Tales Read online

  Salute

  It started when I was coming up North Gun Road on my way from the flight line back to my barracks. Bright and hot afternoon, in Puerto Rico. The heavy engines scraping the heat down heavier. Overhead the big planes pulled their noses up, or dipped them coming across the flat blue water, clearing thick palms, the town of San Locas, the long high metal fence, then down, if the pilot was good on most of the wheels, down onto the long flat runway, the engines churning and spinning metallic light across the tar and cement. When planes left or came in, you’d turn your head, no matter how many times, just to watch. Maybe only a few seconds. But watch, till the thing disappeared on the ground, to be wheeled close to a hangar by the grease balls, or off and up, like into the sun, out across the motionless sky.

  I was walking slowly, or pretty slowly, in shabby two-piece fatigues, the kind with the color washed out. My fatigue hat was the same color, the brim frayed and bent so the edges fit down tight around my eyes. My stripes . . . there were two of them . . . bent at the edges away from the cloth of the fatigues, old soldier style, though I was only maybe a year and a half in, with another year and a half to go.

  The air force was where I did all my reading, or a great deal of it. At least it was where I started coming on like a fullup intellectual, and got silent and cagey with most of the troops, and stayed in my room most nights piling through Ulysses or Eliot or something else like that. Sometimes writing shreds of literature myself, most times about things of which I had very little knowledge at all. Death or Eternity or Love or something like that, weeping sometimes at my fate, hitched like a common fool (I’d come up with the word Plebeian a few days before, and used it to insult my duty sergeant who just retorted by doubling my duties. And he didn’t even know what the hell I was saying . . . though he asked one lieutenant later in the day, who told him . . . and of course the man felt more than justified piling it on me, who was, besides being an insufferable silent snob, a loose-mouth nigger . . . both at the same time) to the air force of the united states. Weep was what I did then, not even really, those long nights, being actually hurt. I was bugged maybe, but the thought of weeping was what animated me. It was deep and got me into a zone of feeling I’d only guessed existed before. Once really in college I walked up Georgia Avenue pretending to be a faggot, feeling alone and weeping in my hands. That was for effect. No it was a dull night in the dormitory, and the hopelessness of the thing, the circumstance, maybe, of being locked off the streets, by the foreignness of the city, Washington, D.C., and the inequitable foreignness of my own changing insides, drove me out, even against my will, onto those streets which revolved slowly in the fog like moors. But those were solid beginnings, or maybe the affair was older than that anyway, there are hundreds of halfway houses to any revelation, and the simplest fact of vision needs probably hundreds of seeings.

  Tears then were harder because the social context was more normal, that is, outwardly, college feeling, the twists of late adolescence are everywhere advertised as American phenomena anyone should understand. The army thing is too though, through the endless happiness of a Sad Sack or Marion Hargrove, or the Jewish soldier, Sam Levene, and the good strong cowboy, who are bosom buddies and whichever survives will in fact weep himself, over his friend’s body, hugging the dead flesh to his face, with the shells and enemy bursting all around this suddenly understandable passion. I remember seeing even a few intellectuals, shambling stupidly through their agonizing paces, the meaninglessness and essential cowardice of thought being everywhere evident at least to anyone who watched the thin four-eyed dope who covered the real world with words that impressed the producer’s mother.

  But this real army life was, like any reality, duller, less flashy than any kind of fancy, and finally a lot grimmer. So the quality of response, and observation. I’d read all day when I could, or walk down near the beaches. I’d read all night if nobody came in to talk or with an open jug of rum, and similar sad nostalgias. (These from my few friends, other fledgling thinkers and lost geniuses of feeling.) In those days we were finding out things wholesale, there was so much we didn’t know that could be picked up even from the Sunday Times, the air mail copy of which cost seventy-five cents, since it was flown down from the States Saturday night to keep all the colonists happy. I made lists of my reading, with critical comments that grew more pompous with each new volume, even my handwriting changed and developed a kind of fluency and archness that wanted to present itself as sophistication. I made my own frictions. I sent my own brain out into any voids I imagined I could handle. Actual trips into San Locas for whores and all-night drunks were kept to a minimum, since the projection of any despair I felt to be my own responsibility, and wanted such revelation orderly, or at least completely at my beck and call. I wanted to cry when I wanted to cry, in this sense, like any big businessman, loving only those accidents that I could use positively. So the urge to walk around dark waterfronts or hang out with ancient sex deviates or share the whore’s bed with two other soldiers, I kept to as few requests as possible. And just one deathly trip through the off limits venereal disease capital of the island, hotly pursued by pimps and their hunchbacked wives, who waved their knives and cursed what they thought was an America I loved, would suffice for weeks . . . since I felt then for the first time in my life, that words were equally as dangerous, or at least I knew they could set the blood flowing in my face as quickly as the stale breath of any Puerto Rican.

  But the only real thing reading does for anyone is to shut them up for a few hours, and let the other senses function as usefully as the mouth. Quiet already, a young man will grow sullen. Sullen, he will grow into stone. But any “normal” most times noisy city half-slick young college type hipster will close his mouth for all times, so ugly will have been the nature of his re-evaluation of the world, and his life.

  So the service became my first arena. The ideas that were coming in so quickly (in Chicago a few months earlier I had made a vow to myself that every day I would learn something . . . that afternoon I began to read Ulysses) I tried to implement immediately, although most times, I was so unsure as to what they were exactly, as life things, that I must have carried a very heavy frustration around with me like a gun. Side streets were tunnels into myself, on all those cold days. Nights would open me up, or twist my insides out, so that the blood of my desire flowed on sidewalks and even, naturally enough, into gutters. Chicago was the town I went through the most changes in. I slept with a couple of old women . . . or maybe only one of them was really old. She had some name that suggested the church to me. (Remembering, now, Lorca, and his understanding of the sexual basis to the Spanish Catholic church: Martyrs staggering toward that specifically Spanish heaven, the bodies full of arrows, blood shining, because of the painter’s mind, and the sun drawn with wide yellow staffs to portray it as divine. Spanish wars too, thick with deep greens and purples, popeyed diers strangling on their horses, death everywhere, beautiful laceration of the world.) And that was more guilt, if that’s really what it is that holds me so firmly to the world. At any rate I thought then, even so young, and still maintain that it is simple guilt that makes me move at all. Only feeling comes to me, and did then, plain and unexplainable.

  Without a thought, then, I walked around that desert, and held my screams in check. Most times in reverie like dilettante petit mal. There were holes in the world. Holes everywhere. I filled them with whatever I could find. My pain, or laughter, secret learnings, and staring hours at my face, picking shaving bumps, in the mirror.

  But now there was a thin blond man standing directly in front of me. He didn’t know me. He’d never even seen me before. (Maybe his mother got fucked by an escaped mad coon sex deviate who resembled the perspiration of my ideas. Or the father? I mean, there could have been some wild connection . . . did his wife buy a broom in my grandfather’s grocery store? No. In the South or the North? Ahhh. No she never been there.

  But now there was a thin blond man standing directly i
n front of me. He didn’t know me. He’d never even seen me before. (Maybe . . . but he recognized the clothes I wore, though he didn’t like their style. He wdn’t now, with what I’ve got on this minute, yellow corduroy pants, and a beard, so no progress finally.

  He recognized I was in the service same as him, only he was thin blond stupidly stern, and he required a service of me. A duty. He watched me I suppose move past him, with story wind blinding me. I didn’t see the cat, really. Or maybe I did, and figured I’d dreamed him, and wanted to dissolve him to get back to the part of the bit where I go down on the tall black girl in the swamps.

  “You in a hurry, Airman?” I heard. He recited the Magna Charta and Bill of Rights before I turned without moving to see him as he rode in with the afternoon, hot and alien. “You in a hurry?” What hurry would I be in? I had, I think I said, another year and a half in this shit. Where would I be going? I didn’t know. I wondered did this cat really have something important to say. But he was a lieutenant. First or second, and maybe from Baltimore or Wilmington. A place nobody has to think about, except for the ugly edge of South in his speech.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I heard. He tried to remember Joe Dimaggio’s consecutive game streak, his mother’s face, the key to his happiness, with fifty bucks a minute in a clean town near the Gulf. Shit, he was a human being too.

  “Don’t you know you’re supposed to salute officers?” I heard. He might almost have grinned if I hadn’t looked so evil. But that’s the way I look all the time. Check my fan club pictures and see. All autographed “With Emotional Prestige . . . All Best . . . Ray Robinson.” But I cdn’t tell him that then. I thought he wdn’t understand . . . that’s the kind of prick I was.

  When the focus returned. (Mine) I don’t know what that means. Focus, returned . . . that’s not precise enough. Uh . . . I meant, when I could finally say something to this guy . . . I didn’t have anything to say. But I knew that in the first place. I said, “Yes sir, I know all about it.” No, I didn’t say any such shit as that. I sd, “Well, if the airplanes blow up, Chinese with huge habits will drop out of the sky, riding motorized niggers.” You know I didn’t say that. But I said something, you know, the kind of shit you’d say, you know.

  Words

  Now that the old world has crashed around me, and it’s raining in early summer. I live in Harlem with a baby shrew and suffer for my decadence which kept me away so long. When I walk in the streets, the streets don’t yet claim me, and people look at me, knowing the strangeness of my manner, and the objective stance from which I attempt to “love” them. It was always predicted this way. This is what my body told me always. When the child leaves, and the window goes on looking out on empty walls, you will sit and dream of old things, and things that could never happen. You will be alone, and ponder on your learning. You will think of old facts, and sudden seeings which made you more than you had bargained for, yet a coward on the earth, unless you claim it, unless you step upon it with your heavy feet, and feel actual hardness.

  Last night in a bar a plump black girl sd, “O.K., be intellectual, go write some more of them jivey books,” and it could have been anywhere, a thousand years ago, she sd, “Why’re you so cold?” and I wasn’t even thinking coldness. Just tired and a little weary of myself. Not even wanting to hear me thinking up things to say.

  But the attention. To be always looking, and thinking. To be always under so many things’ gaze, the pressure of such attention. I wanted something, want it now. But don’t know what it is, except words. I cd say anything. But what would be left, what would I have made? Who would love me for it? Nothing. No one. Alone, I will sit and watch the sun die, the moon fly out in space, the earth wither, and dead men stand in line, to rot away and never exist.

  Finally, to have passed away, and be an old hermit in love with silence. To have the thing I left, and found. To be older than I am, and with the young animals marching through the trees. To want what is natural, and strong.

  Today is more of the same. In the closed circle I have fashioned. In the alien language of another tribe. I make these documents for some heart who will recognize me truthfully. Who will know what I am and what I wanted beneath the maze of meanings and attitudes that shape the reality of everything. Beneath the necessity of talking or the necessity for being angry or beneath the actual core of life we make reference to digging deep into some young woman, and listening to her come.

  Selves fly away in madness. Liquid self shoots out of the joint. Lives which are salty and sticky. Why does everyone live in a closet, and hope no one will understand how badly they need to grow? How many errors they canonize or justify, or kill behind? I need to be an old monk and not feel sorry or happy for people. I need to be a billion years old with a white beard and all of ASIA to walk around.

  The purpose of myself has not yet been fulfilled. Perhaps it will never be. Just these stammerings and poses. Just this need to reach into myself, and feel something wince and love to be touched.

  The dialogue exists. Magic and ghosts are a dialogue, and the body bodies of material, invisible sound vibrations, humming in emptyness, and ideas less than humming, humming, images collide in empty ness, and we build our emotions into blank invisible structures which never exist, and are not there, and are illusion and pain and madness. Dead whiteness.

  We turn white when we are afraid.

  We are going to try to be happy.

  We do not need to be fucked with.

  We can be quiet and think and love the silence.

  We need to look at trees more closely.

  We need to listen.

  Harlem 1965

  New-Sense

  Nothing changed in the passage. The same world. The same decisions. Only the role is altered, the “facing up.” Shadows stalk the same. Sounds hang. The hand on the face, knees bent to sit, quiet a fitful thing, and the honest people somehow cowed because they want to say so much filth on themselves, they cannot focus on the filth of their enemies.

  I lived in a small town, and grew up in a small town. I lived in large cities, and was small-town in the midst of them. I lived in big mansions that were small shacks huddled against the screams of the poor. I lived fantasies in the center of ugly reality. And reality was the feeling I wanted, and escaped to, from a fantasy world, where I cd have everything. Where I cd be everything.

  O.K., let it focus on women. My typing and thinking are slow after so long a layoff my fingers and the fingers of this skyscraper I carry around on my neck. But who can be involved in anything like screaming passion? Except your dick gets hard, and you want to hug somebody to it. You want some warmth. You want to lay back and look at the ceiling, and smoke grass and relax away from yr tedious ambitions.

  Gray romance. On and on. It comes again. Like after the sudden summer, being jammed up in a room talking shakespeare at night w/ a white girl, and then going for that for the difference it made. The slight difference, which is no slightness, but a narrow turning that pushed on, means you have arrived at a different place. A different world.

  But there was no burning screaming menace involved. No passion. Except the pushing and wondering if this was really the way beautiful things happened. The logic and rationales we posited. The sucking and licking. The turning and lying. The need to have each other, and be different for that.

  But essentially you find yrself w/ someone and that’s that. Unless some heavy thing can shake you. Or you’re just an ambling hunk of swine and bone, just poking along, rejecting this vegetable, or eating all of them, making thick layers of dead rot we must call our kindest memories. Our sentiment.

  But unless you think about it, focus on it, romance is dream. And what is with you is gray dull heavy. Tho it can lead to the deepest flash connection. And the spiritual value of looking up in the dim quiet and seeing the same face is an umbrella of God. Why we feel so deeply things might possibly be “organized.”

  You can either sit and think about what you’re doing, which
is then nothing at all. Or move, and faster, and faster, and zooooom, not even maybe get the chance to feel what’s happening. Nothing in private, nothing to think about, since it’s all presented, and there, and present to be talked about, and murdered over. No reflection.

  Dull romance. What life can finally be. What you sit and remember, and what you do, the really scorching part of everything, so fast it goes without you, though it has you in it.

  What we produce leads back to ourselves. Input-transducer-Output. And from the last we know something of the machine that produced it. All accident and passion, or the black man in black or the white man in white, feeding variables into a known piece of machinery.

  (O world I want to change you, and these fantasies are sundays in the wet silence, gathering my strength about me, clear and free, for a hard thing. Which must be done, and gotten, in order that peace come, and be free, and unconditional.)

  * * *

  We would be in love now. I could go make love to somebody right now, instead of hacking at this machine. Right now, lost second, I could. And pull them close to me, and be said to find and be in, LOVE. But there’s a kind of raw thin quality to it. A slotting. That I’m reacting to. A fixity and predictability to myself, in that context that holds me away. Even tho the context itself can never be predicted. (Unless yr abstract white man sitting with sequined beasts.