The young man nods and asks, “What are you drinking, handsome?”
“Manhattans, but I’m buying. Excuse me, bartender,” he says, pointing to the space helmet above them, “what’s that over the bar?”
“Sorry, mister, not tonight,” the redheaded man says, putting his hand on Less’s. “It’s on me. And the cosmonaut helmet is mine.”
Less: “It’s yours?”
“I work here.”
Our hero smiles, looking down at his hand, then up at the redhead. “You’ll think I’m nuts,” he says. “I have a crazy favor to ask. I’m interviewing H. H. H. Mandern tomorrow, and I need—”
“I also live nearby. Tell me your name again?”
“Arthur Less?” the white-haired woman asks in the green room of the theater, while H. H. H. Mandern vomits into a bucket. “Who the hell is Arthur Less?”
Less stands in the doorway, space helmet under his arm, a smile imprinted on his face. How many times has he been asked this question? Certainly enough for it not to sting; he has been asked it when he was very young, back in the Carlos days, when he could overhear someone explaining how Arthur Less was that kid from Delaware in the green Speedo, the thin one by the pool, or later, when it was explained he was the lover of Robert Brownburn, the shy one by the bar, or even later, when it was noted he was his ex-lover and maybe shouldn’t be invited over anymore, or when he was introduced as the author of a first novel, and then a second novel, and then as that fellow someone knew from somewhere long ago. And at last: as the man Freddy Pelu had been sleeping with for nine whole years, until Freddy married Tom Dennis. He has been all those things, to all those people who did not know who he was.
“I said, who the hell are you?”
No one out there in the theater will know who he is; when he will help H. H. H. Mandern, sick with food poisoning but unwilling to let down his fans, onto the stage, he will be introduced merely as “a huge fan.” When he leads that hour-and-a-half-long interview, filling it with extended descriptions when he sees the writer is failing, answering some questions from the audience when Mandern turns his weary eyes to Less, when he saves this event, saves this poor man’s career, still nobody will know who he is. They are there for H. H. H. Mandern. They are there for his robot Peabody. They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives. That other writer, sitting beside him, face partly visible in the open visor of a space helmet, is inconsequential; he will not be remembered; no one will know, or even wonder, who he is. And later tonight, when he boards a plane for Mexico City, and the young Japanese tourist beside him, hearing he is a writer, grows excited and asks who he is, Less, still in free fall from the broken bridge of his last hopes, will answer as he has so many times before.
A magniloquent spoony.
No rancor. No feelings at all.
Arthur, you know my son was never right for you.
“Nobody,” says our hero to the city of New York.
Less Mexican
Freddy Pelu is a man who doesn’t need to be told, before takeoff, to secure his own oxygen mask before assisting others.
It was just a game they were playing, waiting for friends to join them at the bar. One of those San Francisco bars that is neither gay nor straight, just odd, and Freddy still wore his blue shirt and tie from teaching, and they were having some new kind of beer that tasted like aspirin and smelled like magnolias and cost more than a hamburger. Less was in a cable-knit sweater. They were trying to describe each other in a single sentence. Less had gone first and said the sentence written above.
Freddy frowned. “Arthur,” he said. Then he looked down at the table.
Less took some candied pecans from the bowl before him. He asked what the problem could be. He thought he’d come up with a good one.
Freddy shook his head so that his curls bounced, and he sighed. “I don’t think that’s true. Maybe when you met me. But that was a long time ago. You know what I was going to say?”
Less said he did not know.
The young man stared at his lover and, before taking a sip of his beer, said: “‘Arthur Less is the bravest person I know.’”
Arthur thinks of this on every flight. It always ruins everything. It has ruined this flight from New York to Mexico City, which is well on the way to ruining itself.
Arthur Less has heard it is traditional, in Latin American countries, to applaud an airplane’s safe arrival. In his mind, he associates it with the miracles of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and indeed, while the plane suffers a prolonged bout of turbulence, Less finds himself searching for an appropriate prayer. He was, however, raised Unitarian; he has only Joan Baez to turn to, and “Diamonds and Rust” gives no solace. On and on the plane convulses in the moonlight, like a man turning into a werewolf. And yet, Arthur Less appreciates life’s corny metaphors; a transformation, yes. Arthur Less, leaving America at last; perhaps, beyond its borders, he will change, like the aged crone who is rescued by a knight and who, once she is carried across the river, becomes a princess. Not Arthur Less the nobody, but Arthur Less the Distinguished Featured Speaker at this conference. Or was it a princess into a crone? The young Japanese tourist seated beside Less, impossibly hip in a yellow neon sweatsuit and moon-landing sneakers, is sweating and breathing through his mouth; at one point, he turns to Less and asks if this is normal, and Less says, “No, no, this is not normal.” More throes, and the young man grabs his hand. Together they weather the storm. They are perhaps the only passengers literally without a prayer. And when the plane lands at last—the windows revealing the vast nighttime circuit board of Mexico City—Less finds himself, alone, applauding their survival.
What had Freddy meant, “the bravest person I know”? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.
What a relief, then, to emerge from customs and hear his name called out: “Señor Less!” There stands a bearded man, perhaps thirty, in the black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket of a rock musician.
“I am Arturo,” says Arturo, holding out a hairy hand. This is the “local writer” who will be his escort for the next three days. “It is an honor to meet a man who knew the Russian River School.”
“I am also Arturo,” says Less, shaking it garrulously.
“Yes. You were fast through the customs.”
“I bribed a man to take my bags.” He gestures to a small man in a Zapata mustache and blue uniform standing arms akimbo.
“Yes, but that is not a bribe,” says Arturo, shaking his head. “That is a propina. A tip. That is the luggage man.”
“Oh,” says Less, and the mustached man gives a smile.
“Is it your first time in Mexico?”
“Yes,” Less says quickly. “Yes, it is.”
“Welcome to Mexico.” Arturo hands him a conference packet and looks up at him wearily; violet streaks curve beneath his eyes, and lines are grooved into his still-young brow. Less notices now that what he had taken for gleaming bits of pomade in his hair are streaks of gray. Arturo says, “There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest.”
He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men.
Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.
Of the Russian River School, Arthur Less missed all the fun. Those famous men and women took mallets to the statues of their gods, those bongo-drumming poets and action-painting artists, and scrambled from the sixties onto the mountaintop of the seventies, that era of quick love and quaaludes (is there any more perfect spelling than with that lazy superfluous vowel?), basking in their recognition and arguing in cabins on the Russian River, north of San Francisco, drinking and smoking and fucking into their forties. And becoming, some of them, models for statues themselves. But Less came late to the party; what he met were not young Turks but proud bloated middle-aged artists who rolled in the river like sea lions. They seemed over-the-hill to him; he could not understand they were in the prime of their minds: Leonard Ross, and Otto Handler, even Franklin Woodhouse, who did that nude of Less. Less also owns a framed excision poem, made for his birthday by Stella Barry out of a tattered copy of Alice in Wonderland. He heard bits of Handler’s Patty Hearst on an old piano in a rainstorm. He saw a draft of Ross’s Love’s Labors Won and watched him scratch out an entire scene. And they were always kind to Less, especially considering (or was it because of?) the scandaclass="underline" Less had stolen Robert Brownburn from his wife.