“See, I’m not nice. I’ve got to keep them. Look again, caress them.”
Given the times, none of this was very scandalous, and you had to reimagine the fifties to get very disturbed. They were curios, and Harold did seem pathetic, hanging on to them, and having them along to assist his biography, which nobody was ever going to write.
“I’m a sad old man,” he smiled.
“I had a great scandal, I think,” I told him.
“Well. Word gets around. It must have been rough.”
I stared at him. It must have been blankly.
“Not those. Those are nothing. Those were mere absolutely typical drunkenness, right on schedule,” I at last admitted to somebody.
Then I tried, and failed, with boorish pauses and needless lies, to tell him about Felice.
She lived, but just barely. All three needles had found the liver, and others had died with a third of the same wounds. I understand she was yellow and even black all over for weeks. A newsman called our home. I had been identified as “a youth” in their local small paper. My father took the call and politely told him that I really had nothing further to add and was trying to get on with my life. The newsman himself was very understanding and polite. My father wasn’t, not to me. He had a name in town. Above all things, he despised scandal.
My love for Felice went on belligerently, sullenly, for a month. It was all I had that was undiscussable and untouchable, and it pulled me through, wondering about her and the difference I might have made in her life. I would see her in other hotels, and there she behaved much like a nun of the old tales, looking out a drab window with a bar of light on her face, and you saw a tear under her eye for remembrance of wholesome youth and true love and what could have been. I tried to rave on the heath but was too conscious of the real fact that I was just bawling like a brat.
“But Harold, Harold!” I took the sleeve of his blazer, shaking it. “I was real then. I throbbed, buddy. I did throb.”
Harold was stunned.
“That woman got you. But she needed me,” he said.
Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?
HIS DREAMS WERE NOT GOOD. E. DAN ROSS HAD CONSTANT NIGHTmares, but lately they had run at him deep and loud, almost begging him. He was afraid his son would kill his second wife. Ross often wanted to kill his own wife, Newt’s mother, but he was always talking himself out of it, talking himself back into love for her. This had been going on for thirty-two years. E. Dan Ross did not consider his marriage at all exceptional. But he was afraid his son had inherited a more desperate fire.
Newt had been fired from the state cow college where he taught composition and poetry. Newt was a poet. But a friend of Ross’s had called from the campus and told him he thought Newt, alas, had a drinking problem. He was not released for only the scandal of sleeping with a student named Ivy Pilgrim. There was his temper and the other thing, drink. Newt was thirty. He took many things very seriously, but in a stupid, inappropriate way, Ross thought. There were many examples of this through the years. Now, for example, he had married this Ivy Pilgrim. This was his second wife.
The marriage should not have taken place. Newt was unable to swim rightly in his life and times. The girl was not pregnant, neither was she rich. If she had made up that name, by the way, Ross might kill her himself. He could imagine a hypersensitive dirt-town twit leeching onto his boy. Newt’s poetry had won several awards, including two national ones, and his two books had been seriously reviewed in New York papers, and by one in England.
Ross did not have to do all the imagining. Newt had sent him a photograph a month ago. It was taken in front of their quarters in the college town, where they remained, Newt having been reduced in scandal, the girl having been promoted, Ross figured. Ross was a writer himself. He was proud of Newt. Now he was driving to see him from Point Clear, Alabama, a gorgeous village on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Ross and his wife lived on a goodly spread along the beach. He worked in a room on the pier with the brown water practically lapping around his legs. It was a fecund and soul-washed place, he felt. He drove a black Buick Riviera, his fifth, with a new two-seater fiberglass boat trailing behind. It was deliberately two-seater. There would be no room for the girl when they went out to try the bass and bream.
He saw ahead to them: the girl would be negligent, a soft puff of skin above her blue jeans, woolly “earth sandals” on her feet, and a fading light in her eyes, under which lay slight bags from beer and marijuana and Valium when she could get it. Newt’s eyes would be red and there would be a scowl on him. He will be humming a low and nervous song. He will be filthy and misclothed, like an Englishman. His hands will be soft and dirty around the fingernails. He’ll look like a deserter on the lam. This is the mode affected by retarded bohemians around campus. Cats would slink underfoot in their home. Cats go with really sorry people. If anybody smokes, Newt and Ivy will make a point of never emptying the ashtray, probably a coffee can, crammed and stinking with cigarettes. Somebody will have sores on the leg or a very bad bruise somewhere. They will have a guitar which nobody can play worth spit. A third of a bottle of whiskey is somewhere, probably under the sink. They’ll be collecting cash from the penny bowl in order to make a trip to the liquor store. This is the big decision of the day. Old cat food would lie in a bowl, crusted. Shoes and socks would be left out. Wherever they go to school or teach it is greatly lousy, unspeakably and harmfully wrong. This was his son and his wife, holding down the block among their awful neighbors in a smirking conspiracy of sorriness; a tract of rental houses with muddy, unfixed motorcycles and bicycles around. Somebody’s kid would sit obscene-mouthed on a porch.
E. Dan Ross, a successful biographer, glib to the point of hackery (he prided himself on this), came near a real monologue in his head: your son is thirty and you see the honors he has won in poetry become like cheap trinkets won at a fair and now you know it has not been a good bargain. A bit of even immortal expression should not make this necessary. It should have brought him a better woman and a better home. Your son has been fired in scandal from a bad school. Newt must prevail, have a “story.” These poets are oh, yes, insistent on their troubled biography. The fact is that more clichés are attached to the life of a “real” writer than to that of a hack. Every one of them had practically memorized the bios of their idols and thought something was wrong if they paid the light bill on time. When I talk to my son, Ross thought, it is comfortable for both of us to pretend that I am a hack and he the flaming original; it gives us defined places for discussion, though I have poetry in my veins and he knows it, as I know damned well he is no real alcoholic. The truth is, Newt would drink himself into a problem just for the required “life.” Nobody in our family ever had problems with the bottle. It is that head of his. He did not know how to do life, he did not know how to cut the crap and work hard. He did not know that doomed love would wreck his work if he played around with it too much. There is cruelty in the heart of those who love like this. There is a mean selfishness that goes along with being so deplorable. You will say what of the life of the spirit, what has material dress to do with the innerness, the deep habits of the soul, blabba rabba. Beware of occasions that call for a change of clothing, take no heed for the morrow, Thoreau and Jesus, sure, but Newt has no mighty spiritual side that Ross has seen. Newt’s talent, and it is a talent I admit, is milking the sadness out of damned near everything. Isolating it, wording it into precise howls and gasping protests.