastic molls, addicts who wheeze, killers in Little Caesar-shoes, forbearers in search of big money, Cagney-dudes turned Camus-sharp, Studs Lonigan dupes, wild-side-walkers, dudes in Houdini-getups whispering farewell my lovely, and ex-skateboard freaks with butterflies tattooed on their proletarian buttocks, cannot expect to soar in unsentenced clean flight with restful sober falcons. Maltese? No, no… sleep. Your days will become indistinguishable. You thought you were like a gray boy, could grow up and marry a Vassar girl, settle down on Moby-Dick, your yacht, out there…? Pull—pull harder: conflict is connecting with yang and exchange is tangled into yin. Thought you smarter than Invisible Man, joker! You pastoral cowboy on the run! Will you run to faith or with facts? The priest will hand you over to cops. Vice versa: if Gary Cooper or Wayne don't get you first at gunpoint, gunslinger. What was that noise — out there… in, i-in, uh, the hall… Public Enemy ain't here now, bud, to spoon feed ya. For crysake! Clean up your act — grow up! Pity: you can't turn to anything ’cause you don't believe: oh, you remember hearing about the Black Madonna in Poland? if you were a God-fearing Christian you'd be able to trot with your guitar or harmonica up the Jazna Gora at Pauline and sink to your holy knees before the icon and beg forgiveness or go to the Holy Grail or… oh, hell, forget it. You think Mexico or South America the answer. How can you be sure you're not being observed right now, that Schnitzler and Signard and Armegurn are not all connected? Maybe you should've never left the ghetto, swindler: might've been better to marry your secret design or, yeah, how about the first grownup woman to take your skinny butt to bed: remember Mabel Study? Presser with thick arms, fried hair, red eyes with yellow rims: rusty feet, huge sagging mammary glands: and when those hard black thighs opened on that two-bit hotel bedroom you smelled her machine's steam lift to befuddle your face. Yet your youth and inexperience and, bygolly, your teenage hardon, led the way. Mentally maybe you never left that plateau! Did you leave that episode baptized in her steam? You humped away at her hardness till you couldn't hump anymore. Then you knew she went home to her dingy house full of ill-conceived hungry children. You on the other hand threw your “proud” head back and went in search of… of what?… to have married her: a sturdy life of brainrot to protect you from this gruesome plight. Nobody knew your name then. Nobody knows it now. Native son? Naw. You remember Defoe — ha! “My true name is so well known… that it is not to be expected I should set my name on the account of my family to this work… It is enough to tell you… the name Moll Flanders so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am… ” You're now on a roller-coaster to the… May as welclass="underline" O picaro! You devilish old Lazarillo de Tormes! Huh? God protects the victims…?