He is being contemptuously superior with his old friend, who, to Dan’s patronizing amusement, is an insurance underwriter. Dan, you may be interested to know, works as a clerk in the main branch of the Sacramento Public Library, but has told his friend that he runs a small literary agency in San Francisco, “so much fresh talent there,” he says. Why he lives so far from the oven of creativity is not brought up. Dan sneers at the friend, the bar, the Village, at poor old New York itself, bastion of all that is wrong with everything. Then, suddenly, and, one might say, belligerently, he begins to recite a rigid poem by James Fremont. When he finishes, he looks smugly at his old friend. “I still write the occasional poem,” he says. The old friend is happily impressed, and they order another round. “How’s Claire, by the way?” the friend asks. “You ever see her?” Dan looks at him, his face rotten with disgust. “Claire?” he says. “Fuck Claire! You know she won’t,” and tears come to his eyes, “she won’t let me see Justin?” He takes out a handkerchief and pokes at his eyes. “That boy was my whole life.”
I have no idea what happened to Dan or Claire as the years passed, although somebody told me that he’d heard that Claire married an ex-priest who wasn’t quite sure he was heterosexual; he also had a limp. This seems much too plausible to be true. Justin, as you know, became a musician, so to speak. But Dan more or less just disappeared into one of many California towns, most of them in the desolate miles of woods between the North Bay and the Oregon border, a land that bursts into flames each fall, to the residents’ enduring surprise.
I have, I’m sorry to say, no nice conclusion to this story, which is, I admit, not much of a story after all. But concerning Dan, at least, I can, and will, borrow a few words from Scott Fitzgerald’s chronicle of another splintered and self-deluded man as coda: “In any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.”
LOST IN THE STARS
The way which can be followed is not the true way.
People are, for the most part, locked into their minds, and their professions of belief in various ideologies or faiths, their opinions and scattered absurdities are but the knowable aspects of the lives they move through as best they can. This may be because of the regularity with which language pretends a simplification, a clear categorization of the particularized darkness that is the mind’s. And so religions and credos and their stupefying shibboleths are often spectacularly successful in duping and soothing us, their creaking yet elaborate language systems shamelessly representing themselves as the contraptions of God or his long-dead confidants. This is comforting folly, and we know that the most reprehensibly smug creeping Jesus lives, much of the time, despite his rigid beliefs, in the midnight of his brain, lost therein like the rest of us.
Consider the young, reasonably well-mannered men who killed so many people on September 11th. There they are, as unremarkably, as sadly ordinary as any representative American one can conjure up: anonymous, with their 5.75 haircuts and Timex “Explorer” watches, GAP T-shirts and overpriced running shoes, Hanes briefs and white athletic socks, and their Dockers khakis. They may well be full of Domino’s cardboard pizza or Big Macs, turning, despite their love of Allah, into chemical-laced excrement in their bowels. They might as well be American, citizens of Big Faucet, South Dakota, or Willow Lake, New Jersey. Insofar as their linguistic commerce goes, they are surely the salt of the earth: “I like very much to learn fly big jet plane nice, O.K., good buddy?” Of spiritual matters large and small, they have no doubts, they have no qualms, their relationship with their morose and irritable God is one that would make the most dedicated Bible-thumper, yea, with snakes and timbrels, screaming and writhing, white roses and accordions, and thunder and lightning, wild with envy. Their stern yet loving Father has certainly spoken to these men in thus wise: “Kill, my young stalwarts, this is my inscrutable message to you, oh, don’t ask why. And know that paradise awaits for all eternity, with its dark-eyed virgins anxious to make your acquaintance.”
These young men know that Allah is pleased that thousands of infidels will soon be slaughtered, and since they are unbelievers, there will be no virgins for them. No halvah or falafel or lamb with rice either. Who knows what becomes of infidel dogs? On the other hand, there may be a shock in store for those soldiers of jihad, if, by some unutterable metaphysical quirk, they are made aware, in the smallest fraction of time, before oblivion, that can still be thought of as time, that “Allah” is a congeries of letters, a linguistic notion, if you will, like “flogiston” or “aporia” or “quark,” and that their deaths are — not to put too fine a point on it — meaningless. Oh, oh. Peace be upon them.
Regard this salesman, a meat-cutting-machine salesman, standing at an ice-crusted window in a room of a so-so hotel in Ohio or Pennsylvania, perhaps somewhere in the Poconos, the land, for so many years, of ga-ga honeymooners delirious in their heart-shaped bathtubs. He is looking out on the semicircular gravel drive that leads to Mohawk Boulevard and thence to the interstate; where, even now, as he smokes and tries to ignore the fact of his appalling boredom and small, regular failures, his petty defeats and debts, his emptiness and dismay, overpriced cars slam down this suicide alley, their drivers — let me be blunt — wholly uncaring about God in any of his disguises or costumes. They want to get home alive, just once more, peace be upon them. God can look after himself.
The salesman puts out his cigarette, his mind turning over darkly and heavily, and, with Barney Miller playing soundlessly and in washes of anemic color on the Korean swivel television in the corner, he takes off his pants and Hanes briefs, removes from his worn bag a pair of black sateen panties with nylon lace trim at the leg openings, pulls them on, and begins to masturbate. He is careful to keep his erect penis confined, the feel of the sateen on his throbbing phallus always does the trick for him. His shadowed mind with its sketchy and occulted thoughts of love and success, of his wife and the women at the branch office in Philadelphia, is concentrated in this solitary act; his secret self finds some succor in the physical world in which he tries his best to live and live each day. And he may thus soothe, for a quarter hour, his persistent malaise, he may find some small fugitive peace.
This act, tawdry as it is, may be thought of as strange and even perverse behavior, but only because, perhaps, I point it out to you, so that you may realize that you know, casually, this salesman. You both buy the paper every morning at the same store, the paper and Tic Tacs and cigarettes. “’Morning,” you both say. I agree that it’s hard to think of this man, with his balding head and scuffed L.L. Bean moccasins, whacking off, far from home, in a pair of cheap black panties. All secrets are dark.
The salesman, for whatever reason, has told himself that his wife has permitted him to use her panties for this cloistered act, whereas he bought them, of course, a few days earlier in a Wal-Mart outside Wilkes-Barre. Oddly, he is thinking of Mickey Rooney in the film My Name Is Aram, at the moment of his orgasm, which arrives blissfully but unexpectedly. As he surrenders completely to the weirdly thrilling and bridelike feelings that overwhelm him, gouts of semen spurt through the panties and onto the coarse bedspread.
The salesman lights a cigarette, and after depositing the soaked panties in the bathroom sink and cleaning himself off with toilet paper and a hand towel, he begins to scrub, nervously, at the soiled bedspread with tap water, the towel, and, for reasons beyond his comprehension, one of his worn, unfashionable ties. He is horrified at the possibility of the maid discovering his onanism when she comes in to make up the bed in the morning. The fucking maid, Oh Jesus, the fucking maid, he says to himself, and then suffers a massive coronary infarction and falls dead, bashing his head on the little writing desk that holds his wallet, keys, change, notebook, cigarettes, lighter, all the now useless junk of his life. Later in the week, his wife, faced with the fact of the semen-clotted panties in the sink, prefers to think that her dead husband was cruelly and disturbingly unfaithful to her with a perverted slut of a whore tramp of the Ohio or Pennsylvania evening. Otherwise — what to think? Peace be upon her.