The train was filled with spirits of the dead stained with the dross that hung in the air, not from New Jersey, but from its filthy neighboring states like Pennsylvania. The train was filled with a spirit of dandruff and with basketball players … with their portable lives. And passengers were employing telekinesis to get lunch rather than wait on line and the air was filled with slow moving sandwiches, but now and then an alarming biological clock-radio would spark a mini-disturbance. Then in Trenton, a girl named Polly sat next to me wearing white patent leather shoes with little straps and she peered at me as if I were the creditor-dodging dabbler in laudanum and abnormality from whom she had undoubtedly fled, but, in the unblemished light of thorough scrutiny, the resemblance apparently vanished, and when she got a big package of tootsie rolls out of a shiny little white purse, I dove for my cigarettes, almost surrendering to impulse once more, almost blurting out “this is the planet of escapes, let’s you and I swallow the key and stay awhile,” almost quoting the astronomer from It Came From Outer Space, “… this may be the biggest thing that ever happened,” but I became nauseated by the confluent odors of tootsie roll and Prince Matchabelli, and in my pants my penis drooped like the long ash of a burning cigarette. And then we stopped in front of a large Johnson & Johnson plant to let cattle cross over the tracks. So beautiful. Through the plant’s grounds ran a network of pseudo-Venetian canals filled with the most luxuriant lotions and powders for the delectation of both rail and automobile traffic. And shortly after we resumed our progress, I resumed my observation of the passing Jersey flora.
I arrived at my parents’ winter home in time to see the LaConti Construction crew unload from its truck the nine-foot marble head from Daniel Chester French’s statue “Neapolitan Fisherboy Listening To A Short-Wave Radio.” In his desperation to find me a suitable birthday gift, Father had hired LaConti to decapitate the statue which was on loan to the Newark Museum from the National Gallery. I had always been very keen on French’s work. My sister, on the other hand, had always been a gravity buff. “Father,” I said, “what have you done? You’ve defaced a national treasure.” Mother wrung her hands, “You test us and test us — holding your breath till you’re blue — getting outa the car, into the car, outa the car — you drive us to it!” Father snapped a bulbous rubber nose into place, “Gotta split — G-men after us — take care of the firm, boy of mine.” “What did you get Ruth?” I yelled after him. “Go see, she’s in her room,” he said, wrapping his arms around Mother’s waist, their moped zipping down the driveway. I dashed upstairs. There, suspended magnetically above her beanbag chair, was a specially annealed niobium cylinder. My sister was on the couch in the fond clutches of her fiancé who had a nearly two-dimensional head — it was the flattest head I’d ever seen — her sweater was bunched up around her neck and her unsnapped brassiere rested above her bare breasts like eyeglasses on someone’s forehead. What a meshugena gift.… We all felt smaller and smaller in the coming days, which seemed shorter and shorter. And everything seemed diminished and fly-by-night.
Well, what is so new about Jersey? Or Mexico. Or England. What could be new in this multiplication of the present … in these bowdlerized translations from the rural? The good life, so called, is over, and that laugh we’d flexed hangs a bit flaccidly between our ears … we seem serious about wanting to outlive each other … and that may be the one source of all travel.
We are unhappy fleas, aren’t we.
Well, if ever there was a rebuttal to marital felicity — they were it. He inevitably left the oven on and compared her Belgian waffles to old sanitary napkins and never saw to it that there were enough bulbs in the house, and she, as you could imagine, was not the easiest person in the world to get along with, but … listen to me.… I’ve been chattering away like a galley slave, and look at the hour. The sun is up, and it’s time to let the greyhounds chase me round the track. Again.
MEMORIA IN AETERNA
Hoping that one last slug of warm Shlitz would give him the courage to finally say to Patty, “I love your breasts, the way one breast presses against the U of your sweatshirt, the way the other presses against the A, making the S a spot where a man could lay his head in peace,” Oscar tipped his airline cup to his lips. But the words wouldn’t come and god Oscar wanted to slip his hand under that shirt and feel her warm bare back and kiss her freckled nose. “This is where I get off,” he said, crestfallen, squeezing past Patty’s knees and ambling up the aisle to the door of the plane. “Bye,” he waved sheepishly; and he jumped. As he fell through the air, he looked up towards Patty’s window and Patty was frantically waving his parachute in her hand, yelling “Oskie, you forgot this!” Oscar’s descent, being the shortest path between two points, was swift. He hit the ground with an awful thud. I was the first to reach him. “Oscar, buddy, ol’ pal of mine, say a few syllables,” I said. His eyes seemed a bit glazed. “Someone just hit me in the head with a pillow,” he said. “Oscar, Oscar,” I keened, “You’re seven-eighths dead, you’re all busted up like a ceramic Buddha dropped from the World Trade Center — do you have any last words?” I wet his lips with my italian ices. “All I ever wanted to do,” he whispered, “was finish my novel … and drag a good Catholic girl through the mud a few times.” “Ciao, old friend,” I said. Randy, Normandi, Ray, Rachel, Wayne, and me — we’ll never forget you.
THE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS
The Japanese are an obnoxious people because they restrict the sale of American-made concentrated orange juice, but their endemic monster cinema makes our American-made psychological tragi-comedy seem like rewarmed tripe. Japanese women adulate young American men. Their jeans, their tough-guy posture, their gum-chewing delivery, their violent inability to sustain intercourse. Jan. 29, 1945: her name was Marianne Faithful and she was related to Alfred Dreyfus. She was exonerated when her nails were found barely incompatible with the murder weapon. When I returned, the body was back. Waists existed. Hips existed. There was a legginess that hadn’t been seen in years (ankles suddenly very sexy). She wouldn’t allow herself to get instant feedback — maybe she was enjoined by the Miracle Temple beneath the Mile High Stadium. “The door for reconciliation is not closed,” she lied, tightening the screws, as the plumbers from the Bahamas who’d taken the old Third Avenue E said “O.K., take my wife,” the other, “O.K., please eat my daughter’s remains.” I stood in front of the louvered blinds. The way to a man’s heart may be his stomach but the way to a woman’s heart is her nose. If you really stink she’ll recoil and if you start to stink, gradually or suddenly, she’ll stop loving you and she won’t even kiss you good-bye. A fair number of Dutch settlers kissed in the seventeenth century. Later, Washington would kiss his wife. Burns says that the freezing militiamen kissed to keep warm; that the kissing was ostensibly expedient or “contingent upon field conditions.” Soon, after signing important declarations, statesmen congratulated each other with very formal kisses. I study Clint Eastwood at the Clint Eastwood Institute in Clint Eastwood, California and, later, off-campus, embrace the woman to whom I’ve shown my feelings, to whom I’ve exhibited my notion of feeling. Then, after making reference to the vivacity of a cloud up there, she drops below the surface of the earth and becomes, in terms of haute couture, “unnaturally plain.” Tuesday morning I stepped into the sun; finally my friend Marianne Faithful had mercifully disengaged or unenveloped herself from her maritimey comforter which smelled like, god forbid, some baby had cheesed on it. The sun had given her garden a facial and she looked like a person who had gone to Tulane — I had never seen such an intractably bitchy glint. I glanced at my wallet and then ogled deeper — no money. No money — no razor blades, no books about photography, I thought at first. But then I ogled deepest into it. Never before had my wallet seemed girlish, but now it was empty and dark and