Catherine had been living for a year and a half on three Maxwell House coffee cans of inherited jewelry. She was so frugal then that there were, when I met her, still two cans left, including the one that contained her great-aunt Catherine’s emerald bracelet, bought for her by her husband when he commanded a ship for the Navy in China.
I swept Catherine off her feet to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, years before rich rock-and-roll fascists took it over. At that time, it was a hotel where the staff specialized in memorizing faces just to tell you how good it was to see you again.
I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller Brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.
We set a room service record.
I would send out for little things. A single pack of Salem Longs. Trifles. We had much sex, even while on the phone; or during Ed McMahon dog-food commercials, where a spaniel would choose between two bowls. When Catherine took her chair into the bathroom to play with the taps, I knew we’d been in the hotel too long. The message light was flashing on the phone. There were huge blue grapes soaking the morning New York Times. I called to check out. News of what I’d done to — or, I should say, on—the mayor had hit the hotel. The staff stared at me. I said the mayor would soon be writing spy novels in prison like other government felons; but I had little conviction. They didn’t like me and they didn’t think I was funny.
At La Guardia, I wore dark glasses and ate about a pound of Oreo cookies, after which I could have really nailed the mayor, but I thought, “Why cry over spilt milk?”
Nighttime 707 Commuter to Miami: little reading lights ignited the disembodied arms in rows in front of me, arms which listlessly flipped airline magazines, or held cigarettes to stream smoke into the cones of light now and then swept aside by the air current behind a hurrying stewardess. All of us passengers were torn from our origins. Red and green lights shimmered on riveted aluminum wings and beneath us my little America, my baby madhouse, deployed towns and farms and cities against the icy ruinous transept of time and the awful thing which awaits it.
Catherine and I swallowed cocktails from the cart, though we seldom had the correct change and drew ugly glances from the stewardesses. I felt that my hands and feet were swelling up and that the pilot had falsified the cabin pressure. I felt too that having to go up and down the aisle at night, to put up with incorrect change and the flight crew’s demand for snacks, was infuriating the stewardesses and that any minute an atrocity directed at the sheeplike passengers with their magazines could break out. Catherine and I were in tough shape mentally; and we had started to fear the stewardesses. As though to throw fat on the fire, they began to gather in the tail of the plane, to ignore the call buttons and to block the toilet. My stomach was full of butterflies and when I saw an old man gesture helplessly to a stewardess as she shot to the tail, I felt I had to do something for us all. I unfastened my seat belt, catching Catherine’s alarmed glance, and started aft. I thought as I glided above the passengers that I saw their hopes of something better winging to me.
The stewardesses glowered toward my approach. They were in a little group. There were sandwich wrappers and styrofoam. An aluminum door was ajar behind them and toilet light flooded forth. They had more food than we did. They seemed to glance at one blonde, a Grace Kelly type with a Bic crossways in her tunic. I was afraid.
When I reached them, I said, “There’s an old man who needs a glass of water. Can you help?”
The blonde stared through me. Then she reached up and touched a switch. Over three hundred passengers, RETURN TO SEAT appeared in lights.
“Hit it,” said the blonde.
“I wonder if I—”
“Can’t you read?”
“The old man needs—”
“I don’t care what he needs. We are entering turbulence. Return to your seat and extinguish all smoking materials.” Then she added something which signaled the beginning of my understanding that the end of my glory was at hand. “You rotten pervert,” she said. “Blowing your cookies all over the mayor of New York.”
* * *
Zut alors! I am in arrears with everyone; else why are they all explaining the sky is blue or yesterday I ate breakfast twice? Why? Someone said, “Two plus two equals four is a piece of insolence.” And these simpletons think I shall accept their reports at face value! Not possible; a thousand times no.
I’m not complaining. If people accept me as I am, that is, fallen from a high place, and don’t assume that I am in despair and require that actuality be described to me, why then a happy liaison of spirits is always a possibility. But not if we are doing ABCs on the state of reality.
Enough of this. The marriage of my aunt, Roxanna Hunnicutt, impends. I must touch base with the orchestra.
But before I do, I would like to note that I, screw loose and fancy free, know certain things, that I am crazy like a fox. I know that Jesse robbed and killed and that he was lonely. I know he was left behind, left for dead. But I know he rose again from the dead. At the same time as these issues ring, I know that I must touch base with the orchestra.
As to this orchestra, I am an admirer; at the same time, I know better. I came of age like everyone else, wearing out copies of Tupelo Honey, feeling richly gloomy. Now in Los Angeles, Jackson Browne and the Eagles nurse everybody’s bruises, and Mick Jagger, the tired old hag, says the Rolling Stones are the best punk band in the world. It’s desperate. I prefer Jorge Cruz playing for endless Cuban weddings in Key West, the only city in America where you can buy novelty condoms in the municipal airport, and where the star of The Dog Ate The Part We Didn’t Like can have a little peace.
The first thing Jorge said was, “I wait and I wait and you never get back to me.”
“I had an egg on my head.”
“I wait and I wait.”
“Egg.”
“I see the egg in the paper. I see your discharge from Florida Keys Memorial. Still I wait.”
“Will you play for our family?”
“On one condition.”
“Which is?”
“That the weeds are cut down at the Casa Marina so that my orchestra is not driven crazy with chiggers.”
“It’s a deal.”
“You hurt my feelings when you didn’t call. I thought it was my music.”
“I neglected you. Accept my apologies.”
“But I will, of course.”
I let go of Jorge’s handlebars. He rolled up Lopez Lane and disappeared behind a car body. The haze from City Electric brought its air of extraordinary romance. Each filling station seemed like a cheerful island with the bright pumps standing bravely in the tropical smoke. Through the open doorways of old homes came the anomalous ring of cash registers or piping television serials. I was transfixed by a beauty beyond the hideous. My heart was a song. Nothing hugs the road like a garbage truck.