I was too stunned to speak. If I’d known she was this smart, I’d have given her an A the first week of the term. Wendy pulled me, tripping, holding my head ducked a little, down cement steps into a hallway of broken glass and garbage, then into a long apartment so hazed with the raw, ugly scent of marijuana hashish congolene and the damp smell of old cellars that I could taste as well as smell these violent odors as they coalesced, take hold of them in my hands like tissue. For a moment I was dizzy. Someone was sprawled dead drunk in the doorway. Sound shook the air. The floorboards trembled. Yet what most confounded me were the flashy men in white mink jackets who favored women, the women who looked, in this pale, fulgurating light, like men. Meaning was in masquerade. I felt my head going tighter. Let me linger too long and I would never regain the university. Remembering what she’d said, I felt tired, fat, and old. Damned if I seduced her. Damned if I didn’t. Ten, maybe fifteen dancers, like dark chips of paint peeled from the shadows, swept me from my briefcase and Wendy. Someone pressed a pellet into my palm. That scared me plenty. But what moved invisibly in this hazy room, this hollow box of light, this noise-curdled air, was more startling than the seen. Music. It played hob with my blood pressure. It was wild, sensual, clanging and languid by turns, loud and liquid, an intangible force, or — what shall I say? — spirit angling through the air, freed by cackling instruments that lifted me, a fat boy and student still, like a scrap of paper, then dropped me, head over heels, into a dark corner by a man or boy — I could not tell which — snorting white powder off a dollar bill. He had a dragon tattooed on his left arm, long braids like a Rastafarian, and a face only a mother could love. Lapping up the last of the powder, he gave me an underglance. “What you lookin’ at, chief?” “Nothing,” I said. “You gettin’ high?” “No,” I said. “You drinkin’?” “No.” “You queer?” “No!” “Then what the fuck you doin’ here?”
What had brought me here? Even I was no longer sure what brought me. I became aware that my palm was empty. Lord. My hand had brought the pellet to my lips without telling my brain. O Lord. Hours passed. Twice I tried to raise my arm, but could not budge. Neither could I look away. Silently, I watched. Helplessly, I accepted things to smoke, sniff, and swallow — blotter acid Budweiser raw ether Ripple. The room turned and leaned. Slowly, a new prehension took hold of me, echoing like a voice in my ear. That man, the one in the Abo Po, lightly treading the measure, was me. And this one dressed like Walt (or Joe) Frazier was me. If I existed at all, it was in this kaleidoscopic party, this pinwheel of color, the I just a function, a flickerflash creation of this black chaos, the chaos no more, or less, than the I. There was an awful beauty in this. Seer and seen were intertwined — if you took the long view — in perpetuity. As it was, and apparently shall ever be, being sang being sang being in a cycle that was endless. I gazed, dizzily, back at the girl. She danced now fast, now slow. I followed her minutely as she moved. And then, perhaps I suffered hypnosis, or yet another hallucination, but my eyelids lowered, relaxing her afterimage into an explosion of energy, a light show in the blink, the pause before the world went black, and I suddenly saw Wendy — not as the girl who shotgunned me with blackmail back at Padelford Hall, who made me jump like a trained seal; who stood outside me as another subject in a contest of wills — but, yes, as pure light, brilliance, fluid like the music, blending in a perfectly balanced world with the players Muslims petty thieves black Jews lumpenproles Daley-machine politicians West Indians loungers Africans the drug peddlers who, when it came to the crunch, were, it was plain, pure light, too, the Whole in drag, and in that evanescent, drugged instant, I did indeed desperately love her.
Hours later, when I came out of this drug coma, the building was full of daylight, quiet, the loud party long past. Things, no longer hazed, had a stylized purity of line. Was there more to come? Was I done? I wondered if I had dreamed the connectedness of Being the night before, or if now, awake, I dreamed distinctions. I didn’t know where I was for an instant. My bones felt loose, unlocked in my body. Through misty eyes I saw Wendy in an upholstered chair nearby, her arms around one brown knee, one bare foot on my briefcase, looking at me sadly, then away. I was twisted in covers on the mattress of a low bed, under a bare electric bulb, wearing only long flannel underwear limp from my sweat. Her bedroom was rayed by sunlight, cool as a basement. She sighed, a long stage sigh: “You poor fool.” Her voice was flat and tired. “You’re still thinking like a fat boy.” She pulled off her blouse, her skirt, her other boot, and threw her cigarette still burning into a corner. As she lay down, her cold feet flat against me, I lifted my arm to let her move closer, and at last let my mind sleep.
MOVING PICTURES
You sit in the Neptune Theater waiting for the thin, overhead lights to dim with a sense of respect, perhaps even reverence, for American movie houses are, as everyone knows, the new cathedrals, their stories better remembered than legends, totems, or mythologies, their directors more popular than novelists, more influential than saints — enough people, you’ve been told, have seen the James Bond adventures to fill the entire country of Argentina. Perhaps you have written this movie. Perhaps not. Regardless, you come to it as everyone does, as a seeker groping in the darkness for light, hoping something magical will be beamed from above, and no matter how bad this matinee is, or silly, something deep and maybe even too dangerous to talk loudly about will indeed happen to you and the others, before this drama reels to its last transparent, frame.
Naturally, you have left your life outside the door. Like any life, it’s a messy thing, hardly as orderly as art, what some call life in the fast lane: the Sanka and sugar-doughnut breakfasts, bumper-to-bumper traffic downtown, the business lunches, and a breakneck schedule not to get ahead but simply to stay in one place, which is peculiar, because you grew up in the sixties speeding on methadone and despising all this, knowing your Age (Aquarian) was made for finer stuff. But no matter. Outside, across town, you have put away for ninety minutes the tedious, repetitive job that is, obviously, beneath your talents, sensitivity, and education (a degree in English), the once beautiful woman — or wife — a former model (local), college dancer, or semiprofessional actress named Megan or Daphne, who has grown tired of you, or you of her, and talks now of legal separation and finding herself, the children from a former, fright-eningly brief marriage whom you don’t want to lose, the mortgage, alimony, 1RS audit, the aging, gin-fattened face that once favored a rock star’s but now frowns back at you in the bathroom mirror, the young woman at work born in 1960 and unable to recall John Kennedy who, after the Christmas party, took you to bed in her spacious downtown loft, perhaps out of pity because your mother, God bless her, died and left you with $1,000 in debt before you could get the old family house clear — all that shelved, mercifully, as the film starts, first that frosty mountaintop ringed by stars, or a lion roaring, or floodlights bathing the tips of buildings in a Hollywood skyline: stable trademarks in a world of flux, you think, surefire signs that whatever follows — tragedy or farce — is made by people who are accomplished dream merchants. Perhaps more: masters of vision, geniuses of the epistemological Murphy.