THERE’S A LONG line at the post office. We’re packed in like sardines. I check out the sardine in front of me. She’s reading a book. This particular sardine is book-crazy. Whenever I see someone reading, I have to know what book, if it’s good, what it’s about.
“What’s it about?’ ”
“What’s what about?”
“Your book.”
“It’s a novel.”
“What kind?”
“Science fiction.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
She brushes aside her red hair. Some women’s eyes scare you. She’s been over-cruised and she’s sick of it.
“What do you want anyway?”
She’s talking loud.
“Nothing, nothing.”
”Leave me alone, all right?”
“Forget it,” I stammer.
Most of the people in line have turned around to watch the spectacle of the Negro attacking the white woman. One girl with a shaved head up towards the front of the line wheels around, rage in her breast. She raises her voice to tell everyone how we’re all maniacs, psychopaths and hassle-artists who are always coming on to women. “They’re never around in winter but when summer comes they crawl out of their holes, whole bunches of them, to hassle people with their scarves and drums and bracelets and bells. The hell with their folklore! And it’s not just the niggers! Now we’ve got the Latinos with their chains around their necks, their necklaces, their rings, their broaches, pushing baubles on us in the cafés. If it’s not a fake Mayan jewel, it’s their body. That’s all those Latins think about.” At first the audience agrees with the shaved-head girl; who among them hasn’t been importuned by a folkloric cruise? But to attack the trade of those poor South Americans and the tradition of the Negroes is going too far.
A man in his forties jumps in. Your typical union man. Worn face. “You can’t be prejudiced,” he says, “lots of guys hassle women and not all of them are black. If you think that about blacks, what do you think they think about us? We colonized them! Sure, coming onto a woman is degrading for her, but it’s an innocent game compared to the slave trade.” For a moment everyone is too shocked by the perversity of the argument to react. Once they get over it, the shaved-head girl counterattacks. “Tell me about it! The colonizers played out their phallic domination fantasies by crushing other people and now that the time’s come to pay the bill, this bastard is offering our women for the niggers to fuck.” Our women! She said our women. Everyone must think she’s a lesbian defending her territory.
Finally, I manage to change my address. I stroll down St. Catherine. The heat is intolerable. I go into a bank building, cool with air conditioning, and guess who I see: Miz Shaved Head with the girl from the post office. She got her. Cruising is practically impossible with that kind of unfair competition.
A Remington 22 That Belonged to Chester Himes
BOUBA CAME BACK from the store. Except for some dehydrated potatoes and rotten onions, we had run out of provisions. Bouba fell for the Pellatt’s speciaclass="underline" a pork shoulder at $1.09 a pound, fresh green onions at $2.39, six boxes of Campbell’s Soup at 29 cents each, dish soap (we were in dire need) for $1.87, a carton of creamy margarine (disgusting) for 59 cents and, at the regular price, a kilo of iodized salt, a 25-pound sack of Uncle Ben’s rice and three cans of spaghetti.
Bouba is making chicken and rice with peanut sauce. The smell is inspirational. I sit down at the typewriter in hopes of forcing something out of a Remington 22 that actually saw Joan Baez in the flesh. I bought the machine at a junkshop on Ontario Street that sells pedigreed typewriters. Old machines. The guy sells them to young writers. Who else but a young writer would be foolish enough to go for such an obviously commercial ploy? Who else would consider himself a writer just because he owned a machine that belonged to Chester Himes, James Baldwin or Henry Miller? This guy pitches his machines according to the kind of book you want to write. If it’s a paranoid book, he’ll sell you the schizophrenic machine that belonged to Tennessee Williams. If you’re looking for a suicide machine, there’s Mishima’s old model. For those in the family saga game, Joyce Carol Oates’s Olivetti will do the trick. Want to write a bestseller? Step right up and purchase the solid gold heap that Puzo owned. And if you’re interested in the tangled destinies of a young Southerner and his neighbors (a Jewish genius and a disturbed young Polish girl), take Bill Styron’s Corona. How can one choose among this embarrassment of riches? It’s like Ali Baba’s cave for a young writer. The junkman’s voice left me no repose, praising Salinger’s discreet machine, Gabrielle Roy’s tin one, the prudish machine of Virginia Woolf, etc. Here’s the terrorist machine that the Black Panthers used to type their communiqués — it’s a portable, of course. The choice boiled down to Hemingway’s old Underwood and the Remington 22 that belonged to Chester Himes. I took Himes.
I’VE ALWAYS HAD this old shoebox full of notebooks, with a journal I’ve kept on and off for three years, and stacks of cards where I note down sentences that come to me, sketches, bits of dialogue overheard in bars, short descriptions of chance encounters, objects and animals, thoughts on jazz, girls, hunger — that sort of thing. A kind of autobiographical grab-bag where the beginning of a novel, an unfinished journal and a missed appointment are all thrown together. What can be saved from this amorphous mass? Burning it is the only reasonable thing to do. I dry out the sink, set the box in it and prepare for immolation. (“Ta ha. It was not to distress you that we revealed the Koran.” Sura XX, 1.)
THE CHICKEN and rice is ready. I set the table. Bouba puts on a Coleman Hawkins record (Blues for Yolande) that he cut with Ben Webster.
“You writing, man?”
“I’m trying.”
“What’s it about?”
Bouba never reads what I write. He likes to talk about it, build a project, discuss a subject, but reading a manuscript — never. He abhors being presented with a fait accompli.
“I think I’m onto something big.”
“Great!” Bouba looks happy. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s a novel.”
“No kidding. A novel? A real novel?”
“Well. a short novel. Not a real novel — more like fantasies.”
“Knock it off, man. Leave that number to the disabused, used-up critics who don’t have any more juice. A novel’s a novel. Short or long. Tell me about it.”
“There’s nothing to it. It’s about a guy, a black, who lives with a friend who spends all day lying on a couch meditating, reading the Koran, listening to jazz and screwing when it comes along.”
“Does it come along?”
“I suppose it does.”
“Hey, man, I like that, I really do. I like the idea of the guy who doesn’t do fuck-all.”
“Of course you do. You’re my model.”
“Writers! You can’t trust them, they’re all bastards!”
Bouba lets loose a big jazz laugh.
“Then what happens?”
“Nothing in particular.”
Hawkins’s sax plays “Body and Soul” (1939).
Cruising in Place
MIZ LITERATURE arrives just in time with a cheesecake in a white box tied with a pink ribbon. Bouba produces some wine dregs he’s been hiding in one of the folds of the couch. We wash it down. Miz Literature can’t stay too long. She has a class tonight. I like these whirlwind visits.
Miz Literature takes a little wine. Two fingers. She’s one of these giddy drunks. She dances across the room with all the grace of an albatross, running into the couch, the table, the fridge and the Japanese screen. She takes off her shoes and throws them at the ceiling. Then it’s on with the dance, with awkward strength and transparent joy. She is wearing a white dress with a black collar and charcoal tights. The floor is littered with butts and stained with drying puddles of beer. Miz Literature dances on, unaware of the filth. She’s a flower on a dung-heap. Then she slows down and collapses on the couch next to Bouba, with her arms crossed.