On the way out I stopped for the Intercontinental Rotary AGT, like you. We flew quickly into Chicago’s O’Hare on the same Astro-Jet. The lapel card I’d had laminated in a New York subway station before leaving here admitted me as a member of the Working Press and with barely a glimpse of the Loop’s broad and massive streets I made the select and newly sprayed Early-Bird Session of The Inner Group in time to grab the last of the Non-Participant chairs along the wall. Two leggy “Hi”-saying beauts from Utah U.’s U-shaped campus passed coffee and crullers to those sitting seminar round the frame of long leather tables, and after two Religious Leaders with hairy wrists led us in prayers (the second silent and in some instances secret), you were introduced by past-President Dr. Dave Dickens, a carrotcrested insurance mogul, whose inter-fingered hands on the table completed the comfortable corral of his fore-arms surrounding his coffee cup. Eventually you finished staring at your whitepowdered chocolate cruller and stared at Dickens who was by now calling you “virtually a national resource, a thinker yes, but a thinker meriting our particular attention in terms of his special field of moral cost-consciousness, the coördination of overall aims. How, that is, can we underwrite in our young people our nation’s ancient priorities?” You looked right at me and I let go the ghost of a grin. It was Tuesday. As you bit off half your cruller and at once began to speak muffled words, I thought two things: This man may do himself in; but what has his life to do with mine?
But long before you’d downed a leisurely length of sentence while chuckling (bitterly and I think even humming) through an initial premise that the U.S. heads for a field-state superposing new levels of both dilution and density, I was seeing again a prospect in acts of yours I observed during the year or two before we moved into this building.
It was back here in New York, and you had come from a platform where toward the end of your spiel the loyal abstractions Courage versus Love that you were squeezing springily together to the ritual shock and wry amusement of black and white leaders from the Old Settlement, Inc., began for me to fade among and become equal to a number of vivid physical distinctions: the woven kink of your hair like sea or land penetrated by the clean pale promontory of temple receding either side; the glass of yellow fluid you reached for and sipped in mid-peroration so a small part of its perspicuous self dripped to the floor delicately splashing your black wing-tips; the nail of your left little finger you hooked into your nostril turning away from the audience, and then at the mouth of that nostril the dot of blood you discovered when you put your nail up there again to try to finish the job. Appalled, you left the stage and just as you passed out of my sight you looked it seemed right at me as if startled by applause I had set off; for they were clapping, they thought you’d really finished. Well, an hour later I had followed you to B&A’s, where you spoke of the failure of your attack on liberal dogma but then were flattered by a denizen of that bar who with an erroneous east-coast Anglo-vowel called you “after all, a polymoth, a polymoth, no matter what.” But in a high state of nerves you said you now saw you had not added to the Available Energy and then said, “My own medicine, my own medicine,” drank three Topaz Neons, picked off the brown clot and put it on the dark varnished bar at the right elbow of the denizen (from Scituate, Mass.) who said really he could hardly see it. Leaving your tie and billfold beside the blood, you passed behind the denizen and strayed out the door just missing my extended saddle shoe. The Life Insurance dome banged five p.m. and as I and the denizen behind me coming to the doorway watched the odd, though neatly duate, game you were playing with the premature witch who had just written VAYA CON EDIS on the hoarding next to the ocelot shop and who was on her daily way to collect free leftover macaroni salad before the business deli closed, we saw beyond you two the four insurance clerks advancing. If I interrupt this scene of interruption near its end just as the denizen pushes in front of me and before the four clerks arrive at B&A’s, it is in order to make best use of the much later event of Dickens’ Inner Group. Dr. Dave smiled privately. Several of the Inner Group were bending this way and that, and so was I in my Non-Participant chair, and my stomach roused.
One hairy wrist didn’t want its cruller and gave it to the hairy wrist that had led the silent prayer. I wonder, Dom, if you recall the last thing you said, and with a poignant lameness looking down at your untouched coffee some of whose good Chicago cream I saw a short time later had surfaced in a cool arabesque: “We owe it to our children to make mistakes with them; but let our mistakes be pivotal, let them be exciting.” You seemed set to go on, but then after a moment looked up surprised, as if imprinting — and too late — a delayed exclamation point.
During Question Time you attacked Religious Leaders. The attack exploded westward toward the setting sun and its afternoon papers, and you (you devil) managed to catch the setting sun that day by accidentally eluding me and not attending the night congress of the I.R. Annual Get Together where, in my laminated dinner jacket, I sat in vain till past-President Dickens whispered to incoming President Deirdre Reardon, Nun-at-Large for some regional religion, who then announced that “prior commitments on the west coast” had forced you to cancel. And I was off (as quick as thought) across a toe or two along my aisle, then to hotel, cab rank, O’Hare, and via neutral skies to the brink of the Pacific.
But I foresaw. For I had seen. Your morning performance in the Inner Group did not amaze me, for the simple reason that almost two years before as the denizen from Scituate or did he say North Scituate and I noted the advance of the four clerks that afternoon of your self-styled failure before the black and white leaders of Old Settlement, you teamed gratuitously with the premature witch. On the corner was the red fire alarm box she was accustomed to go around three or four times and this afternoon of your bloodied nose on the wry platform and the prematurely applauding audience and, left on the bar inside, your tie and billfold, you caught the premature witch as she reached her ritual alarm box preparatory to crossing the street, and you said something I infer must have been “Let’s go halves.” Whereupon you each did semi-circles about the box, meeting first on the curb side then on the inboard side once and twice — but the magic didn’t work — till like a virtually sane person she stopped you and said, “Friday I go round here just three times before I cross the street; can’t get to the deli too soon; you got better things to do.” You said, “No better things, no worse—many things.” Your prior mutterings about “medicine” demonstrated plainly what your trouble was: you were failing to keep a clear passage at least between if not equinear a couple of your ideas, Field-state and Commitment. You were becoming uninsulatable.